Open Educational Resources and Practices in China: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The concepts of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP), regarded as two pillars of the broader open education movement, have been evolving since the concept of OER was first coined in the 2012 Paris Declaration. Several research studies have been conducted to investigate the impacts of OER and OEP adoption and implementation in universities. However, most of those studies have focused on western and developed countries, and little information is known about developing countries, especially Asian ones. Particularly, China was one of the first Asian countries to adopt open education and its related strategies following the MIT OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing in 2003. This study conducts a systematic literature review to investigate the current state of the art of OER and OEP in China. The findings show that several governmental, organizational, and institutional initiatives have been launched to facilitate OER adoption in China. They also show that while several OEPs have been implemented, there is still a continuous need to work on these practices and further investigate their impacts on learning outcomes and behaviors, as no current reviewed study has done so. Finally, a generic framework of OER and OEP challenges is presented along with recommendations to further enhance the adoption of OER and OEP in China.

Current state of open educational resources in the Arab region: an investigation in 22 countries

“…Specifically, it is seen that the absence of motivational factors is one of the common problems which made the Arab participants do not develop and publish OER (26%), followed by lack of time (21%), copyright (20%) and the absence of authoring tools (17%). To overcome these issues in other countries, it is seen, for instance, that China gives bonuses to teachers who contribute to enriching the national OER repositories with their own OER (Tlili et al, 2019). Additionally, to overcome the lack of time issue, the process of creating OER must be timeless and this can be achieved by developing authoring tools which can help in creating OER with simple steps.…”

“…The OER movement is based on the idea that educational resources (e.g., content, course designs, etc.) should be released under licenses that allow anyone to freely access, retain (download, duplicate, store), reuse, revise (translate, adapt, modify), combine, and-or re-share them (Tlili, Huang, Chang, Nascimbeni, & Burgos, 2019). OER were adopted at the 2012 World OER Congress (Paris declaration).…”

“…(2) Developing supportive policy; (3) Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER; (4) Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER; and, (5) Facilitating international cooperation. While several research studies were conducted to understand the current situation of OER in a given country or region (see for instance, Cronin & MacLaren, 2018;Hollingshead, Ashburn-Nardo, Stewart, & Hirsh, 2016;Tlili et al, 2019), no research study, to the best of our knowledge, was found that summarizes the OER progress in the entire Arab region, specifically in the twenty-two Arab countries. It is worth mentioning that some investigations about the OER current state in some regions, such as MENA and Middle East, were conducted by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), in partnership with UNESCO and the government of Slovenia, but this investigation did not cover all the twenty-two Arab countries (Commonwealth of Learning, 2017).…”

Inter-Campus Sharable Potential of Hardware Educational Resources in A University Town: Connotation, Determination Method and A Case Study

“…Their development period has not been going for long, such that their main functions and structures are relatively in the initial period [12]. The existing studies on ISERs mainly focused on the following aspects: survey of sharing status [4,32], sharable contents [11,33], obstacles and reasons in sharing [34,35], measures to achieve sharing [5], etc. At present, it is generally believed that ISER in most UTs in China is not very efficient [4,11,35].…”

Accessibility within open educational resources and practices for disabled learners: a systematic literature review

“…Open Educational Resources (OER), defined as 'teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that may be composed of copyrightable materials released under an open license, materials not protected by copyright, materials for which copyright protection has expired, or a combination of the foregoing' (UNESCO, forthcoming), have the potential to contribute to reaching this objective by increasing access to learning as well as improving the quality of the learning experience (Ehlers, 2011). The OER movement is based on the idea that educational resources (e.g., content or course designs) should be released under licenses that allow anyone to freely access, retain (e.g., download, duplicate, store), reuse, revise (e.g., translate, adapt, modify), combine and-or re-share them (Tlili, Huang, Chang, Nascimbeni & Burgos, 2019). The use of OER for teaching in an innovative and collaborative environment is referred to as Open Educational Practices (OEP).…”