The impact of open educational resources in teacher activities. A perception survey

Open educational resources are a key instrument in the promotion of learning and social appropriation of knowledge in the digital world. Providing access to existing learning resources in a way that teachers, students and parents are able to discover, acquire, discuss and adapt them to their own learning scenarios will also promote the development of values and attitudes that play a fundamental role in the educational process, such as team work, collaboration and critical thinking. In turn, this will foster the development of learning networks and communities. In this context, teachers play an instrumental role as facilitators, as their expertise enables them to assess the quality of content and to design and adapt learning activities according to individual learners' profiles. However, we wanted to find out how the interaction with open educational resources would enhance teachers' activities, if digital resources could be easily integrated in their actual educational curricula, or if teachers felt that the introduction of these resources would improve the educational experience of their students. This paper addresses the usage and usability of open educational resources from teachers' perceptions. For this, we utilized the Open Discovery Space portal, a socially-powered and multilingual open educational resources' repository intended to support teachers, students and parents to intuitively identify, share, reuse and revise digital learning resources. This analysis was performed taking into account both actual content and ancillary services offered by the portal (e.g., content sharing, content discussion, community building), and was methodologically organized as a streamlined cognitive walkthrough that included two evaluation workshops in late 2013 and early 2014, and a further debriefing survey in mid 2014. The first workshop included a brief course to teachers on the functionalities and aims of the Open Discovery Space portal and an assessment survey. The second workshop was devoted to answer the questions posed by the teachers participating after a 6-week period of usage and reflection. Again, the workshop was completed with an assessment survey on the portal's content and services. Finally, in mid 2014 a final evaluation, survey-based session was (will be at the time of writing this abstract) carried out after continuing interaction with the portal's content and services during several months.