Using Open Educational Resources for Teaching in Higher Education: A Review of Case Studies

Abstract

This paper surveys the case studies on the use of open educational resources (OER) in higher education, and summarises the involvement of institutions in OER, as well as the effectiveness, limitations and good practices regarding OER use. The survey includes a total of 59 case studies published from 2009 to 2018 which were collected from Scopus and Google Scholar. The results show that higher education institutions have mainly been the users rather than the providers of OER. The use of OER has been shown to improve students' performance, enable easy and free access to learning materials, reduce costs and dismantle learning barriers, and promote the sharing of learning materials and collaboration with others. However, the development of OER in higher education has been impeded by limitations in areas such as policy support, technological infrastructure, digital literacy, intellectual property rights, learning design and language barriers. Several good practices are proposed for the effective implementation of OER, viz. (1) developing policy support for OER; (2) cooperating closely in developing OER; and (3) customising the contents of OER. Based on the findings, it is suggested that future work should address the limitations on achieving the goals of the OER movement.