Guest Editorial: Open Educational Resources in Engineering Education: Various Perspectives Opening the Education of Engineers

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialog, knowledge sharing, and capacity building. One of the fundamental concepts of OER is "the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge." Reuse of educational resources by both individuals and organizations may have significant creative and economic benefit for the educational environment. This Special Issue editorial introduces six interesting experiences, representative of the use of OER in engineering education in important areas such as the production of open content at various scales, reuse of contents, institutional open Web site initiatives, and technological applications to support the exploitation of OER, all at different degrees of maturity. Since some readers will be unfamiliar with prior work on OER, this Special Issue also outlines the hot topics in OER and the critical factors for success when joining the Open Educational Movement. Finally, the editorial provides a set of recommendations and examples offered by the Special Issue editors from their over 6 years of experience leading a research group in semantic Web technologies applied to Open Education. A key requirement, in their opinion, is to improve the metadata interoperability between various collections of open material, so as to facilitate the discoverability and subsequent combining, remixing, or adapting OER; that is, OER data should be easily accessible to any user.

Expanding the Body of Knowledge Concept for Professional Practitioners

“…In this expanded model, practitioners could also become knowledge creators and educators. The BOK4P may also benefit from the new interest in the open educational resources (OERs) that includes the massive open online courses (MOOCs) (e.g., [61]). Both developments are described later in this paper.…”

“…The creation and distribution of BoK4P will require appropriate existing or new channels (e.g., Collabratec [35] and the open educational resources (e.g., [61]). …”

“…The BOK4P may also benefit from the new interest in the open educational resources (OERs) (e.g., [61]). The OERs include teaching, learning and research materials in any medium (digital and otherwise) that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open licence that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions [63].…”

OER Recommendation for Entrepreneurship Using a Framework Based on Social Network Analysis

“…Open Educational Resources (OERs) [1] are learning materials published on the Web with open licenses. The Open Education Consortium (http://www.oeconsortium.org/) is one of the largest consortiums that brings together institutions that produce and promote OERs.…”

Integrating OER in the design of educational material: Blended learning and linked-open-educational-resources-data approach

“…OER movement envisions a world where everyone, everywhere, anytime has access to the high quality education and training they desire [35]. The purpose of this work is to show a way to enhance the face-to-face classrooms with integration of OERs, to create blended learning instruction.…”