Measuring a Critical Impact on Technology in Education: A Tool for OERs Evaluation

This paper describes how giving students the tools to carry out an evaluative analysis of the resource they are accessing can enable them develop their analytical and critical thinking skills. It can also help them to gain insight into the importance of 'learning to learn'. These students also gain the ability to characterise the impact of OERs on Higher education teaching and learning. The main scope of the present research project is that students could independently evaluate the quality of online digital resources both as learners and future educators. Doing so it is possible to overcome “brief term instrumental characteristics” of tools and promote long term evaluation processes (Vertecchi, 2012). This proposal concerns an area of research into distance learning which has not been explored in this way previously. The study does not explore the quality of learning in online environments. Rather, it investigates how students should approach the online resources at their disposal, facilitating their critical and reflective skills and adopting a model for analysis.