Development and validation of the open educational practices impact evaluation (OEP-IE) index

With the increasing adoption of open educational practices across the education sector there are also growing calls for evidence of their impacts. This includes evidence of, not only their role in mitigating the costs of educating students, but also on their impacts on educational practices. Such impacts of the adoption of open educational practices are closely tied to educators’ mindsets and dispositions about notions of access and equity in relation to educational opportunity. It makes sense, therefore, to target overt behaviours of these dispositions to obtain a measure of their impacts since behaviours are far easier to observe, index and shift in desirable ways to make way for the adoption of a culture of sharing. This paper reports on the development of an instrument that can help index these behaviours so that appropriate strategies around learning and teaching can be developed and employed to shift them in ways that are amenable to the adoption of a culture of openness and sharing in educational institutions.