Scoping the nascent: An analysis of K-12 OER research 2012-2017

Abstract

Awareness and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) has grown at all levels of education. Higher education researchers actively study OER but K-12 OER research indicates limited published results. To address this gap, this study examined articles meeting defined criteria and analyzed the results. Findings include cohesion of author-supplied keywords and ten primary categories of focus. From 38 articles studied, a variety of research methods were represented. Analysis showed Professional and Applied Sciences were overwhelmingly represented with the majority of articles within the discipline of Education and its fields with Humanities a distant second category of publication. The equal distribution between open and closed access journals may reflect changes to past scholarly publication practices. Citation analysis revealed divergences and reinforces the nascent quality of this topic. Future K-12 OER research that studies the complex change from resource scarcity to resource flexibility and digital abundance is needed.