Scoping the nascent: An analysis of K-12 OER research 2012-2017

Constance Blomgren,Iain Mcpherson

doi:10.5944/openpraxis.10.4.905

Abstract

Awareness and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) has grown at all levels of education. Higher education researchers actively study OER but K-12 OER research indicates limited published results. To address this gap, this study examined articles meeting defined criteria and analyzed the results. Findings include cohesion of author-supplied keywords and ten primary categories of focus. From 38 articles studied, a variety of research methods were represented. Analysis showed Professional and Applied Sciences were overwhelmingly represented with the majority of articles within the discipline of Education and its fields with Humanities a distant second category of publication. The equal distribution between open and closed access journals may reflect changes to past scholarly publication practices. Citation analysis revealed divergences and reinforces the nascent quality of this topic. Future K-12 OER research that studies the complex change from resource scarcity to resource flexibility and digital abundance is needed.

Highlights

Since UNESCO’s early open courseware forum in 2002, public domain or open licensed educational materials - referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER) - have increased in three significant ways: awareness of these malleable educational resources; the use of OER through the development of a variety of public repositories; and, the concomitant support for OER by an array of advocates
OER research significance for K-12, unlike within higher education, lays in potentiality but as this paper demonstrates, interest grows in this topic
Higher education has been writing and researching OER for quite some time, even before the 2002 UNESCO Global Forum adoption of the term OER (UNESCO, 2002), this study reveals that K-12 OER activity substantially lags behind

Summary

Introduction

Since UNESCO’s early open courseware forum in 2002, public domain or open licensed educational materials - referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER) - have increased in three significant ways: awareness of these malleable educational resources; the use of OER through the development of a variety of public repositories; and, the concomitant support for OER by an array of advocates. UNESCO (2012) defined OER as including a wide range of learning materials, from “textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation (UNESCO, 2012, para 1).” Wiley (2014) later suggested ‘the 5Rs’ of OER. To further enhance the definition of OER and its growth toward Open Educational Practice (OEP), Cronin (2017) suggests that OEP involves “collaborative practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of OER, as well as pedagogical practices employing participatory technologies and social networks for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation, and empowerment of learners”

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Conclusion