Editorial - Volume 18, Issue 4 | Hilton III | The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning

"Open Educational Resources have been used in classrooms for more than a decade, and yet the research surrounding OER is still in its infancy. This special issue contains 16 empirical studies that address different aspects of the implementation of OER centered on the COUP framework. Bliss, Robinson, Hilton, and Wiley (2013) provide the COUP framework as a model for studying the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER). COUP stands for:

Cost - What are the financial impacts for students and other stakeholders of OER adoption?

Outcomes - How does OER influence student academic performance?

Usage - In what ways do faculty members, as well as learners use OER?

Perceptions - What do faculty and students think about, and feel toward, OER?

Six years ago, Ehlers (2011) identified a need for research to determine the efficacy of OER. My recollection of this time period is that some believed that OER were inferior to commercial materials and that student learning would decline if OER were adopted. Conversely, some argued that OER would dramatically improve student learning as students gained access to learning resources. This special issue addresses the significant need for much more research on the question of OER efficacy. Consider for example just two aspects of the COUP framework, "Outcomes" and "Perceptions." Hilton (2016) identified only 16 studies that had examined these two areas. Since that time additional peer-reviewed studies have been published, but only a handful (Pitt, 2015; Wiley, Williams, DeMarte, & Hilton, 2016; Delimont, Turtle, Bennett, Adhikari, & Lindshield, 2016; Hilton, Fischer, Wiley, & Williams, 2016; Illowsky, Hilton, Whiting, & Ackerman, 2016; Croteau, 2017; Ozdemir & Hendricks, 2017). Given the millions of dollars and equally significant amounts of time that have gone into OER creation and adoption, much more research is needed on the efficacy and perceptions of these resources. Even outside of outcomes and perceptions, the cost savings of OER is far from a settled issue, and the usage aspect of OER is the least studied of all. The current special issue helps to address this gap in the literature by providing 16 articles, each of which focuses on empirical aspects of one of more aspects of the COUP framework. The articles in this issue are arranged by the COUP framework, acknowledging that many of the articles address multiple aspects of it."