The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of approaches to and insights for impact assessment on open educational resources (OER) in higher education and building on this to sketch a framework for university focussed OER impact assessment. The authors describe the literature on impact assessment in the OER context and the existing…

Purpose: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) was a milestone when it was uniformly adopted by its member states on November 25, 2019. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide an overview of the OER Recommendation in relation to some of the UN…

Open Educational Resources (OER) are becoming a significant, mission-driven trend within educational literature. To help address rising costs, instructors and designers are looking to OER to effectively replace traditional instructional content, which requires more than just identify and replace. Drawing from 51 OER studies conducted in countries…

Although textbooks are a traditional component in many higher education contexts, their increasing price have led many students to forgo purchasing them and some faculty to seek substitutes. One such alternative is open educational resources (OER). This present study synthesizes results from sixteen efficacy and twenty perceptions studies…

This paper examines the role of proprietary software in the production of open educational resources (OER). Using a single case study, the paper explores the implications of removing proprietary software from an OER project, with the aim of examining how complicated such a process is and whether removing such software meaningfully advances a…

Learning paths are curated sequences of resources organized in a way that a learner has all the prerequisite knowledge needed to achieve their learning goals. In this article, we systematically map the techniques and algorithms that are needed to create such learning paths automatically. We focus on open educational resources (OER), though a…

A key component of online and blended learning content, open educational resources, (OER) are heralded in a global movement toward high-quality, affordable, accessible, and personalized education. However, stakeholders have expressed concern about scaling OER use due to a lack of means to ensure a fit between learner, resource, and task. Usage…

This paper examines the problems and potential of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Education Resources (OER) in the global South. Employing a systematic review of the research into the use of open online learning technologies in Southern contexts, we identify five interrelated themes emerging from the literature: (1) access to the…

This paper investigates the degree to which recent digital Open Education literature is aligned to social justice principles, starting with the first UNESCO definition of Open Educational Resources (OER). A critical analysis of 19 texts was undertaken to track dominant and alternative ideas shaping the development of Open Education since 2002 as…

Recommender Systems (RS) in e-learning has attracted several researchers aiming basically at scaffolding learners in locating relevant learning resources that meet their learning needs and profiles. Whereas a number of review studies have been carried out in the area of educational recommender systems, there is a limited information in the…

This paper presents a review of distance education literature published in the "International Review of Research in Open and Distance/Distributed Learning" (IRRODL) to describe the status thereof and to identify gaps and priority areas in distance education research based on a validated classification of research areas. All articles (N =…

Open Teaching is currently considered an ambiguous and polysemic concept but has nevertheless become a growing global trend in ICT-based education. To identify key issues on the subject, this article presents a study on Open teaching that combines meta-synthesis and content analysis of research published over the last twenty years in major…

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…