Understanding Innovation Vectors in the Use of Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are either in the public domain or published on an open licence which permits various forms of redistribution, reuse and repurposing. Many organisations and higher education institutions around the world are using such resources, and anecdotally many believe this is supporting innovations in practice. However, there is scant research into how such innovations should be understood or evaluated conceptually. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework that can describe and evaluate innovative practice as well as results from a study of 44 cases using this framework in the context of the ENCORE+ (European Network for Catalysing Open Resources in Education) project (2021–2023). This conceptual framework provides a rich qualitative description for instances of innovation which use OER. Our examples cover many countries, including Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, UK, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Kenya, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, USA, and Zanzibar. The sample includes organisations of all sizes and maturities of implementation. This allowed us to differentiate OER value propositions for a range of stakeholders at different levels of maturity of OER use. We explore whether variables such as the size and maturity of an organisation influences innovation strategies and the perception of stakeholder relationships. Our data indicates four elements to the development of OER value propositions as innovation vectors. Firstly, OER value propositions tend to be transformative, and focused on modifying or redefining pedagogical activity. Secondly, they are practical, targeting users/providers and influencing behaviour in direct and achievable ways. Thirdly, OER users and advocates emphasise observability, simplicity and compatibility as key aspects for communicating OER value propositions. Fourthly, OER innovation is aspirational in that greater maturity of organisations using OER sees the OER value proposition widened to include more stakeholder types.