Better than Christmas – OER Research hub report
The OER Research Hub completed its second annual report for the founders, the Hewlett Foundation in September. It plots the evidence we’ve gained against the 11 hypotheses of the project. It’s not the final report which we will deliver next year, but it has some very interesting findings. We have over 6000 survey responses from educators, informal and formal learners, and librarians.
Some of the key findings are:
- 37.6% of educators and 55.7% of formal learners say that using OER improves
student satisfaction - 27.5% of educators and 31.9% of formal learners agree that OER use results
in better test scores - 79.4% of OER users adapt resources to fit their needs
- 79.5% of educators use OER to get new ideas and inspiration
- 88.4% of learners say that the opportunity to study at no cost influenced
their decision to use OER - 74.9% of informal learners use OER to have a learning experience
- Knowing where to find resources is one of the biggest challenges to using OER
- General knowledge of well-established OER repositories is low
- Only 5% of educators say they don’t share information about OER
- The more educators use OER, the more they are willing to share
- Only 12.4% of educators create resources and publish them on a Creative Commons license
- Videos are the most common type of OER used.
- Cost of and access to materials can have an effect on student retention
- 40.9% of all formal learners in our sample consider that OER have a positive impact in helping them complete their course of study
- 79.6% of formal students think they save money by using OER
- 31.5% of informal learners say that their interest in using OER is a chance to try university-level content before signing up for a paid-for course
- 31.3% say their use of OER influenced their decision to register for their current course.
- 83.2% of informal learners say they are more likely to take another free course or study a free open educational resource, and 24.2% say that they would go on to take a paid for course as a result of using OER
There is still a lot more to do, in particular we really want to get at good comparative data demonstrating improvement in scores (or otherwise) following OER adoption, so if anyone has leads in that area please get in touch. Nevertheless, I would contend that this represents one of the most comprehensive investigations of OER impact, and so will be of interest to anyone in the field.
We’ll be doing further analysis and digging into some of the findings in further detail over the coming months. The report is available under a CC-By licence, and available in a nicely designed PDF booklet, so really, your Christmas wishes are already fulfilled, which is nice.
