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Archive for the ‘Open Educational Resources’ Category

Adoption of Sharing and Reuse of Open Resources by Educators in Higher Education Institutions in the Netherlands: A Qualitative Research of Practices, Motives, and Conditions

To find out what is needed to speed up the adoption of open sharing and reuse of learning materials and open online courses in publicly funded Dutch institutions of Higher Education, a qualitative research study was conducted in fall 2016. This study examined issues of willingness of educators and management, barriers and enablers of adoption, […]

Nearly half of U.S. colleges are using OpenStax textbooks this year

The Rice University-based OER publisher reported that students across 5,160 colleges and universities are saving a combined $177 million on its textbooks. edscoop

Open Educational Resources: Challenges and Opportunities in Indian Primary Education

Education is a fundamental human right, yet one fifth of the world’s population lives with poor literacy. India is home to the largest number of illiterate people, with infrastructural, cultural, and socio-economic factors hindering equitable access to quality education. Due to the rapidly growing technology and Internet usage in the country, open educational resources (OER) […]

Open Educational Practices in Australia: A First-phase National Audit of Higher Education

For fifteen years, Australian Higher Education has engaged with the openness agenda primarily through the lens of open-access research. Open educational practice (OEP), by contrast, has not been explicitly supported by federal government initiatives, funding, or policy. This has led to an environment that is disconnected, with isolated examples of good practice that have not […]

Free Digital Textbooks vs. Purchased Commercial Textbooks

A large-scale study at the University of Georgia has found that college students provided with free course materials at the beginning of a class get significantly better academic results than those that do not. The Georgia study, published this week, compared the final grades of students enrolled in eight large undergraduate courses between 2010 and […]

Cengage Contributes Openly Licensed Content to OER Community

BOSTON, July 16, 2018 – Cengage, an education and technology company, is contributing the narrative content for three openly licensed textbooks, as well as the learning objectives and assessments for 12 course areas as Open Educational Resources (OER). The Creative Commons Attribution licensed (CC BY) narrative content and the learning objectives are available to download […]

Download: Proceedings of the European Distance and E-Learning Network Conference , Genoa, Italy, June 2018

Introduction The demand for people with new, enhanced skills is growing. The volume of information produced and shared in all fields is overwhelming. Building the data economy became part of the EU Digital Single Market. Powerful and sophisticated ICT is part of everyday life, and the world of learning is not an exception. Pressure is […]

I’m Never Doing This Again!: Identifying and Solving Faculty Challenges in Adoption of Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) can be an effective tool in lowering student textbook expenses and bringing current material into the classroom, but come with many barriers for faculty related to time, expertise, motivation, standardized testing requirements, and subject matter differences. Given the number of potential challenges and problems with using OER, school administrators with distance […]

Effects of an Open Educational Resources Initiative on Students, Faculty and Instructional Designers

A research and development project was undertaken to document, analyze and report the effects of implementing a free/open educational resources (OER) initiative within Sullivan University’s College of Business Administration. The project involved the redesign of courses using no-cost textbooks and other educational resources, in place of resources costing students hundreds of dollars per course. Quantitative […]

Connecting OER With Mandatory Textbooks in an EFL Classroom: A Language Theory–Based Material Adoption

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) theory focuses on developing language learners’ meta-linguistic understanding of the interrelation among linguistic form (grammar/vocabulary), meaning, and context. Guided by SFL when using a mandatory textbook and open educational resources, this study investigates how exposure to this blended teaching and learning context may impact English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ adjustment to materials used […]

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