Projects led by the OU around OER aim to tackle a range of questions from 'What is the impact on teaching and learning of OER?' to 'How can we help researchers and practitioners in the OER field to contribute to the evidence of OER effectiveness?' Research around OER is broad and can be institutionally driven or set by external funders.
We try to communicate our findings through traditional means (conference papers, webinars and presentations) and via the OER Evidence Hub whose aim is to map the collective knowledge of the Open Education community.
Institutional research into OER
The OU is constantly striving to find out more about our informal learners. We undertake surveys and review statistical data to uderstand the demographics of our many thousands of informal learners, their motivations and expectations on all our open platforms and media channels. Data gathered in this way is important both to improve our widening participation offering and for research purposes.
Open Research Online
The Open University's Open Research Online is an open access respository of OU research publications and other activities by OU staff. Below is a selection of OER papers: