David Wiley

A decade of development

In this paper we present a history of the idea of Open Educational Resources, overview the current state of the Open Educational Resources movement, report on critical issues facing the field in the immediate future, and present two new projects to watch in 2009.

The Four "R"s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources

A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By ‘open’ it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. However, ‘open’ is not a simple dichotomy; rather, there is a continuum of openness. We discuss four separate aspects of reuse and demonstrate how these describe different levels of openness. We discuss how the licensing and technical aspects of open educational resources affect the relative openness of an open educational resource. Implications for those creating open educational resources are discussed.

A Non-authoritative Educational Metadata Ontology for Filtering and Recommending Learning Objects

Digital libraries populated with learning objects are becoming popular tools in the creation of instructional technologies. Many current efforts to create standard metadata structures that facilitate the discovery and instructional use of learning objects recommend a single, authoritative metadata record per version of the learning object. However, as we argue in this paper, a single metadata record — particularly one with fields that emphasize knowledge management and technology, while evading instructional issues — provides information insufficient to support instructional utilization decisions. To put learning objects to instructional use, users must examine the individual objects, forfeiting the supposed benefits of the metadata system. As a solution, we propose a system that includes multi-record, non-authoritative metadata focussed on the surrounding instructional context of learning objects.

Open Educational Resources: A Review of the Literature

This chapter begins by reviewing the many definitions of the term open educational resources and concludes by discussing challenges and opportunities for the approach. Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials either licensed under an open copyright license or in the public domain. Neither the term “open educational resources” nor the term “open” itself has an agreed upon definition in the literature. Research regarding open educational resources focuses on methods of producing OER, methods of sharing OER, and the benefits of OER. Significant issues relating to OER remain unresolved, including business model and discovery problems.

An OER COUP: College Teacher and Student Perceptions of Open Educational Resources

Despite increased development and dissemination, there has been very little empirical research on Open Educational Resources (OER). Teachers and students involved in a large-scale OER initiative at eight community colleges across the United States were given a detailed questionnaire aimed at uncovering their perceptions of the cost, outcomes, uses and perceptions of quality of the OER used in their courses. Teachers and students alike reported significant cost savings and various pedagogical and learning impacts due to the implementation of OER in the classroom. In addition, most students and teachers perceived their OER to be at least equal in quality to traditional textbooks they had used in the past. Implications for further research are discussed.

Cost-savings achieved in two semesters through the adoption of open educational resources

Textbooks represent a significant portion of the overall cost of higher education in the United States. The burden of these costs is typically shouldered by students, those who support them, and the taxpayers who fund the grants and student loans which pay for textbooks. Open educational resources (OER) provide students a way to receive high-quality learning materials at little or no cost to students. We report on the cost savings achieved by students at eight colleges when these colleges began utilizing OER in place of traditional commercial textbooks.

The Impact of Open Textbooks on Secondary Science Learning Outcomes

Given the increasing costs associated with commercial textbooks and decreasing financial support of public schools, it is important to better understand the impacts of open educational resources on student outcomes. The purpose of this quantitative study is to analyze whether the adoption of open science textbooks significantly affects science learning outcomes for secondary students in earth systems, chemistry, and physics. This study uses a quantitative quasi-experimental design with propensity score matched groups and multiple regression to examine whether student learning was influenced by the adoption of open textbooks instead of traditional publisher-produced textbooks. Students who used open textbooks scored .65 points higher on end-of-year state standardized science tests than students using traditional textbooks when controlling for the effects of 10 student and teacher covariates. Further analysis revealed statistically significant positive gains for students using the open chemistry textbooks, with no significant difference in student scores for earth systems of physics courses. Although the effect size of the gains were relatively small, and not consistent across all textbooks, the finding that open textbooks can be as effective or even slightly more effective than their traditional counterparts has important considerations in terms of school district policy in a climate of finite educational funding.

Using Online Technologies to Extend a Classroom to Learners at a Distance

The authors studied a course in which an instructor allowed individuals at a distance to participate. Although these students were not formally enrolled in the university where the class took place, the instructor gave them full access to all course materials and encouraged them to complete course assignments. The authors examined the time and technical proficiency required to involve learners at a distance. We surveyed these learners to determine their perceptions of the course and examined their work. Learners at a distance reported receiving some benefit from the course, particularly in terms of learner–content interaction. We surveyed students in the face‐to‐face classroom to determine whether having students participating at a distance in the same class affected their perception of the course. They reported no impact. The implications and limitations of these results are discussed.

Peer-to-peer and learning objects: the new potential for collaborative constructivist learning online

Despite the fact that collaboration is as well studied as any instructional strategy, online collaborative learning efforts have been slow to succeed. Client-server computing models are currently giving way to newer peer-to-peer models. At the same time, traditional conceptions of online learning in terms of electronic page turning are falling to the learning object model. The new paradigm of peer-to-peer learning object-based systems provides an opportunity for online collaborative learning to be appropriately architected, and therefore successful. Specifically, learning object systems force their designers to consider the important role of context mediation in learning, and to design accordingly. Peer-to-peer systems make real-time collaboration, which is a critical component for successful collaborative learning, possible.

Educational data mining meets learning analytics

W This panel is proposed as a means of promoting mutual learning and continued dialogue between the Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics communities. EDM has been developing as a community for longer than the LAK conference, so what if anything makes the LAK community different, and where is the common ground?