A needs assessment was conducted at a learning center at one completely online institution to understand administrator, faculty, and student perceptions of the center's services and resources to uncover gaps between the current state and intended outcomes (personalized support, clarity of services, and shared accountability for student success).…

Purpose: Open online courses have expanded opportunities for people to learn remotely. However, few online experiences offer participants ways to create projects and actively engage with course materials while developing meaningful personal connections with one another. The purpose of this paper is to share strategies implemented in a large online…

Many initiatives exist to increase the adoption of open educational practices (OEP) within universities, but few initiatives start by exploring the capacity of educators to adopt open approaches. This paper addresses this challenge, suggesting that in order to build OEP capacity, universities should build on the existing skills of local champions…

In recent years India has shown a growing appetite for open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP). Despite this, there is a paucity of research on OER use and impact, the extensiveness of OEP, and attitudes towards openness in India. This paper reports on research intended to help fill that knowledge gap by conducting a…

The global open education movement is striving toward openness as a feature of academic policy and practice, but evidence shows that these ambitions are far from mainstream, and levels of awareness in institutions is often disappointingly low. Those advocating for open education are seeking to widen engagement, but how targeted and persuasive are…

This paper will share Discover Palestine, an interdisciplinary Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) and the first MOOC to be created in Palestine, by the E-Learning Centre, Faculty from the Department of Geography, and Department of Tourism and Archaeology from An-Najah National University in Palestine. The paper traces the process of development of…

This study investigates what characterises teachers' pedagogical design of OER [Open Educational Resources], and potential affordances and constraints in pedagogical design in an open education practice, when contributing to a Swedish repository Lektion.se. The teachers' framing of the OER shared on the repository included the analyses of a…

This article describes the use of Moodle as a suitable platform to support the postgraduate open and distance learning (ODL) courses offered by Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM). Many USIM postgraduate students who take obligatory courses (e.g., research methodology and data analysis) are taught at different venues to facilitate students'…

Open education, including the use of open educational resources (OER) and the adoption of open education practice, has the potential to challenge educators to change their practice in fundamental ways. This paper forms part of a larger study focusing on higher education educators' learning from and through their engagement with OER. The first part…

This article reports results from a scale-up study of the impact of a software tool designed to support teachers in the digital learning era. This tool, the Curriculum Customization Service (CCS), enables teachers to access open educational resources from multiple providers, customize them for classroom instruction, and share them with other…

An understanding of the key characteristics and implicit competencies underlying online teaching is essential to distance education institutions that embark on the assertive use of technology in their tuition development and delivery. The Virtual Teaching Dispositions Scale (VTDS) assists in investigating professional teaching dispositions…

The study presented here aims to gather useful information on the use, re-reuse and sharing of resources in Education and also the influence of repositories, to better understand the perspective of individual practitioners and suggest future areas of debate for researchers. Open Resources: Influence on Learners and Educators (ORIOLE) project, was…

Despite numerous supports for undergraduates, low success rate has been a growing concern in the South African university system. Guided by Moore's [1993. "Theory of Transactional Distance." In "Theoretical Principles of Distance Education," edited by Keegan, 22-38. London: Routledge.] transactional distance theory, this…

Background/Context: Previous work on the use of open educational resources in K-12 classrooms has generally focused on issues related to cost. The current study takes a more expansive view of openness that also accounts for adaptation and sharing in authentic classroom contexts. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The study seeks to…

Education is considered a priority sector in Bangladesh and a means of socio-economic development by all citizens -- urban and rural, rich and poor. This attitude has created a demand for education which traditional systems have been unable to cope with, mainly in three ways -- they cannot reach the massive and circumstantial unreached and the…