Educators rely on open educational resources (OER) to deliver adaptable, scalable teaching and assessment, but the quality and consistency of these can vary dramatically.
When resources don’t follow shared technical standards, educators can encounter disjointed tools, inaccessible content, and assessments that don’t align—creating confusion and a frustrating experience for both teachers and students.
For OERs to transfer successfully between different schools and learning platforms, they need to comply with educational best practices with open, interoperable standards. Below, we explain how these standards can help OER meet expectations for accessibility, reusability, and assessment.
Key Takeaways
- Open educational resources provide reusable, sustainable, and accessible teaching materials for educators and students.
- However, to adhere to educational best practices, these resources must follow standards such as LTI, PCI, and the QTI standard to remain compatible with assessment systems.
- By using OERs that don’t follow these standards, institutions expose themselves to risks such as fragmented content, limited reuse, accessibility gaps, and compliance challenges.
Why Standards Matter for Educational Best Practices
Open educational resources are freely available teaching materials—such as lessons, activities, videos, textbooks, or assessments—that anyone can use, adapt, and share.
Thanks to their transferable nature, OERs help institutions avoid relying on expensive, restricted, or proprietary materials. As such, they play a key role in delivering consistent, accessible, and adaptable teaching experiences that are paramount to modern institutions’ learning strategies.
However, to play this role, these resources need to be scalable across different schools, learning platforms, tools, and assessments. In short, they need to follow open standards.
Open standards—such as those developed by the reputable global nonprofit 1EdTech—enhance interoperability, simplify technical complexity, and accelerate innovation. Without these standards, OERs can fragment, rendering them incompatible with certain tools or missing essential data. Educators may spend more time problem-solving than teaching, and students may experience inconsistent and frustrating learning experiences.
Open standards address these issues by creating shared expectations for how resources are structured, delivered, and maintained. Similarly, these standards also ensure OERs can move seamlessly across platforms while retaining accessibility features.
By aligning tools and resources with open standards, institutions can trust they’re getting resources that are transferable, reliable, and sustainable—core components of educational best practice.
How Open Standards Transform OER into Scalable Resources
By following open standards, OERs adhere to a common structure, transforming them from isolated materials into scalable resources. As such, they become interoperable—the content can move across institutions, tools, platforms, and assessment systems without issues.
Now, let’s delve into the key open standards that strengthen and elevate OERs.
Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)
LTI ensures instructional content can connect seamlessly across different learning platforms. When OERs adhere to LTI, they can launch inside any learning management system (LMS), share data securely, and ensure a consistent learning experience. As a result, materials can be scaled across different environments without the need for manual integration or setup.
Question & Test Interoperability (QTI)
The QTI standard provides a universal structure for questions, tests, scoring models, and metadata. It ensures assessment items within OER behave consistently across different platforms, so institutions know they’re receiving a consistent measurement of learning—no matter which system delivers the test.
Portable Custom Interactions (PCI)
PCI makes it possible to use innovative and interactive assessment formats—such as simulation-based tasks or clickable sequences—across multiple tools without losing functionality or accessibility. This means that even advanced assessment tasks created from OER remain interoperable and sustainable.
Common Cartridge (CC)
The Common Cartridge standard ensures OERs can be packaged, along with associated metadata, and shared in a consistent format. For example, if a teacher wants to use an OER created in a different LMS from the one used by their current institution, Common Cartridge ensures it can be imported fully without technical problems.
Together, these standards ensure that instructional OER and assessment systems speak the same language. This creates a unified teaching and testing experience, reduces technical complexity, and gives institutions confidence that OER will scale reliably across programs and technologies.
The Risks of OER Without Standardization
When OERs aren’t built on open standards, institutions can encounter the following risks.
Fragmented content and limited reuse
If content behaves differently across platforms, OERs can become difficult to reuse at scale—materials may need to be edited or repackaged each time they’re shared, or if educators wish to change platforms.
Higher long-term maintenance and costs
Despite being free, non-standardized OERs can often require ongoing fixes—for example, if they corrupt or need rebuilding. Over time, this increases workload for educators and IT teams and results in higher long-term maintenance costs.
Accessibility gaps and compliance challenges
Without standardization, accessibility varies considerably between resources. For instance, some OERs may be lacking basic features required for SEND learners. As institutions are responsible for meeting regulations such as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973), inconsistent resources can expose schools to legal risks.
Misalignment between learning content and assessment
When OERs and assessments don’t share common standards, they often fail to align. Instructional resources may use one format, while assessments abide by different rules for scoring, metadata, and item behavior.
This disconnect can weaken the relationship between what students learn and what they are tested on. For example, if a student has practiced with multiple-choice formats with an OER but their assessment uses open-ended tasks, they may feel unprepared for the test’s format or its cognitive demands.
Vendor lock-in through proprietary formats
Ironically, “open” resources can become locked into certain tools when they aren’t standardized. If an OER works only on one vendor’s platform, institutions lose the flexibility to switch tools, scale programs, or participate in open ecosystems.
How to Build a Sustainable OER Ecosystem
Creating a viable OER ecosystem hinges on interoperability, quality, and long-term usability. Here’s how institutions can get started.
Require vendors to follow standards
Requiring vendors to adhere to open standards ensures you can share, adapt, and integrate OERs across platforms without breaking. Many vendors publish certifications from 1EdTech (such as LTI 1.3 or LTI Advantage certification) showing they meet these standards and that their tool has passed interoperability testing.
However, certification doesn’t always guarantee all features are standards-based, so it’s best to ask directly whether your specific use case is covered.
Opting for platforms built on open standards, such as TAO, ensures that assessment content integrates seamlessly with instructional OERs, maintains accessibility, and remains portable over time. This allows institutions to adopt, share, and scale resources confidently, so educators can focus on teaching, rather than technical issues.
Design content for reuse and portability
Open standards provide a foundation that ensures resources can be reused, adapted, and aligned with assessments across platforms and institutions.
When designing content, teachers should use standard file formats—such as QTI—instead of proprietary formats, and avoid tool-specific features so content won’t break when moved.
Similarly, keep media modular by organizing images, videos, and documents into reusable components so they can be remixed across courses.
Finally, document your content structure so others can understand and adapt it, and test content in multiple LMSs or platforms before rolling it out, to ensure portability.
Ensure accessibility is built into every resource
Follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) guidelines and embed features such as alt text, captions, and transcripts to ensure OER remain inclusive and compliant as accessibility standards evolve.
Conclusion
Open standards are essential for turning OERs into reliable, high-quality, interoperable materials that institutions can trust.
When resources follow these standards, they become consistent, reusable, and aligned with assessments—solving common problems such as fragmented or inconsistent content, limited reuse, and accessibility inequality.
And by grounding OER tools in principles of collaboration, adaptability, and inclusivity, educators gain confidence that materials will work across platforms and support long-term learning goals. This transforms OERs from isolated content into a sustainable foundation for educational best practices.
Discover how assessment leaders are using OERs to close equity gaps, or read more about standardizing testing on an open-source assessment system over on the TAO blog.
Get Started With Open-Standards-Aligned OER
See how TAO helps institutions leverage resources built on open standards for scalable, consistent, and accessible learning.
Schedule a demo to explore how our platform ensures alignment between instructional content and assessment, simplifies adoption, and supports long-term educational best practices.
FAQs
Why should our educational practices be based on accepted educational philosophy?
Basing teaching practices on accepted educational philosophy gives educators a clear, proven foundation for how students learn. This helps ensure decisions are consistent, effective, and aligned with student needs, rather than random or opinion-based, leading to better learning outcomes and more coherent teaching.
Why are professional standards important in education?
Professional standards ensure teachers have clear objectives for quality, ethics, and practice. These standards ensure consistency across classrooms, help educators thrive in their roles, and ensure students receive safe, effective, and well-supported learning experiences.
What is the main role of performance standards in educational assessment?
Performance standards define educational goals and curriculum expectations. They set the bar of what good work looks like, giving both teachers and students clear targets to aim for while also ensuring fair and accurate assessments.
