Open Educational Resources (OER) Research Database

Project Overview

The OER Research Database provides a free and easily accessible venue for instructors, administrators, students, policy-makers, and other stakeholders to locate research and formal literature on the use of open educational resources and practices.

The OER Research Database is part of a larger, Hewlett Foundation-funded project titled, "Establishing Compelling Evidence for OER as a Completion and Learning Strategy for Higher Education.” Our objective with this work focuses largely on the impact of OER implementation on key student success metrics across over a dozen U.S. institutions representing all major institution types and a diverse body of students.

As part of this larger objective, advocacy for adopting and implementing OER and OEP is key. The OER Research Database emerged from within this mission by providing a free and easily accessible venue for instructors, administrators, students, policy-makers, and all types of stakeholders to locate research and formal literature on the use of OER and OEP.

The OER Research Database . . . provides a free and easily accessible venue for instructors, administrators, students, policy-makers, and all types of stakeholders to locate research and formal literature on the use of OER and OEP.

The development of this resource reduces barriers to OER implementation and adoption and helps to provide a method for interested groups to formulate data-, theory-, and practice-based arguments for the inclusion of OER and/or OEP across a range of educational environments and contexts.

Finally, this research project was designed to help us better understand and characterize a "quality" OER implementation. It is our goal that, through this database, key players can locate and source robust examples of OER done well.

A colorful collection of library books on metal shelving

Image from Zaini Izzuddin via Unsplash

What types of publications can be found here?

  • The focus of the publication is on OER and/or OEP
  • Includes only formal publication types, like reports, journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles, theses and dissertations, books, book chapters, legal documents, formally published conference proceedings, policy documents, and datasets. We have excluded publications we consider to be informal (e.g., blog posts, conference presentations)

Note that this is not a database of open educational resources; rather, this is a database of research and literature written on the topic of OER and OEP.

    The OER Research Database Team

    • C. Edward Watson

      C. Edward Watson

      Vice President for Digital Innovation
    • Heather Miceli

      Heather Miceli

      Postdoctoral Research Fellow
    • Jessica Chittum

      Jessica Chittum

      Assistant Vice President for Curricular and Pedagogical Innovation and Director of VALUE Operations
    • Beth Perkins

      Assistant Director for Research and Assessment

    The Research Behind the Database

    What sets this work apart from a standard database search is the research behind the archive of publications. We have not only collected, collated, and provided APA-style references for all publications but also implemented a robust qualitative methodology to code every publication included in the database. Learn more about that research.

    Thanks to the Hewlett Foundation

    The development of this OER Research Database has been supported by generous funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as part of a grant titled, "Establishing Compelling Evidence for OER as a Completion and Learning Strategy for Higher Education.”

    Questions about this project?

    Reach out to the research team via Heather Miceli at [email protected].