3 Bozkurt, Koseoglu, and Singh, “An analysis of peer reviewed publications on op
3 Bozkurt, Koseoglu, and Singh, “An analysis of peer reviewed publications on openness in education in half a century: Trends and patterns in the open hemisphere.”
Reference
Background
This study focused on identifying trends and patterns in peer-reviewed literature, focusing on openness in education. They used a systematic review to find publications from 1969-2017 that contained the following keywords: open education, open learning, OEPs (open educational practices), and OERs (open educational resources). In the first phase of this project, researchers conducted a content analysis of 970 publications identified as sources of data. In the second phase, research was carried out using Social Network Analysis to compare the dynamics of networks and their components. In the final phase, researches used text-mining to examine emerging themes and concepts. The overall data collection and analysis process can be examined in this figure. Overall, findings suggest that openness in education has increasingly become an interdisciplinary research topic. The next section highlights key points from the article.
Key Points
- Search Result Findings
- OERs, open education, open learning, MOOCs (massive open online courses), and e-learning were identified as the most common keywords.
- Research on OERs was by far the most common.
- Research found there were three major themes: barriers in OERs, OERs as vision for higher education, and the relationship between OER and OEPs.
- It was also discovered that there is a lot of ground for more research with OEPs.
- OERs, open education, open learning, MOOCs (massive open online courses), and e-learning were identified as the most common keywords.
- Geographical Findings
- Country distribution of publication revealed that research on the topic mostly stemmed from developed countries:
- “This finding raises questions as to the sustainability of openness in education and its efficiency and effectiveness to lessen the digital divide” (Bozkurt, 2019, page 86).
- Publications were limited to having been written completely in English or at least with English abstracts and titles. This limits the study sample, so there may be many other publications on the topic that are written in other languages.
- Country distribution of publication revealed that research on the topic mostly stemmed from developed countries:
- School Findings
- Many universities that claim that they use open learning have not contributed much to research in the field.
- This begs questions as to whether they are actually using openness, or if they just advertise it to attract more students.
- Many universities that claim that they use open learning have not contributed much to research in the field.
- The trends in publications in subject areas show that social sciences published the most research on the search terms at 44.51%. This is not surprising considering that in this study, education falls under social sciences. Other top subject areas include compute