Lessons Learned from the Development of Open Educational Resources at Post-Secondary Level in the Field of Environmental Modelling: An Exploratory Study

Quazi K Hassan,Ashraf Dewan,Kazi Z Sumon,Khan R Rahaman

doi:10.3390/educsci9020103

Quazi K Hassan, Ashraf Dewan + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9020103

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Abstract

Open educational resources (OER) have become increasingly popular in recent times. Here, the aim was to synthesise the lessons learned through the development of OER materials for a university-level course called “environmental modelling”. Consequently, the topics of discussion included: (i) how to choose an appropriate creative commons license; (ii) ways of incorporating materials from other sources, such as publicly available sources, other open access materials, and an author’s own published materials if not published under a creative commons license; (iii) the impact of the developed OER in the field of environmental modelling; and (iv) the challenges in developing OER material. Upon developing the materials, we observed the following: (i) students enrolled in the course did not purchase textbooks; (ii) our OER materials ranked as one of the most accessed (i.e., number 7) materials according to the usage data that summed the number of file downloads and item views from PRISM (i.e., the hosting platform maintained by the University of Calgary); (iii) the students learned relatively better as per the data acquired by the University of Calgary’s universal student ratings of instruction (USRI) instrument; and (iv) other universities expressed interest in adopting the materials.

Highlights

Open education resources (OER) are materials that are openly available for reuse, modification, and sharing that originated in the later part of the twentieth century [1]
In the scope of this paper, we summarized the lessons learned through the development of Open educational resources (OER)
The major obstacle we encountered was the existence of limited OER that we could either adopt or adapt

Summary

Introduction

Open education resources (OER) are materials that are openly available for reuse, modification, and sharing that originated in the later part of the twentieth century [1]. In 1994, Wayne Hodgins introduced the term “learning object” to describe any packaged digital resource useful for educational purposes [2,3]. The concept of generative learning objects (GLOs) was developed to overcome restrictions that made it difficult to gain full benefits from the use of these generated resources [4]. The term “generative” is understood as a property of the learning content produced and handled either semi-automatically or automatically [5] with the support of some technology. GLOs have been considered as a leading technology of choice for eLearning support due to their.

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