#297 Poster

Monday 16 April 15:00 - 17:15 Bar/Conservatory

Contemporary Development of the Student use of Open Education Resources

Libor Hurt, Kaye Towlson, Lucy Mathers & Vivien Rolfe, De Montfort University, UK

Conference Theme: Innovation

Summary: The development of student skills in finding and evaluating OERs, of relevance to all learners and producers of OERs.

Abstract: Open Education Resources (OER) are digitised materials which can be reused for teaching, learning and research that are made available through open licensing (Hylen 2007). A large proportion of OERs are aimed at and developed for academic users, however students are also potential users. One major problem with OERs is that students are either not aware of them or they do not possess the correct skills to use the resources (Stapleton et al 2011).  The aim of the present study is to analyse the contemporary development of the student use of OERs.
Focus groups with student volunteers were set up to develop their skills and to produce guidelines for OER discovery and use. Students were asked about OERs in general and were tasked with finding OERs using the Google search engine. Each student was given the opportunity to use the De Montfort University Library “Information Source Evaluation Matrix” (Towlson 2009) to firstly scrutinise a book to gain familiarity with the matrix. Then the students applied the matrix to an OER which was in a form of their choice, such as video or animation. The matrix consists of a number of questions ranging from the accessibility to author information, to the relevance of the resource to the subject context. Each question is scored from 1 to 5 and an overall total for the resource is calculated to give a reflection of academic quality. The student comments were recorded by audio, and they also wrote down comments and suggestions on the matrix sheet.  The results showed that students were not aware of OERs. When searching for OER using Google, students felt that they were highly accessible, i.e. resources appeared on the first or second page of search engine results, but they felt that the relevant resources were overshadowed by ones of lesser quality. As a result of the focus groups, students made recommendations to improve and adapt the evaluation matrix for the appraisal of learning content in other formats such as video and animation.
In summary, academic establishments should aim to develop their students’ research skills pertaining to OERs and their ability to scrutinise sources for quality. OER authors should make them more student friendly with all the relevant information and details to allow them to be evaluated. The use of a logo mark was one suggestion to help students identify resources that are of good quality and that reflected the level of expertise contained.