The OER Research Hub was a three year project funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and based in the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University in the UK. The OER movement had just passed the decade mark when the project was initiated. There was a sense that although great work had been done in the implementation of OER globally during this period, research about their impact on teaching and learning was scarce.

The aim of the project was to investigate many of the commonly held beliefs about the benefits of OER. It also had the intention of raising the profile of research in the OER community Working with 15 different collaborations around the world, the OER Research Hub investigated 11 hypotheses. These addressed issues such as performance, finance, educator reflection, improved access and the impact of openness. Four sectors were examined: K12, Community College, Higher Education and Informal Learning. In addition the attitudes of both learners and educators were surveyed. The full evidence report and academic publications arising from the project can be found at http://oerhub.net.

This summary report brings together three separate data reports, which highlighted some of the key findings for different groups of OER users: educators, formal learners and informal learners. The reports are presented in an easy to digest, infographic style layout which we hope you will find useful.

The OER Research Hub has also released all of the data underpinning these reports under an open license (CC-BY Attribution License 4.0). Researchers are already starting to
work with our data, and we would love to hear if you use it to conduct any of your own investigations. You can access the data used to generate this report via http://bit.ly/oerhubdata. You are welcome to use this data as long as you provide attribution
to us as the original authors.

The findings here indicate that OER have many different types of impact. For example, they are used widely by students to trial subjects before they enter formal education; educators use them to reflect and adapt their own practice; that they increased interest in the subject for learners, and so on. The challenge now is for OER researchers to further explore these findings, to produce a comprehensive evidence base. This will facilitate the
mainstream adoption of OER, by focusing on solving specific problems.
Further context for understanding this data can be found in our accompanying OER Evidence Report 2013-2014 which is available from http://oerhub.net/reports/.

Keywords

formal vs. informal learning · infographic · OER challenges · OER in other languages · OER research · OER subjects