Barriers, incentives, and benefits of the open educational resources (OER) movement: An exploration into instructor perspectives

First Monday ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serena Henderson ◽  
Nathaniel Ostashewski
Keyword(s):  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Replication Study ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Instructional Materials ◽  
Institutional Policy ◽  
Open Educational Resource ◽  
Educational Resource ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Major Benefit

Open educational resource (OER) barriers, incentives, and benefits are at the forefront of educator and institution interests as global use of OER evolves. Research into OER use, perceptions, costs, and outcomes is becoming more prevalent; however, it is still in its infancy. Understanding barriers to full adoption, administration, and acceptance of OER is paramount to fully supporting its growth and success in education worldwide. The purpose of this research was to replicate and extend Kursun, Cagiltay, and Can’s (2014) Turkish study to include international participants. Kursun, et al. surveyed OpenCourseWare (OCW) faculty on their perceptions of OER barriers, incentives, and benefits. Through replication, these findings provide a glimpse into the reality of the international educators’ perceptions of barriers, incentives, and benefits of OER use to assist in the creation of practical solutions and actions for both policy makers and educators alike. The results of this replication study indicate that barriers to OER include institutional policy, lack of incentives, and a need for more support and education in the creating, using, and sharing of instructional materials. A major benefit to OER identified by educators is the continued collegial atmosphere of sharing and lifelong learning.

scholarly journals Web Strategies for the Curation and Discovery of Open Educational Resources

Open Praxis ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Rolfe
Keyword(s):  
Search Engine ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Open Educational Resource ◽  
Educational Resource ◽  
Open Education ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
The Uk

For those receiving funding from the UK HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resource Programme (2009–2012), the sustainability of project outputs was one of a number of essential goals. Our approach for the hosting and distribution of health and life science open educational resources (OER) was based on the utilisation of the WordPress.org blogging platform and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to curate content and widen discovery.This paper outlines the approaches taken and tools used at the time, and reflects upon the effectiveness of web strategies several years post-funding. The paper concludes that using WordPress.org as a platform for sharing and curating OER, and the adoption of a pragmatic approach to SEO, offers cheap and simple ways for small-scale open education projects to be effective and sustainable.

scholarly journals Open Educational Resources in E-Learning

Organizacija ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dejan Dinevski ◽  
Samo Fošnarič ◽  
Tanja Arh
Keyword(s):  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Open Educational Resource ◽  
Educational Resource ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Lifelong Learners ◽  
The Future ◽  
E Learning ◽  
Open Standards ◽  
Source Of Information

Open Educational Resources in E-LearningOpen educational resources in e-learning are the future source of information for lifelong learners. Open source and open standards are defined as the basis of the "Open educational resource movement" that is beginning to form on a global level in the last decade. The characteristics of the OS are investigated in the relation to e-Learning, existing and new pedagogical principles and copyright issues. Several good practices, ideas and existing initiatives are presented and the vision of the future of open educational resources is introduced.

scholarly journals Freeing CP: GIS&T and NACIS in the Open Educational Resources Movement

2009 ◽  
pp. 5-20
Author(s):  
David DiBiase
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Graduate Education ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Geographic Information Science ◽  
Geographic Information ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Open Educational Resource ◽  
Educational Resource ◽  
Special Case

This article positions higher education in geographic information science and technology (GIS&T), including cartography, in relation to the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. After defining OER and the movement it denotes I compare several initiatives designed to promote free sharing of GIS&T-related educational resources and, in one special case, free provision of graduate education. Finally I consider a justification for conceiving Cartographic Perspectives as an open educational resource, and for freeing it from its current exclusive distribution to NACIS members, subscribers and their patrons.

scholarly journals TrueLearn: A Family of Bayesian Algorithms to Match Lifelong Learners to Open Educational Resources

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (01) ◽  
pp. 565-573
Author(s):  
Sahan Bulathwela ◽  
Maria Perez-Ortiz ◽  
Emine Yilmaz ◽  
John Shawe-Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Recommendation System ◽  
Background Knowledge ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Computer Assisted Learning ◽  
Lifelong Learners ◽  
Knowledge States ◽  
Wide Range

The recent advances in computer-assisted learning systems and the availability of open educational resources today promise a pathway to providing cost-efficient high-quality education to large masses of learners. One of the most ambitious use cases of computer-assisted learning is to build a lifelong learning recommendation system. Unlike short-term courses, lifelong learning presents unique challenges, requiring sophisticated recommendation models that account for a wide range of factors such as background knowledge of learners or novelty of the material while effectively maintaining knowledge states of masses of learners for significantly longer periods of time (ideally, a lifetime). This work presents the foundations towards building a dynamic, scalable and transparent recommendation system for education, modelling learner's knowledge from implicit data in the form of engagement with open educational resources. We i) use a text ontology based on Wikipedia to automatically extract knowledge components of educational resources and, ii) propose a set of online Bayesian strategies inspired by the well-known areas of item response theory and knowledge tracing. Our proposal, TrueLearn, focuses on recommendations for which the learner has enough background knowledge (so they are able to understand and learn from the material), and the material has enough novelty that would help the learner improve their knowledge about the subject and keep them engaged. We further construct a large open educational video lectures dataset and test the performance of the proposed algorithms, which show clear promise towards building an effective educational recommendation system.

scholarly journals Developing Institutional Open Educational Resource Repositories in Vietnam: Opportunities and Challenges

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 109-124
Author(s):  
Vi Truong ◽  
Tom Denison ◽  
Christian M. Stracke
Keyword(s):  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Open Educational Resource ◽  
Educational Resource ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Educational Materials ◽  
High Quality ◽  
The Public ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Sociocultural Characteristics ◽  
Economic Constraints

The introduction of open educational resources (OER) provides new opportunities for learners worldwide to access high-quality educational materials at the lowest cost. As a developing country, Vietnam is one of the countries that can most benefit from the OER movement. However, the concept of OER in Vietnam remains little known to the public, with few institutional OER repositories (IOER) developed. This study contends that IOER development in Vietnam is complicated and constrained by many contextual difficulties; it was designed to explore the challenges and opportunities. After a literature review, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with relevant stakeholders. Building on the findings from the literature, this study found that IOER development in Vietnam is constrained by five categories of challenges: (a) technological and infrastructure matters, (b) economic constraints, (c) sociocultural characteristics, (d) pedagogical concerns, and (e) legal limitations. Many of these challenges are not identified in the literature and provide insights into potential implications and solutions for future IOER in Vietnam and other countries.

scholarly journals Open Educational Resources in Canada 2015

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rory McGreal ◽  
Terry Anderson ◽  
Dianne Conrad
Keyword(s):  
Open Data ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Open Educational Resource ◽  
Open Education ◽  
Paris Declaration ◽  
Creative Commons ◽  
Council Of Ministers ◽  
Education Initiatives

<p class="Abstract">Canada’s important areas of expertise in open educational resources (OER) are beginning to be built upon or replicated more broadly in all education and training sectors. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art in OER initiatives and open higher education in general in Canada, providing insights into what is happening nationally and provincially. There are growing examples of OER initiatives from several Canadian institutions offering free courses to Canadians and international learners. National open education initiatives include the federal government's Open Data pilot project and the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada (CMEC) support for the Open Educational Resource Paris Declaration, as well as Creative Commons Canada. Regionally, the western provinces of British Columbia and Alberta are supporting OER as part of major open education initiatives.</p>

scholarly journals Human-Centered Design as an Approach to Create Open Educational Resources

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
pp. 7397
Author(s):  
Carles Garcia-Lopez ◽  
Enric Mor ◽  
Susanna Tesconi
Keyword(s):  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Human Centered Design ◽  
Lifelong Learners ◽  
Content Organization ◽  
Future Work

Open educational resources (OER) play an important role in teaching and learning, especially in lifelong learning. Educational resources should be created in a way that addresses lifelong learners’ needs. Human-centered design (HCD) is a design perspective and an iterative process that involves users in all phases of the process. Thus, an HCD approach can provide relevant advantages when creating OER for lifelong learning. This work presents the Design Toolkit as a case study of digital open educational contents for design education that has been created following an HCD process. The orientation of the Design Toolkit is to provide users OER in a tool format rather than in a traditional manner. The main goal of this research is to contribute to the understanding of how HCD impacts OER creation. The research focuses on teachers, assessing the Design Toolkit content organization and analyzing teacher adoption and usage of the resources. The HCD approach fosters teachers’ satisfaction, promotes OER adoption and provides new design requirements for a future iteration of the HCD process. The results show that designing OER involving users through an HCD approach sets the focus adequately on their needs and limitations. Teachers feel satisfied with the Design Toolkit, fostering the adoption of OER in different educational contexts. Finally, users’ involvement in the whole HCD process points out design and educational requirements for future work.

scholarly journals The benefits of creating open educational resources as assessment in an online education course

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eseta Tualaulelei
Keyword(s):  
Online Education ◽  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Professional Learning ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Open Educational Resource ◽  
Assessment Task ◽  
Project Data

This paper reports preliminary findings of a pilot project at an Australian regional university where students in an online multicultural education course created open educational resources as an assessment task. Designed as action research, the project transposed early years educators’ concerns about professional learning and resources into an assessment task. Students created resources in response to the task, and these resources were collated into an open educational resource. Based on a range of project data, the paper presents preliminary findings that show the assessment task had many benefits for students including increased engagement, practical learnings and pride in sharing their work. The paper concludes with implications for practice and suggestions for related research.

scholarly journals Open Educational Resources as a Catalyst for Innovation and Lifelong Learning: A Question of Human Rights and Social Justice

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebba Ossiannilsson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Sustainable Development Goals ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Education For All ◽  
Building Capacity ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Opening Up

A milestone in the achievement of UNESCO’s Sustainability Goals, Education for All (SDG4), was passed when the organization’s recommendation for the implementation of Open Educational Resources (OER) was uniformly adopted in 2019. Now it is time to move from the awareness of OER to their mainstream implementation at all levels, micro, meso, and macro, including all stakeholders, such as governments, institutions, academics, teachers, administrators, librarians, students, learners, and the civil service. The OER Recommendation includes five areas: building capacity and utilizing OER; developing supportive policies; ensuring effectiveness; promoting the creation of sustainable OER models; promoting and facilitating international collaboration; monitoring and evaluation.OER are valued as a catalyst for innovation and the achievement of UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of education for all, lifelong learning, social justice, and human rights. The implementation of the OER Recommendation will contribute to the achievement of several other SDGs. Because access to quality OER concerns human rights and social justice, this recommendation is vital. In 2020, the effects of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated the importance of opening up education and the access to internationally recognized, qualified learning resources. This article describes and discusses how the promise of resilient, sustainable quality education can be fulfilled in the new normal and the next normal.

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