User Experience to Inform the Design of a Search Infrastructure for Open Educational Resources

Open education includes the access and use of freely licensed material, which is known as open educational resources. Since the idea evolved about 20 years ago, the movement faces the challenge to motivate educators to actively use, create and distribute open learning resources. The reasons are that educators do not know where to find such resources for their discipline, and if they know common web sources, they find it hard to seek for the most relevant material. By now, there are several information seeking services for openly licensed educational material that differ in structure and functions in many respects. Some services as well offer functions to upload one’s own material. A challenge for those services is to offer appropriate seeking and filtering functions to allow users an efficient and easy search. The following paper reports on a user-oriented study that evaluates six search services for open educational resources. A qualitative approach was chosen to better study the specific target group and new evolving search services. The study informs the designing of a decentralized infrastructure that offers seeking educational material from different higher educational institutions within Germany.