OER Case Study Project
From OER Commons Wiki
Contents |
Project Purpose
A wide range of individuals and organizations are actively involved in the development of free-to-use open educational resources (OER). Partly because the field is so new, there have been few opportunities to share learnings and advances within and across projects and boundaries. Little is known, for example, about how projects are facilitating the adaptation of open content by diverse users, what structures they are instilling to support peer production, and how they are attempting to inspire community engagement.
ISKME is working with six projects to help them build capacity to track, analyze and share key developments in the creation, use and reuse of open educational resources (OER), and in the practices and models that play a role in project sustainability. The aim is to enable projects to discover unknown or untapped potential, facilitate decision making around which practices to change and which to maintain, learn how other OER projects have overcome similar challenges, and advance the field at large by contributing new knowledge which others can build upon.
The participating OER projects include:
- CurriculumNet (Uganda)
- Curriki (United States)
- Free High School Science Texts (South Africa)
- Mission 2007 Training Commons (India)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (United States)
- Teachers' Domain (United States)
Project Goals
The findings from the case studies of the participating projects will be used to develop assessment tools and resources that can assist any open education project in tracking, sharing, and advancing their learnings and success. The long-term goal of is to develop ongoing mechanisms for knowledge sharing on open education initiatives worldwide, through all types of research, stories, and experiences.
The Process
The project work entails helping each of the six projects uncover and explore research questions that are central to their efforts to advance their goals, with the aim being to make use of the resources, processes, and people already in place so that the work is realistic to their existing structures and practices. In this process, several themes have been identified for further exploration, some of which are comparative across cases, and others which bring less common areas of knowledge to light. These themes include peer production, use and user engagement, the development and sustainability of open content funding models, and licensing and the process of making legacy content open.
Project Resources
Individual Case Study Reports
- Building Open Educational Resources from the Ground Up: South Africa's Free High School Science Texts
- Mission 2007 Training Commons: Developing a Living Curriculum for Telecentre Workers in India
- CurriculumNet: Creating Freely Available Curriculum Materials to Meet Uganda's Growing Student Population
- Curriki: Facilitating Use and User Engagement Around Open Educational Resources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Toward a Sustainable Funding Model for Open Access
- WGBH's Teachers' Domain: Producing Open Materials and Engaging Users
Case Study White Paper
The case study white paper is a cross-case comparison of the individual case studies listed above.
Case Study Framework
This case study framework seeks to assist OER projects in tracking, analyzing and sharing key developments in the creation, use and reuse of open educational resources. Based on the case studies of each of the six projects above, the framework provides research tools, reflective questions, and examples that OER projects can draw upon in conducing their own case studies.
