Open Research

Open Research is an open textbook based on the award winning course of the same name. The course ran two facilitated iterations during 2014 and 2015 on Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). Open Research was co-authored and delivered by the OER Hub team, leaders in open education research and open research practices. Open Research explores what it means to be more 'open' in your research, ethical considerations, dissemination and the role of reflection. This open textbook also incorporates previous participant contributions into new activity commentary sections

Who are the Open Learners? A Comparative Study Profiling non-Formal Users of Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) have been identified as having the potential to extend opportunities for learning to non-formal learners. However, little research has been conducted into the impact of OER on non-formal learners. This paper presents the results of a systematic survey of more than 3,000 users of open educational resources (OER). Data was collected between 2013 and 2014 on the demographics, attitudes and behaviours of users of three repositories. Questions included a particular focus on the behaviours of non-formal learners and the relationship between formal and non-formal study. Frequency analysis shows that there are marked differences in patterns of use, user profiles, attitudes towards OER, types of materials used and popularity of different subjects. The experience of using OER is fairly consistent across platforms in terms of satisfaction and impact on future behaviour. On the whole, non-formal learners surveyed were highly positive about their use of OER and believe they will continue to use them. With regards to this making formal study more likely some degree of polarization was observed: some believed formal study was now more likely, while others felt it made this less likely. On the whole, while non-formal learners are enthusiastic about using free and online resources, the language and concept of OER does not seem to be well understood in the groups surveyed. A range of findings relating to OER selection and use as well as differences between repositories are explored in the discussion

Adapting the Curriculum: How K-12 Teachers Perceive the Role of Open Educational Resources

It has been suggested that open educational resources (OER) can lower cost and lead to greater flexibility, however while there has been significant investment in opening up content there have been few studies looking at how these resources are perceived by those who might use them. This quantitative article contributes to fill a gap in our knowledge of how K-12 educators teaching in face-to-face, online and blended contexts currently think about and use OER. It is part of the research carried out by the Hewlett-funded OER Research Hub (OERRH) Project to examine the impact of OER on teaching and learning practices. The authors report findings from a survey of 600+ schoolteachers who answered a set of attitudinal and behavioural questions in relation to how they use OER, what types of OER they use and what influences their selection of content, in addition to the purpose, challenges and perceived impact of OER in the K-12 classroom. The research highlights how OER allow schoolteachers to personalise learning through adaptation, and argues that mainstreaming OER in K-12 education is not only a matter of raising awareness but of changing teachers’ habits

OER Hub Researcher Pack

The OER Hub researcher pack will be of interest to anyone conducting research into the impact of open educational resources (OER) or open education. Building on the earlier release of tools developed, used and released by the OER Hub, the researcher pack provides explanation and guidance on how to use these tools. All material and tools are CC BY licensed and are available for reuse

OER Evidence Report 2013-2014

The Open Educational Resources Research Hub (OER Research Hub) provides a focus for research, designed to give answers to the overall question ‘What is the impact of OER on learning and teaching practices?’ and identify the particular influence of openness. We do this by working in collaboration with projects across four education sectors (K12, college, higher education and informal) extending a network of research with shared methods and shared results. The project combines: – Targeted research collaboration with high profile OER projects – A programme of international fellowship – Global networking and expertise in OER implementation and evaluation – A hub for research data and excellence in practice This report is an interim review of evidence recorded against the key hypotheses that focus the research of the OER Research Hub project

The Impact of OER on Teaching and Learning Practice

The OER Research Hub has been investigating the impact of OER, using eleven hypotheses, and a mixed methods approach to establish an evidence base. This paper explores the findings relating to teaching and learning. The findings reveal a set of direct impacts, including an increase in factors relating to student performance, increased reflection on the part of educators, and the use of OER to trial and supplement formal study. There are also indirect impacts, whose benefits will be seen after several iterations. These include the wide scale reporting of adaptation, and the increase in sharing and open practice that results from OER usage

Estimation of parametric and nonparametric models for univariate claim severity distributions : an approach using R

This paper presents an analysis of motor vehicle insurance claims relating to vehicle damage and to associated medical expenses. We use univariate severity distributions estimated with parametric and non-parametric methods. The methods are implemented using the statistical package R. Parametric analysis is limited to estimation of normal and lognormal distributions for each of the two claim types. The nonparametric analysis presented involves kernel density estimation. We illustrate the benefits of applying transformations to data prior to employing kernel based methods. We use a log-transformation and an optimal transformation amongst a class of transformations that produces symmetry in the data. The central aim of this paper is to provide educators with material that can be used in the classroom to teach statistical estimation methods, goodness of fit analysis and importantly statistical computing in the context of insurance and risk management. To this end, we have included in the Appendix of this paper all the R code that has been used in the analysis so that readers, both students and educators, can fully explore the techniques describe

Identifying Categories of Open Educational Resource Users

The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement has been successful in developing a large, global community of practitioners, in releasing high quality learning material and influencing policy. It now stands at the cusp of mainstream adoption, which will require reaching different audiences than previously. In this contribution the findings of the OER Research Hub are used to identify three categories of OER user: OER active, OER as facilitator and OER consumer. These groups have different requirements of OER and thus varying strategies would be required to meet their needs if mainstream adoption was to be realized

Recommending audio mixing workflows

This paper describes our work on Audio Advisor, a workflow recommender for audio mixing. We examine the process of eliciting, formalising and modelling the domain knowledge and expert’s experience. We are also describing the effects and problems associated with the knowledge formalisation processes. We decided to employ structured case-based reasoning using the myCBR 3 to capture the vagueness encountered in the audio domain. We detail on how we used extensive similarity measure modelling to counter the vagueness associated with the attempt to formalise knowledge about and descriptors of emotions. To improve usability we added GATE to process natural language queries within Audio Advisor. We demonstrate the use of the Audio Advisor software prototype and provide a first evaluation of the performance and quality of recommendations of Audio Advisor