As OER are increasingly in use across higher education, access to formal publications and research focused on OER and OEP become imperative. Beyond the critical importance of backing our educational choices with evidence, asking imperative questions about the benefits of OER to aid decision-makers is key to furthering the cause across education internationally. During this session, we will explore an open-access web-based archive of publications specifically developed to support practitioners, decision-makers, and researchers alike as they implement, investigate, and learn more about open resources and pedagogies in education. This work is rooted in a large-scale research study focused on advancing the conversation on OER beyond affordability, and having OER literature collected in (and easily accessible through) an online database has allowed us to discover the bigger picture behind OER scholarship, and how trends have shifted over time.
This session will take you on the journey of OER as told through trends in the literature, from an engaging demo where participants will be some of the first to explore the database to defining what we seem to actually know (and don’t know) about OER to–perhaps the most critical piece of all–asking what we can do to keep this important focus on open resources and practices moving forward in education internationally.
In this archive of OER/OEP-focused publications, we have collected and cited over a thousand formal publications whose main focus is OER or OEP, and further coded themes and categories illustrating the landscape of literature . The database includes a variety of publication types, from peer-reviewed journal articles to books and book chapters to reports from relevant organizations. All publications were qualitatively coded by a team of researchers and organized into main categories (OER, OEP), key subgroups detailing the type of information included in the publication (from descriptive to several types of empirical research), and inherent themes across the categories and subgroups highlighting areas of interest within the literature as well as clear gaps in what we know about open practices and resources in education (e.g., student outcomes, student perceptions, faculty perceptions, affordability, policy). This coding scheme also aids users in seeking out exactly what they need from hundreds of publications.We will share the trends we unearthed, data visualizations, and key examples of OER/OEP publications in this presentation. Participants will also have the opportunity to offer feedback on this emerging tool via an anonymous survey as we continue to expand and develop this work. Overall, we seek to support practitioners, researchers, and decision-makers as they identify and use scholarly literature when implementing and arguing for the use of OER at their institutions, thus practicing the science of teaching and learning.
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[Session 3E]: Practice and Policy in OEAuthor KeywordsResearch database, Repository, Scholarly Landscape
