Distance-Learning Students’ Perception on the Usefulness of Open Educational Resources

Abstract

Open educational resources or OER have been widely used for teaching and learning in higher education. This paper investigates the distance-learning students’ perception on the usefulness of OER for learning purposes. Through a survey conducted to the distance-learning undergraduate students at the Open University of Hong Kong, it is revealed that OER are often used and generally considered useful as supplementary learning materials for acquiring relevant knowledge and doing assignments and projects. Among other types of OER, open access textbooks and reference books, and openly shared lecture notes and video clips are considered in particular useful. Massive open online courses and tutorials are considered to be more useful than small-scale mobile learning modules. For online learning tools, online dictionaries and encyclopedia are considered to be very useful. It is also revealed that the reliability, quality and comprehensiveness of OER are key concerns for distance-learning students to use OER for learning purposes.