OER use and reuse
Open Educational Resources: The value of reuse in higher education
The report “Open Educational Resources: The value of reuse in higher education” outlines the range of online resources that are being used and how, when, where and why they are being incorporated into learning.
In 2010, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) commissioned the University of Oxford to undertake a study to assess the impact of the use of OER in the UK higher education sector. The OER Impact Study ran from November 2010 to June 2011. This report is a summary of the findings of the research, written primarily for teaching staff and those supporting curriculum delivery processes who may not have considered the potential value of OER before.
The approach of the study was broad and highly qualitative; focusing on what motivates the reuse (or rejection) of digital resources found on the web, and exploring factors that staff and students value in educational content, such as provenance, quality, context and format.
The report begins by highlighting some key themes of the use and reuse of OER. It then outlines the study’s findings of current practice within the sector and suggests some of the attributes of educational content that are most valued by stakeholders in a range of contexts. It also describes approaches taken by staff when searching for educational content online and some of the ways in which they incorporate resources into the curriculum. The report concludes with the study’s recommendations around enhancing teaching practice, supporting learners, improving services and further research.
Building Open Bridges
Building open bridges: collaborative remixing and reuse of open educational resources across organisations
“Building open bridges: collaborative remixing and reuse of open educational resources across organisations” is a paper published in March 2013 by the University of Nottingham (UK) exploring new creative collaboration practices related to OER.
Authors Tim Coughlan, Rebecca Pitt and Patrick McAndrew explore in this paper practices that, developed as a set of course materials, were released as OER from the UK, remixed for a US context by a cross-organisational, cross- cultural team, and then reused in a broad range of educational settings. The approaches taken during these remixing and reuse activities as novel forms of creative collaboration are also analysed.
Researchers identify how openness has provoked novel inter- organisational collaboration and forms of ownership. They also define forms of open practice that need support and present issues that should be considered in devising and supporting open projects in education and beyond.
Build it and they will come?– Inhibiting factors for reuse of open content in developing countries
“Build it and they will come?– Inhibiting factors for reuse of open content in developing countries” is a paper written by Mathias Hatakka, from Örebro University (Sweden) and published in 2009 in the “The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries.“
Open content has the potential to change the playing field when it comes to every individual’s right to education. However, despite the benefits of OER, the usage is very low in developing countries. Understanding why content developers choose not to use it is the first step towards finding a solution to the problem.
Mr Hatakka focuses his qualitative study on the question “Which inhibiting factors for reuse do content developers in developing countries experience with open content?” To find an answer, interviews, questionnaires and observations have been made with content developers from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and from UNESCO’s Open Training Platform.
Findings show that many of the inhibiting factors with reuse of open content do not necessarily relate to the actual content. Educational rules and regulations, lack of infrastructure, teaching practices and traditions etc. are major obstacles that need to be overcome if the usage of open content should increase.
Identifying Barriers to the Remix of Translated Open Educational Resources
This article was originally published on the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Volume 14, Issue, 1.
Remix is touted as one of the most important practices within the field of open educational resources (OER). But remixing is still not mainstream practice in education and the barriers and limitations to remix are not well known. In this article we discuss the design and development of a print and web-based booklet created to introduce the topic of OER to schoolteachers. The guide, the first of its kind available in Portuguese, was created through the remix and translation of existing resources available in English. Choosing design-as-remix raised a series of concerns related to licensing, attribution, context, and technical standards. In this article we review the concerns related to culture and inequity within the OER movement, followed by the design choices and procedures, and finally the implications of these issues for the open educational resources movement.
Use and Reuse of OER: professional conversations with language teachers
This article by Tita Beaven was originally published on the Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, volume 9, issue 1.
In the last ten years prestigious Open Education Resources projects have been set up, often with generous support from funders. Funders and institutions that support OER want evidence of their use and reuse; it seems, however, that OER have not yet been widely adopted by teachers as part of their daily practice.
This paper investigates the use and reuse of OER from a subject-specific repository for language teachers. In particular, the small scale study investigates how and why language teachers use OER in their teaching and rework existing resources. It also examines whether the teachers understand the resources and how to use and adapt them effectively, as an inability to do so has been considered an impediment to their reuse.
Track OER
Track OER is project to facilitate Web analytics for Open Educational Resources.
Open educational resources have been published by many higher education institutions around the world. They are released under licenses that typically allow download, copying and reuse of the content. However, once the content leaves the publisher's server it becomes very hard to find out who is using it, and what they are doing with it. The Universities, funding bodies and individuals who invest time and effort in developing OER content need to find out more.