An Evaluation System to Trace the Usage of the OER Conversion Tool (convOERter).

Open Educational Resources (OER) are available resources for teaching, learning, and research distributed under an open license. They are considered essential building blocks in educational systems, as they can be freely used, modified, and shared. However, there are still many challenges that hinder the proper utilization of OER at schools as well as in higher education institutions. One of these challenges is the lack of technical tools that support producing OER or converting existing educational materials to OER. In order to overcome this problem, the OER Conversion Tool convOERter has been developed at the Learning Technologies Research Group of RWTH Aachen University. The main functionality of the tool is to support converting existing educational materials to OER by extracting images from the input files and replacing them with OER-compliant images retrieved from OER image portals. Since it is crucial to understand the tool’s usage and to trace the interaction between the tool and the end users, an evaluation system, consisting of a logging module, analytics engines, and a dashboard has been developed and integrated. In this paper, we will introduce the system’s conceptual design and illustrate its main modules. We will also highlight how and to which extent convOERter is being used by tracing and analyzing the interaction logs of the integrated system. Additionally, we will summarize the results of a usability study that was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the evaluation system.