Page - viii - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

responsibility of the authorities is not questioned. And understandably—inmy opinion—they need to be reassuredwhen it comes toOER. 2. A quality slip is something authorities are fearful of. And when actively pro- moting the use of OER we should have our answers ready. Here are some possible answers: A.We can argue that the type of control proposed in the context of traditional publishing doesn’t really exist. The editorial boards aremade upmostly by peoplewho all have some form of hidden (or not hidden) bias. B.Wecanargue that quality control can’t bedonebecausequality is essentially a subjectivematter and that fromanopenpoint of viewwe should not reject an open textbook just because we don’t like it. Perhaps this OER suits someone else. Furthermore, one goal of open education is to empower teachers and students, sowe should reallywork on giving each the tools to betterdecidebyhimself.Thisposition iseithernaiveor irresponsible. Inboth cases, it will not make the problems disappear. C.Wecan address theproblem, in all its complexity.Weshould address itwith researchers. Easy solutions exist: a resourcewhich is good is necessarily of quality, ergo all we have to do ismeasure popularity. Instead of popularity, we couldmeasure engagement. If we can see that the material is being used, this is a sign of quality:we can certainly do thiswith videoswhich are usually streamed. And, essentially, we should keep in mind the crucial question of serendipity. A system inwhichquality is theunique judgemaybackfire: as therewill be aclose connexion between quality of a resource and quality of the institution, interesting OER may find it difficult to get proposed, read and consumed. Serendipity is necessary for openness. The whole idea is to empower the creators of new resources.And if thismeans that the resource, in anopenworldmaybe invisible to others, is not ‘given its chance’, then the open education movement will have to deal with a new problem. So the quality question is far frombeing solved and no simple path exists. This should stimulate the interest of researchers from many fields to come up with solutionswhichwill aimatpreservingall thebenefits ofopeneducationalpractices. In this volumeput together byDanielBurgos,UnescoChair atUNIR, a variety of questions are scrutinised and evenwhen answers are given, the inevitable—and highly desirable—result of research is that you end up with more questions than when you started. So letme just add the quality question to this increasing set and wish that the reader finds in these texts the inspiring ideas shemay be seeking. Prof. Dr. Colin de la Higuera Chair inTechnologies for theTraining of Teachers byOpen Educational Resources University of Nantes, France e-mail: cdlh@univ-nantes.fr viii Foreword byColin de la Higuera