Abstracts
Abstract
Open educational resources (OER) have been praised for revolutionizing education. However, practitioners and instructors battle keeping OER updated and measuring their impact on students’ performance. Few studies have analyzed the improvement of OER over time in relation to achievement. This longitudinal study uses learning analytics through the open-source Resource Inspection, Selection, and Enhancement (RISE) analysis framework to assess the impact of continuous improvement cycles on students’ outcomes. Panel data (i.e., performance and use) from 190 learning objectives of OER of an introductory sociology course were analyzed using a hierarchical linear model. Results show that more visits to an OER do not improve student achievement, but continuous improvement cycles of targeted OER do. Iterative implementation of the RISE analysis for resource improvement in combination with practitioners’ expertise is key for students’ learning. Given that the RISE classification accounted for 65% of the growth of students’ performance, suggesting a moderate to large effect, we speculate that the RISE analysis could be generalized to other contexts and result in greater student gain. Institutions and practitioners can improve the OER’s impact by introducing learning analytics as a decision-making tool for instructional designers. Yet, user-friendly implementation of learning analytics in a “click-and-go” application is necessary for generalizability and escalation of continuous improvement cycles of OER and tangible improvement of learning outcomes. Finally, in this article, we identify the need for efficient applications of learning analytics that focus more on “learning” and less on analytics.
Keywords:
- open educational resources,
- OER,
- student performance,
- longitudinal analysis,
- learning analytics,
- higher education,
- RISE analysis
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Appendices
Biographical notes
Daniela, who goes by Ela, is an Assistant Professor in Learning, Design, and Technology at North Carolina State University where she is part of the Digital Transformation of Education interdisciplinary cluster. Ela approaches her research with the belief that online and distance learning improve women's lives and, ultimately, society. She is an educational researcher within the fields of online learning, open educational resources, and learning analytics. Her research focuses on supporting online learners' social presence through network analysis. She is a 2022-2023 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow and 2023-2023 Bilsland Dissertation Fellow. Her dissertation won the Mary Kay Sommers Dissertation Award. Prior to her graduate studies at Purdue University, Ela earned a B.A. in English Philology and Education from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
Sandra Liliana Camargo Salamanca is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Research Methodology from Purdue University. Her research primarily focuses on improving the quality of inferences drawn from assessment instruments and ensuring that the results are used more effectively in classrooms, schools, communities, and countries. Sandra has extensive experience in psychometric analysis, meta-analysis, and quantitative methods research. She holds two master's degrees: one in Education from Purdue University and another in Psychology from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her thesis on the concept of validity received Laureate recognition. Her contributions to the field have been recognized with several awards, including fellowships from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation of Colombia.
David Wiley is the Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, a company dedicated to eliminating race, gender, and income as predictors of student success in US higher education. His work and research happen at the intersection of open educational resources, generative AI, learning analytics, continuous improvement, and professional development. He is one of the founders of the open educational resources movement. He is also Education Fellow at Creative Commons, an Ashoka Fellow, adjunct faculty in Brigham Young University's graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology where he was previously a tenured Associate Professor, and Entrepreneur in Residence at Marshall University's Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation.
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