Abstract
Despite all the benefits claimed for open education resources (OER), studies reveal that these are used less than anticipated. One reason for this is potential users’ uncertainty over whether the products’ aims, design and processes are fit for the intended purposes. This paper proposes a simple-to-use framework for faculty and students to apply in determining whether OER have fitness for purpose in their teaching and learning. The selection criteria are based upon the benefits claimed in the literature for OER, MERLOT’s framework of evaluation criteria for OER selection and Merrill’s first principles of instruction. The criticality, feasibility and applicability of these criteria were reviewed by 207 OER researchers and users through a cross-regional online survey and subsequent consultations with a small team of experts familiar with researching and using OER. The final 25-item final framework was developed in accord with the agreed criteria.
Highlights
It is generally held that making openly licensed educational resources freely available online under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing offers opportunities for people everywhere to share, use and reuse quality materials and tools
A provisional set of selection criteria based on the benefits of open education resources (OER) as claimed in the literature, MERLOT’s three dimensions of quality and detailed review areas specified under each dimension, and Merrill’s first principles of instruction and application strategies proposed for each principle were developed by the authors in consultation with five faculty members and five researchers well versed in OER
Because the evidence suggests that one of the factors inhibiting a wider use of OER is the lack of information on and doubts about their fitness for purpose, the authors sought to create a comprehensive but simple-to-use framework for various users by developing and testing selection criteria in regard to benefits, ease of use, content and pedagogy
Summary
It is generally held that making openly licensed educational resources freely available online under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing offers opportunities for people everywhere to share, use and reuse quality materials and tools. Despite the many OER repositories and search engines to help locate these repositories, the take-up of OER has fallen short of expectations (Conole, 2012; Murphy, 2013). This under-utilization is attributed to the confusing multitude of repositories and distribution channels on the Web that make it time consuming or impractical to locate OER (Leacock & Nesbit, 2007; Reynolds, 2012), to a lack of consistent metadata and consistency in repositories’ protocols (Groom, 2013) and to unclear licensing information making it difficult to distinguish OER from other digital content (Groom, 2013). Many attempts have been made to do this, for example by Leacock and Nesbit (2007), Baya'a et al (2009), Jung et al International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (2016) 13:3
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