Educational Repositories: Study of the Current Situation and Strategies to Improve Their Effective Use at Ecuadorian Universities

Educational repositories of digital educational material and learning objects allow teachers and students to store and retrieve educational resources to be used in virtual teaching and learning environments as well as in face-to-face educational spaces. They are also an important means of disseminating and evaluating the quality of educational resources produced by teachers. The quality of these resources largely relies on the guidelines and policies issued by educational institutions and supplied to their teachers, so that these resources can be created with an adequate level of quality and deployed in different learning management systems. The objective of this paper is to explore to what extent Ecuadorian universities make use of the educational repositories of digital educational material, the specialized repositories of learning objects, and the way in which they have evolved over the last five years. This paper also helps to identify the barriers and the factors that hinder their use. It is expected that the conclusions drawn from this analysis will permit the design of strategies aimed to promote the creation and use of quality digital educational materials.