  A vast amount of OpenCourseWare (OCW) is meanwhile being published online to
make educational content accessible to larger audiences. The awareness of such
courses among users and the popularity of systems providing such courses are
increasing. However, from a subjective experience, OCW is frequently cursory,
outdated or non-reusable. In order to obtain a better understanding of the
quality of OCW, we assess the quality in terms of fitness for use. Based on
three OCW use case scenarios, we define a range of dimensions according to
which the quality of courses can be measured. From the definition of each
dimension a comprehensive list of quality metrics is derived. In order to
obtain a representative overview of the quality of OCW, we performed a quality
assessment on a set of 100 randomly selected courses obtained from 20 different
OCW repositories. Based on this assessment we identify crucial areas in which
OCW needs to improve in order to deliver up to its promises.
