Although there is a growing need for more collaborations between education researchers and practitioners (e.g., educators or instructional designers) to promote Open Educational Practices (OEP), the open education community has yet to develop an ecosystem in which education researchers share evidence-based instructional materials as Open Educational Resources (OER) and practitioners share back their customized materials. The quality of OER as instructional materials, but not as a cost-effective alternative to traditional resources, has been traditionally examined by "the perceived quality" through a peer-review process, rather than through actual field studies with its end users. As we see the need for more effective and sustainable OEP efforts, it is increasingly important to establish such a new way of effective collaboration that provides evidence-based OER.
Towards the goal of exploring how we might develop an ecosystem where education researchers and practitioners can share evidence-based resources and engage in OEP, we will offer an example showing one such collaborative OEP. We will show our OER that were created based on the research findings informed by our two research studies and will describe how the collaboration between researchers and educators facilitated our OEP. Specifically, we conducted studies in which education researchers and practitioners designed visual representations in middle-school algebra and evaluated their effectiveness in a real-world context. The OER are offered in different formats to facilitate a variety of use (e.g., use of Google slides as a platform to allow for easy customization or an automated digitized tool to allow efficient adaptation).
We will describe how education researchers and practitioners collaborated in the design and research phases. We will also discuss how sharing evidence-based OER meaningfully facilitates effective OEP.
Learning Outcomes: After engaging with our session/work, education researchers, educators, or instructional designers will be able to discuss with their colleagues (by having a casual conversation or workshop) one way in which researchers and practitioners can effectively collaborate in promoting Open Educational Practices (OEP).
LINK TO THE PRESENTATION PAGE:
https://tomonag.org/opened20/
