Teachers in K–12 schools have shown an increasing desire for open educational resources (OER) to ensure all students can learn effectively. OER provide teachers with free access to open-licensed educational resources that they can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute for personalized instruction. Open educational practices (OEP) have been considered a pathway to reinforce the acceptance and readiness of K–12 teachers to use OER. This research thus showcases a qualitative study that investigates teachers’ experiences with OEP. This research explains K-12 teachers’ perceived benefits of implementing OER and also discusses their perceived barriers hindering OER usage in K–12 settings. The study also discusses the practical implications of integrating OER in K–12 curriculum.
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Open educational resources (OER) have the potential to promote social justice imperatives in education, but because of the uneven provision of technical infrastructure across different countries, it remains uncertain whether the people who need OER the most are its primary beneficiaries. In K-12 education, educators play a major role in the effort to incorporate OER into classroom teaching but, even if they are able to source such resources (overcoming the "first-level digital divide"), many lack the practical capacity to effectively use (e.g., adapt) OER (the "second-level digital divide"). This exploratory research paper employs a cross-cultural perspective to interrogate how the second-level digital divide shapes K-12 teachers' effective use of OER. With the goal of understanding how this divide influences OERs' potential to enhance social justice, this research attempts to identify the factors accounting for teachers' effective use of OER-and any reception gap-between different countries by conducting a series of stepwise logistic regressions applied to a largescale survey of K-12 educators. It does so by assessing OER use amongst 675 K-12 educators around the world in relation to their developmental and cultural contexts, as expressed through the Human Development Index, the Gender Development Index, and Hofstede's six dimensions of national culture. The findings of this exploratory study provide new insights to support OER adoption in K-12 settings worldwide from a cultural perspective.
The outbreak of COVID-19 leads to an increasing demand for online educational resources to continue teaching and learning. Open educational resources (OER), with the benefits of cost-saving and open licenses, have great potential in facilitating the rapid transition to digital education, but concerns about whether OER decrease the effectiveness of student learning remains unsolved. Hilton's review article (2016) provides synthesized evidence stating that OER can help decrease college students' textbook spending without undermining student learning effectiveness. It is also noteworthy that implementing OER in digital education needs additional considerations beyond the efficacy of OER. Therefore, this special issue article extends Hilton's (2016) synthesized findings by presenting four additional perspectives in research, design, culture, practice about implementing OER in digital education.
Although Chinese governments are devoted to the improvement of education, considerable defects such as inequality in education and an increase in educational costs
Numerous instructional strategies have been applied to minimize statistics anxiety. Instructors are likely to consider those strategies a burden and may hesitate to apply them in their courses if there is a lack of continuous support. Open educational resources (OERs) enabled by information and communication technology have the potential to resolve this concern owing to their cost-effectiveness and to the prolific collections available. OERs can be adopted through reuse, redistribution, revision, and remix. Although a few former studies proved that technology could effectively reduce statistics anxiety, fewer studies demonstrated the effective adoption of OERs through reuse, redistribution, revision, and remix when coping with statistics anxiety. The purpose of this study was threefold. First, from earlier studies, we identified instructional strategies used to reduce statistics anxiety. Second, according to those instructional strategies, we assisted instructors in selecting and customizing OERs through reuse, redistribution, revision, and remix and in applying them in introductory statistics/quantitative research methodology courses. Third, we investigated the students' perceptions of the use of OERs to reduce statistics anxiety. The findings indicated that students had a positive reaction to the use of OERs to reduce statistics anxiety. Through this study, we can establish a rigorous approach to adopting and customizing OERs for various instructional needs in an interdisciplinary curriculum.
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