Development Of Open Educational Resources Research Articles

Open Educational Resources in Higher Education

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are changing the learning and teaching landscape in many different fields. In the area of higher education, OERs are swiftly becoming important elements in support of Open Educational Practices (OEPs) and the Open Education Movement. Research suggests that OERs and OEPs might be powerful vehicles for professional development, for teacher collaboration, and to enhance knowledge of technology in language pedagogy (Borthwick & Gallagher-Brett, 2014). Nonetheless, in spite of the increasing popularity of open education, little is known with regard to the production and use of OERs in languages other than English (Zancanaro & Amiel, 2017). This paper examines concepts, advantages and challenges related to Open Education and briefly reviews studies which discussed the production of OERs in languages other than English in higher education. The few studies addressing the development and use of OERs in languages other than English show that more research is needed to increase visibility of open education for less prominent languages and to support the Open Education Movement in higher education. DOI:10.2458/azu_itet_v6i1_berti

Assessing the Potential Toward Open Educational Practices in Kyrgyzstan

The study was undertaken to understand the propensity for increased engagement with open educational practices (OEP), to include methods prioritizing student-centered teaching & learning, and awareness, use, and development of open educational resources (OER) among higher education faculty in Kyrgyzstan. The study employed a mixed-methods research design, combining qualitative and quantitative data obtained from 35 faculty, librarians, and administrators in institutions of higher education in Kyrgyzstan. This study aimed to identify current teaching practices and learning resource usage practices, gauge levels of knowledge regarding Kyrgyzstan’s Copyright law, Creative Commons licenses, and Open Educational Resources, and investigate perceptions regarding potential roles for libraries in enabling others’ learning regarding Copyright and Creative Commons, and open educational resources. Analysis of the results revealed a higher than expected gravitation toward student-centered pedagogy than previously assumed. The study also identified broad use of digital downloads as learning materials, conflation of open educational resources with free online resources, and positive perceptions of libraries’ potential to instruct regarding Kyrgyz copyright, Creative Commons, and open educational resources, and needs for further professional development training for librarians.

Openness in higher education

The purpose of this study is to analyze the phenomenon of openness in higher education and its trends and technologies of expanding educational opportunities in the digital information society of Moldovan universities. The main concepts of openness in education are associated with the practice of online learning and constructivist approaches, technical optimization of delivering information, continuous professional development and globalization of higher education. Since skilled knowledge becomes the main value of the market, then higher education perspective as a tool of knowledge reproduction is transformed into the basic space of openness and accommodation to innovative use of educational resources. The key issues related to openness in order to impact higher education target the development of Open Educational Resources (OER), as well as implication of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), relatively new online learning trend. There are institutional practices of the adoption and use of open education technologies in some international universities and organizations, which could be extended as well to create an open learning system in the Republic of Moldova, focusing on national practices of education. Openness of Moldovan HEIs is a strategic choice for the future in a rapidly changing educational market that should proliferate.

Collaborative Oer Adoption by a Professional Learning Community, a Model of Teacher Professional Development

The authors, as members of IT for Change, an NGO working in the area of digital technologies and social change, participated in the ‘Subject Teacher Forum program (STF), an in-service Teacher Professional Development (TPD) program for government high school teachers across Karnataka, between 2011 and 2016. The primary purpose of the Subject Teacher Forum was to demonstrate a technology mediated model of continuing teacher professional development, introducing teachers to different digital tools for creating resources and and for connecting with one another through a state-wide mailing list based Professional Learning Community (PLC). As a part of the Subject Teacher Forum program, the DSERT began a related initiative called the ‘Karnataka Open Educational Resources’ (KOER) to publish the resources shared in the state-wide mailing lists. A core group of mathematics, science and social science teachers, members of the state-wide PLC, were selected to lead this development of Open Educational Resources (OER). This core group learnt to access, create, revise, remix and publish OER on the KOER repository. The aim of the paper is to understand how an OER creation process embedded within a PLC can support the adoption of OER in a government school system as well as provide a method of TPD.

Open Educational Resources: Role of Libraries

This paper discusses awareness about Open Educational Resources (OER), the level of integration with library resources and the barriers as perceived by academic librarians. It also tries to examine the possible roles of academic libraries in promoting and supporting OER development. It presents the results of a survey on the awareness, integration and involvement of academic libraries in OER.

Professional Learning Communities, an ICT Integrated Model of In-Service Teacher Education

n-service teacher-education (INSET) in the Government school system is characterized by centralized program design, didactic teacher professional development (TPD) processes and limited interaction amongst participants during and after training. The National Curricular Framework for Teacher Education, 2010 has envisioned an INSET that is self-directed, peer-based, continuous learning; recognizing and building on teacher experiences. The ‘Subject Teacher Forum’ (STF), an INSET program of RMSA and DSERT Karnataka has attempted such an INSET, through the creation of a ICT enabled Professional Learning Communities (PLC). The STF focused on strengthening digital competencies among teachers, in using free educational software applications (like Geogebra, Phet, Freemind), authoring tools (to create text, image, audio and video resources), web tools (like maps, search) and web resources (like encyclopedias, dictionaries) for their TPD and teaching-learning. IT for Change, the resource institution partnering DSERT, trained Master Resource Persons, who trained colleagues across Karnataka, using a ‘blended cascade’ approach. The participating mathematics, science and social science government high school teachers have shared ideas, experiences and open educational resources (OER) on the virtual forums of their PLC. “An analysis of the interactions on the forums is indicative of growing awareness, proactive participation and the development of a community. The training interventions have introduced teachers to a variety of software tools and web resources, encouraging them to engage with these resources, create their own and share them with their peers. The STF is implemented by the government system, using existing infrastructure and budgets. Being systemic, it has the potential to scale and sustain. Based on the 3rd RMSA JRM recommendations; Telangana and Assam have initiated INSET, contextualizing the Karnataka STF experiences to meet their priorities. Through an analysis of these programmes, the paper explores a PLC-OER based INSET model that could reform TPD, and facilitate OER development in Indic languages.

Design and Development of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in Higher Education

Library and information services have dramatically changed over the last couple of years. Now access to information is not limited to what is physically available in a particular library. Information is accessible free of charge from a wide variety of globally distributed commercial repositories such as open access (OA) journals, OA archives and open courseware and others. Now libraries can provide worldwide access to a never-ending supply of distributed information and knowledge in electronic form that is constantly available and updated. This article provides information about resources like e-journals, e-books, directories/gateways, theses and other OA resources in pure sciences, social sciences and management. The Maris Stella Virtual Library provides links not only for the above resources but also links for Open Course Ware and Massive Open Online Courses

Open Educational Resources Development on Higher Education in a Collaborative Process of Co-Creation

This paper aims to expose the results of a qualitative research process based by participatory research methodology, developed within a research of Theory and Pedagogical Practice in the Instruction of Professors, from the StrictoSensu Post-Graduate Program in Education (PPGE) at Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Parana (PUCPR), Curitiba, Brazil, as part of the activities of the research group Pedagogical Practice on Teaching and Learning with Educational Technologies (PRAPETEC) research group. From 2013 to 2016, several actions were developed by the research group to contribute to research on collaborative learning, co-creation, open education and open educational resources, due to a partnership with the Collaborative Open Learning Community (coLearn) under the coordination of Dr. Alexandra Okada. In this context, the question to this investigation was as follows: how can open educational resources (OER) development on Higher Education in a collaborative process of co-creation contribute to student learning? The aim of this study was to promote a collaborative and open educational experience for students through the creation of OER as well as the incorporation of Facebook, YouTube and Whats App as supporting environments in the teaching and learning process. Based on the analysis of the obtained results, it was observed that this experience was positive for contributing to the knowledge production in a collaborative way, with criticality, autonomy and creativity. And also, the students experienced an innovative methodology, allowing those who already act as professors to reflect on their pedagogical practice.

Educators' open educational collaboration online: The dilemma of emotional ownership

The open education movement has witnessed ups and downs from initial interest in transparency and openness, followed by a lack of reuse of open educational resources (OER) and the massive boost of interest in massive open online courses (MOOCs). This article addresses educators' online behaviors and perceptions regarding participation in collaborative development of OER in online settings. Using a data-driven approach to study educators' perceptions, this article presents multiple considerations for collaborative OER development and validates a new model explaining educators' intention to participate in collaborative action. The findings reveal the contradictory nature of emotional ownership of knowledge: a critical enabling factor for commitment and a barrier to knowledge exchange in an open and transparent manner. The findings also show how outcome expectations regarding increase in reputation and status in the network do not influence the intention to share knowledge. Further interviews with idea-sharing platform users enable us to explain the favorable settings to resolve the dilemma of emotional ownership. The study contributes not only to further development of the open education movement but also to theory development of educators’ collaborative behaviors online.

AM-OER: An Agile Method for the Development of Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources have emerged as important elements of education in the contemporary society, promoting life-long and personalized learning that transcends social, eco- nomic and geographical barriers. To achieve the potential of OERs and bring impact on education, it is necessary to increase their development and supply. However, one of the current challenges is how to produce quality and relevant OERs to be reused and adapted to different contexts and learning situations. In this paper we proposed an agile method for the development of OERs – AM-OER, grounded on agile practices from Software Engineering. Learning Design practices from the OULDI project (UK Open University) are also embedded into the AM-OER aiming at improving quality and facilitating reuse and adaptation of OERs. In order to validate AM-OER, an experiment was conducted by applying it in the development of an OER on software testing. The results showed preliminary evidences on the applicability, effectiveness and ef ciency of the method in the development of OERs.

Librarians and OER: Cultivating a Community of Practice To Be More Effective Advocates

ABSTRACTAs the costs of scholarly and educational publications skyrocket, open educational resources (OER) are becoming an important way to provide content and enhance the teaching and learning experience. Librarians have a key role to play in developing, advocating, and managing OER. For many librarians, however, championing OERs means adding an additional responsibility to their already heavy workloads, which may be overwhelming. This article describes how a grassroots group of academic librarians in British Columbia, Canada joined together as a community of practice to learn and to share ideas, strategies, and tools to support the use of OER. The BCOER Librarians focus on the education and professional development of librarians to help facilitate the use and development of OERs and to create authoritative and sustainable resources to support librarians in OER-related interactions with faculty.

THE PROBLEM OF USING OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN THE LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE AS A LESS WIDESPREAD LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD

The demand to promote development of Open Educational Resources (OER) in less used languages is relevant all across Europe. Although numerous education resources are available today, their access in the Lithuanian language is very scarce. The aim of the article is to reveal the importance of OER in the Lithuanian language for the development of teachers’ competences. This is crucial to assure the quality of teaching material by providing a possibility to disseminate innovations, to develop creativity and consistency as well as to share created teaching resources. The article is based on scientific literature analysis and descriptive methods. OER in Lithuanian are crucial to assuring the quality of teaching material by providing teachers a possibility to develop their competences, creativity, and consistency as well as to apply innovations and share the designed resources of teaching.

The potential of high-quality Open Educational Resources (OERs) for the teaching of English poetry

ABSTRACTThis article reports on the possibilities afforded by the availability of high-quality Open Educational Resources (OERs) for traditional Humanities subjects such as English. The OERs provided a rich multimedia environment that enabled students to explore a range of selected poems. This paper reports on the design, development and usability testing of OERs for the teaching of poetry at Junior Certificate level in Irish post-primary schools. The potential impact of such OERs is also addressed.

OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT: THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES

Systems of education are being simultaneously changed by both internal and external factors, with their modeling being far back than real-time challenges. Such a contradiction could be smoothened by making use of e-Environment to balance old-fashioned techniques and methods against crucial standards for knowledge and skills to be obtained and transformed into competences. Considering the blurred boundaries between traditional education and e-learning, it is essential that both threats and opportunities should be analyzed to find the most efficient ways for high educational performance with quality education possible. Thus, a strategic planning for refining the most efficient and productive models of teaching, learning, tutoring, coaching and mentoring is a vital part of future success. Quality education is ensured under e-Environment with freedom of choice and an egalitarian access to unlimited diversified open resources, for it facilitates personal and personality development when making a choice is the only factor that matters. The paper studies the advantages and disadvantages, threats and opportunities of OER development. The study analyses quality education ensured by open educational resources development, since OER are connected with an egalitarian access to unlimited information, which can benefit to the process of personality formation through realization of abilities, capabilities, wants and needs and sharing diversified experience to make this educational personality transformation the most efficient. Open educational resources provide with the ability to interpret the diversity which is literally the creation of personal realization of the variability of the modern world. DOI: https://doi.org/10.28925/2414-0325.2016.2.d6066

Chinese Faculty Members’ Open Educational Resources (OER) Usage Status and the Barriers to OER Development and Usage

The purpose of this study was to investigate faculty members’ usage of Open Educational Resources (OER) as well as the barriers to OER development and usage. 360 faculty members from Zhejiang University (ZJU) in China were randomly selected to complete a survey. The study found that: (1) most of surveyed faculty members rarely utilized OER, while they had some awareness of sharing educational resources; (2) the majority noticed online educational materials published for learning or reference, while they ignored open source software or licensing tools for sharing and reusing resources; (3) lack of time and skills were significant obstacles for faculty members to develop OER, while lack of incentives was a potential obstacle; (4) content, experience, and school factors affected faculty members’ OER usage; (5) online teaching experiences impacted incentive to develop OER as well as how to develop OER. It also played a key role in faculty members’ perceptions about the experience and habit factors as possible barriers to OER usage. Results of the study implicate that more serious efforts are needed to improve the awareness and development of OER in China.

Developing a Sustainable Financial Model in Higher Education for Open Educational Resources

<p>Financial issues regarding the sustainable production, dissemination, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education are reviewed and proposed solutions critiqued. Use of OER produce demonstrable cost savings for students. Yet OER development continues to rely almost completely on government and philanthropic funding. This indicates that a mismatch exists between the financial interests of students and those of higher education institutions. Before OER will be broadly adopted, changes to government policy are required to align institutional objectives with faculty motivations and student needs.</p>

Trends and Opportunities in Computer Science OER Development

Abstract The world is embracing an open education model. The success of this process implies an adequate awareness, an assumption that is inconsistent with recent reports and statistical facts. Despite the major advances in recent years, Open Educational Resources (OER) are still not in the mainstream of Computer Science course development. Motivated by the need to fill this gap, this paper analyzes the evolution of the OER development and the emerging trends relevant to Computer Science education. The aim is to raise the awareness and promote a practical transition process towards an adequate model that aligns the interests of all stakeholders.

Influencing factors in OER usage of adult learners in Korea

Open Educational Resources (OER) is terminology that refers to educational resources (content and software) distributed through the Internet, free of charge and freely accessible, expanding learning opportunities for adult learners. This terminology first appeared around 2002, although its roots can be traced to the open architecture of the Internet. Until recently, OER development has focused more on quantity of contents rather than quality. In this study, we have examined the factors influencing the learning intention of adult learners in the OER context. Based on the relevant literature, we have identified a number of factors influencing a learner’s intention to use e-learning content. We have also developed a questionnaire for conducting a survey on such influencing factors. The survey results show that ease of use and relation to immediate workplace needs affect the intention of adult learners in using OER. The findings of this study can inform those developing and designing a learning environment that employs OER while also providing general guidance for developers and educators on how to design OER content.

Widening access and OER: developing new practice

Open Educational Resources (OER) are widely viewed as having the potential to open up access to educational opportunities at all levels. However, issues of access, openness and free use are complex and contested. The development of OER takes place in contexts where educational and other resources are distributed unevenly, both between the global north and south and within nations in the developed world. This paper reviews recent literature on OER and widening access to higher education for adults which suggests that so far OER is having limited impact on educational inequality. In the context of the tensions and challenges identified in the literature it then presents evidence from some recent developments in Scotland where OER has been developed collaboratively in widening access partnerships. The paper argues that the findings from these new initiatives support the view that realising the promise of OER is as much through the development of innovative social practice as through development of new content. It concludes by suggesting that there is a case for extending the definition of Open Educational Practices (OEP) from a focus on design and pedagogy into the domain of partnership and social networks.

Open Educational Resources Development Model for an Inquiring Cultural Skill of Higher Education Students

This study is aimed to develop Open Educational Resources (OER) model for an Inquiring cultural skill of higher education students. The findings revealed as follows: The model consisted of four components: 1) A scope of a knowledge domain 2) Content development: media design and development, including and evaluation of the media effectiveness 3) Implementation: publish with Creative Common (CC) license and 4) Quality assurance: by learners’ vote and the outcome of learners’ inquiring cultural skill