Category: data
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Open educational resources: A bridge to formal education?
The relationship between open educational resources and formal education is complex and multifaceted. In the early days of OER, detractors of the OER movement cautioned that universities could suffer financially from releasing free content – a vision of OER as in competition with formal education. To date, OER Research Hub (OERRH) research…
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Can OER break down barriers to participation in education?
Are open education models leading to more equitable access to education? The OER Research Hub (OERRH) has spent the past few months gathering evidence around this question in connection with OERRH hypothesis C – ‘Open education models lead to more equitable access to education, serving a broader base of learners than traditional…
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'Through a glass darkly' Part 3: OER, critical reflection and educators' improved practice – some early evidence
Do OER prompt critical reflection by educators who use them, resulting in improved practice? Part 3 of my blog series on reflection moves from abstract theorisation to concrete evidence around OER Research Hub (OERRH) hypothesis E, which raises this very question. JISC (2013) suggest that the use of OER ‘encourages open educational…
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NOVA Focus Group: Initial Thoughts
On Friday I visited Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) to run an OER focus group with instructional designers and teachers. We’ll be using the data collected as part of the project’s ever-increasing dataset, but I thought it would be worth gathering some of my initial reflections here. I was a guest…
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Flipped or flipped open?
PHOTO: CC-BY B. de los Arcos Claire Walker and I were scheduled to present at FlipCon13 last Wednesday, June 18th. Sadly, we never made it, as this silly Spaniard single-handedly decided it would be better fun to visit the local hospital, and not exactly to research their use of OER,…
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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known: nine surveys for OER research
Astronomer and writer Dr Carl Sagan is probably mis-credited as saying that ‘somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known’, though the sentence did feature in a 1977 interview with him in Newsweek magazine. Irrespective of whether Sagan or a magazine reporter made this statement I think it’s fair to say that Carl Sagan’s research…
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Data Visualization Tools
There’s a nice list of data visualization tools available on netmagazine. I think it would be really interesting to experiment with a few of these in the context of the redevelopment of the OLnet Evidence Hub in the OER Hub project. Modest Maps could be used instead of Google Maps to provide geolocation for organisations, input…