I recently came across a research paper published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Chemistry Education Research and Practice entitled Integration of Open Educational Resources in Undergraduate Chemistry Teaching – a Mapping Tool and Lecturer’s Considerations (Feldman-Magor, Rom, and Tuvi-Arad; 2016) and since we are doing a lot of work with Open Chemistry here at UCI, the paper caught my attention.
The authors investigated the criteria that instructors at 66 colleges or universities in Israel use in selecting OERs for their courses plus they evaluated the quality of 100 websites from around the world that offer chemistry OERs using a tool of their own design. (Oddly enough, these two aspects of their research were independent of each other though reported in the same paper. I was more interested in the evaluation criteria reported by the instructors and therefore focus my comments on just that.)
The authors found that the majority of instructors used OERs as a supplement to their own teaching, selecting material that was useful for homework assignments and that illustrated complex concepts (via 3-D models and simulations, for instance). The OERs selected generally did not include so-called Web 2.0 functionality such as discussion forums, content sharing, and other interactive capabilities. Many instructors today are not very familiar with such technologies and have limited time to learn them.
In order of decreasing importance, selection criteria included how well the OER content aligned with their own content knowledge, how well-known the author was, and how well-respected the institution (or company) that created the content was. Criteria that were not very important included how recently the content had been updated, whether the content lent itself to collaborative learning, and the content’s underlying sources of information (as long as it agreed with the instructor’s personal knowledge of that content, presumably).
The research also showed that OERs were most likely to be used in lesson preparation than for other purposes. The second-most common use was for demonstrations.
How does this relate to UC Irvine’s Open Education efforts? While the focus of this particular paper was on how instructors use OERs, we have focused heavily on how students use OERs, especially since students usually choose to use the materials themselves without needing an instructor to assign it to them. Hence, we expect the peer-learning capabilities we are currently developing around OpenChem to make our content even more attractive as students will be able to form facilitated study groups around virtually any chemistry topic.
As more instructors become familiar and comfortable with Web 2.0 capabilities, the ability to encourage students to form study groups will undoubtedly cause the usage of our site and similar sites to grow. Stay tuned for continuing developments…