Development and validation of the open educational practices impact evaluation (OEP-IE) index

ABSTRACT

With the increasing adoption of open educational practices across the education sector there are also growing calls for evidence of their impacts. This includes evidence of, not only their role in mitigating the costs of educating students, but also on their impacts on educational practices. Such impacts of the adoption of open educational practices are closely tied to educators’ mindsets and dispositions about notions of access and equity in relation to educational opportunity. It makes sense, therefore, to target overt behaviours of these dispositions to obtain a measure of their impacts since behaviours are far easier to observe, index and shift in desirable ways to make way for the adoption of a culture of sharing. This paper reports on the development of an instrument that can help index these behaviours so that appropriate strategies around learning and teaching can be developed and employed to shift them in ways that are amenable to the adoption of a culture of openness and sharing in educational institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Open learning
• open scholarship
• open educational resources
• open educational practices
• impact evaluation index

Acknowledgments

The seeds of this work were sown during capacity building work around researching the role of Open Educational Resources for Development funded by the International Development Research Centre (Canada) at the Wawasan Open University, Malaysia. Various other partners have had an input in it since then—namely, senior management, and staff and students of the Open University of Sri Lanka, the University of the South Pacific, and Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia. The assistance of Professor MGM Khan (School of Computing, Information and Mathematical Sciences at The University of the South Pacific), with reliability and validity testing of the OEP-IE Index is much appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Som Naidu

Som Naidu is Principal Associate, Technology, Education and Design Associates. A former Pro Vice-Chancellor (Flexible Learning), and Director of the Centre for Flexible Learning at the University of the South Pacific, his research interest and expertise lies in the design and development of open and flexible learning environments, and in the enhancement of learning and teaching more generally.

Shironica P. Karunanayaka

Shironica P. Karunanayaka is a Senior Professor in Educational Technology at the Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL). She is a former Dean of the Faculty of Education at OUSL. Her key research focus is in the areas of ICT in education, learning experience design, open educational resources and open educational practices.