Introducing open educational resources typology to digital libraries

ABSTRACT

The increased tendency towards the open education movement and the widespread use of Open Educational Resources (OER) demonstrate the potential value of sharing and reusing free digital resources among educational communities. Effective OER management, essential for all educational digital libraries, facilitates the reuse, retention, revision, remixing, and redistribution of OER. It also requires proper identification of OER. The purpose of this paper is to introduce different types of OER to digital libraries. A hybrid approach was taken which incorporated a systematic review of published articles and interviews with domain experts and a preliminary list of OER types was extracted, completed, categorised, and approved. As a result of this research, more than 90 OER types have been introduced and divided into three categories including educational content, software, and complementary materials. Identifying various types of OER in each category not only allows for better use of these resources to improve educational practices but also begins to provide an infrastructure for both human and machine use.

KEYWORDS:

• Open educational resources
• OER types
• open educational content
• open educational software
• OER categorisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://oercommons.org/

2. http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm

3. https://ocw.mit.edu/

4. https://openstax.org/

5. https://dp.la/

6. https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/

7. https://www.caeducatorstogether.org/

8. The Learning Object Metadata (LOM) proposed by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is a standard data model to describe LOs. This standard, which can model LOs from different perspectives, has considerable usage in profiling them (1484.12.1–2020, 2020). IEEE LOM introduces objects in fifteen categories as follows. (1) exercise (2) simulation (3) questionnaire (4) diagramme (5) figure (6) graph (7) index (8) slide (9) table (10) narrative text (11) exam (12) experiment (13) problem statement (14) self-assessment (15) lecture. According to many subscriptions of OER and LOs, IEEE LOM is also used to profile OER. Various open libraries, as well as research papers, use IEEE LOM to model OER (Mosharraf & Taghiyareh, 2020; Navarrete & Luján-Mora, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Maedeh Mosharraf

Maedeh Mosharraf received BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees from The University of Tehran in 2010, 2013, and 2019, respectively. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering, Software and Information Systems with the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Shahid Beheshti University. Her research interests are in open collaborative environments for eLearning, adaptive LMSs, and applying ontologies and semantic web techniques to different contexts.