Open Assessments, an Open Education Resource (OER), can be more affordable, adaptable, and available by crowdsourcing content creation, evaluation, and distribution of educational materials. Affordable, adaptable, and available open assessments augment the abilities of assessment in formative environments and may serve as a resource to quickly create adaptable summative assessments. Despite the possibilities of crowdsourced OER, limitations still exist for employing a crowdsourced method including discovering incentives for generating materials, a lack of formal process for creating, evaluating, and distributing the materials, and technological barriers inhibiting growth. With time, development of a crowdsourcing platform can make open assessments and other OER more affordable, adaptable, and available for instructors and students.
Crowdsourcing would work especially well with assessment items. Research shows students can successfully create higher level assessment items with training and a review process of the items. Making open repositories successful hinge on disseminating the items effectively, and the question repositories need to have the breadth and depth of questions to form item banks large enough for formative and summative quizzing. While studies are needed to quantify the effects of crowdsourcing on the adaptability, affordability, and availability of educational resources, the success or failure of crowdsourced open assessments establishes a model to crowdsource other educational resources. Other resources that could benefit from a crowdsourced platform include textbooks, videos, and tutoring services. Crowdsourcing open assessments is a viable solution to make Open Education Resources available, adaptable, and open to enable learning autonomy.
