Substituting open educational resources (OER) for commercially-produced textbooks results in demonstrable cost savings for students in most higher education institutions. Yet OER are still not widely used, and progress toward large-scale adoption in most colleges and universities has been slow. More...

Open Educational Resources (OER) are gaining acceptance as legitimate and effective teaching materials in higher education, particularly in 2-year institutions.  Despite the steady growth in the availability and use of OER, there have been relatively few studies on the efficacy of OER and student achievement. More...

We are pleased to bring you the penultimate issue of 2017, a collection of 16 research pieces and one field note that comprises a literature review on MOOCs. Researchers continue to investigate the nature of MOOCs, although we have only two MOOC-research pieces this issue. The first is from Kahan, Soffer, and Nachmias, who sought to characterize the different types of participant behavior in a MOOC using a data mining methodology with 21,889 participants. More...

This summer issue of IRRODL begins with articles on open education and ends with a field note on the Khan Academy's OER in Chinese. There are several papers on different aspects of distance education and these are followed by three articles on MOOCs. 
This issue begins with Cronin's paper on openness and praxis in higher education. She shares with us an Irish perspective on Open Educational Practices (OEP) and how open pedagogical strategies are perceived and practised (or not) at one university. More...

There is a wide variety of research articles in this edition, ranging from connectedness to MOOCs. An article on K12 standards is followed by one on DigitalDNA and one for administrators on talent management. The book review section consists of three reviews led by a book that I co-edited for the Commonwealth of Learning. This is followed by a guide on digital teaching and a text on qualitative research. The final leadership section consists of an editorial and two papers on technology- enhanced learning and adaptive leadership. More...

Open Educational Resources have been used in classrooms for more than a decade, and yet the research surrounding OER is still in its infancy. This special issue contains 16 empirical studies that address different aspects of the implementation of OER centered on the COUP framework. Bliss, Robinson, Hilton, and Wiley (2013) provide the COUP framework as a model for studying the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER). COUP stands for:

Cost - What are the financial impacts for students and other stakeholders of OER adoption?
Outcomes - How does OER influence student academic performance?
Usage - In what ways do faculty members, as well as learners use OER?
Perceptions - What do faculty and students think about, and feel toward, OER. More...

A study of academics and professional staff engaged in the emerging field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) reveal three areas of significant difference in reference to perspectives about TEL. These differences rest on the following individual characteristics: 1) research areas and competencies, 2) academic level, and 3) attitudes towards teaching. More...

Since it was first introduced in 2008, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been attracting a lot of interest. Since then, MOOCs have emerged as powerful platforms for teaching and learning academic writing. However, there has been no detailed investigation of academic writing MOOCs. As a result, much uncertainty still exists about the differences of writing MOOCs compared with traditional types of writing instruction in the classroom. More...

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have changed the way in which OER (Open Educational Resources) are bundled by teachers and consumed by learners. MOOCs represent an evolution towards the production and offering of structured quality OER. Many institutions that were initially reluctant to providing OER have, however, joined the MOOC wave. More...

In this study, a blended synchronous learning environment (BSLE) was created to support a group of graduate students when they were taking a course. Instruction was delivered to both face-to-face (F2F) and online students simultaneously. The purpose of this paper is to present how this BSLE was gradually designed, implemented, and improved by following the educational design research approach. More...