This presentation reports on preliminary insights from the adoption of OERs in M.Ed. research methods courses delivered face-to-face and online. The study examined students’ and instructors’ perspectives on the usability and value of OERs in research methods courses. Findings from students’ and instructors’ surveys and focus-groups will be discussed.
Objectives:
- To share instructors’ insights into the challenges of using adapted OERs in campus delivery and online delivery
- To share narrative accounts of student and faculty experiences in using OERs in the M.Ed. education research methods course.
- To offer an opportunity to discuss how different dimensions of OERs can be improved for student learning.
The use of OERs reduces educational costs for students. Beyond this financial benefit, OERs have the potential to facilitate students' learning by allowing for the incorporation of multi-modal (e.g., videos, audios) learning tools as well as other interactive features (e.g., application activities to test learning with immediate feedback). For teachers, it facilitates keeping course material current by easily adding, removing and modifying content. OERs afford the possibility of building on material currently available through common creative license. The perspectives of M.Ed. students taking these courses and faculty teaching them will be examined to identify how these resources facilitate learning and their overall quality across several dimensions (e.g., visual appeal, clarity, interactivity, etc.). In this presentation, we will first provide an overview of existing research on the implementation of OERs in higher education. We will follow with a presentation of a study examining students’ and faculty perspectives on the implementation of OERs in and M.Ed. research methods course. Their perspectives and preferences for OERs will be presented and implications for adoption, adaption, further development, and implementation of OERs in graduate courses will be discussed.
