Canada’s important areas of expertise in open educational resources (OER) are beginning to be built upon or replicated more broadly in all education and training sectors. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art in OER initiatives and open higher education in general in Canada, providing insights into what is happening nationally and provincially. More...

Financial issues regarding the sustainable production, dissemination, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education are reviewed and proposed solutions critiqued. Use of OER produce demonstrable cost savings for students. Yet OER development continues to rely almost completely on government and philanthropic funding. More...

Special Issue: OER and MOOCs

Table of Contents

Editorial

Research Articles

This paper presents the results of collaborative research between OpenStax College, who have published 16 open textbooks to date, and the OER Research Hub, a Hewlett funded open research project examining the impact of open educational resources (OER) on learning and teaching.  The paper focuses primarily on the results of two surveys that were conducted with educators during 2013 and 2014/2015. More...

This paper examines how access to, and use of, open educational resources (OER) content may be enhanced for nonnative learners in developing countries from a learner perspective. Using analysis of the open education concept, factors that affect access to OER content, and universal standards for delivering multimedia learning, the author demonstrates that the open concept, access, and participation in OER content follow a three-level relationship. More...

Learning object repositories are a shared, open and public space; however, the possibility and ability of personal expression in an open, global, public space is crucial. The aim of this study is to explore personal spaces in a big learning object repository as a facilitator for adoption of Open Educational Resources (OERs) into teaching practices and to gain more insight into different types of OER user behaviors by analyzing the users' behaviors in the Bookmark Collection of MERLOT. More...

The aim of this study is to investigate the present status of DCSA program focusing on student enrollment, dropout and completion trends.  The study tries to explore the factors that attract or pull students to enroll in the program and push them to dropout from the program. Secondary data analysis and interview are used to generate data. More...

The aim of this article is to shed some light on patterns of and major motives for the adoption of different types of disruptive learning innovations by Unisa academics. To realise the aim of the study, the following questions were addressed: What are the reasons for adopting disruptive learning innovations? What is the level of interaction with disruptive innovations? What training do Unisa academics require on disruptive innovations? A qualitative approach was adopted by conducting focus group interviews with 76 Unisa academics. More...

Table of Contents

Editorial

Research Articles

Research Notes

Open Educational Resources (OER) emerged within the context of open education which is typically characterized by the sharing of knowledge and resources and the exchange of ideas. Unisa as a mega open distance learning (ODL) university has publicly communicated its intention to take part in the use and creation of OER. As global and local university research on OER is limited, this prompted an investigation to gauge the uptake of OER at Unisa, by staff, with the purpose of institutional information gathering for decision making and planning in this area. More...