An exploratory literature review on open educational practices

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a review of peer-reviewed publications (2007–2017) on digital open educational practices (OEPs). It explores trends and patterns in this emerging area of study by examining paper abstracts and bibliographic data indexed in the Scopus database using a combination of descriptive statistics, text mining, social network analysis, and content analysis. Findings demonstrated two major strands of OEP research: those who discuss OEP in the context of open educational resources, mostly in terms of open educational resource creation, adoption and use, and those who discuss OEP in relation to other areas, including open scholarship, open learning, open teaching or pedagogy, open systems and architectures, and open source software. Based on the findings of this study and in the light of the broader literature on OEPs, we echo the calls for a need to conceptualize OEPs as a multidimensional and unifying construct.

KEYWORDS:

• Open education
• open educational practice
• openness
• literature review
• mixed methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research is supported by Anadolu University Scientific Research Projects Commission under the grant no: [1805E123]; Anadolu Üniversitesi [1705E413].

Notes on contributors

Suzan Koseoglu

Suzan Koseoglu is an academic developer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Suzan holds an MEd and a PhD in learning technologies. Her area of expertise is online learning with an emphasis on open and networked scholarship and socio-cultural aspects of learning in further and higher education contexts.

Aras Bozkurt

Aras Bozkurt is a researcher in the Department of Distance Education at Anadolu University, Turkey. He holds MA and PhD degrees in distance education. He conducts studies on online learning communities and online learning processes.