# Theoretical frameworks for researching OER


**Why do we need theories?**

At some stage early in my education, I picked up the idea that theory,
although perhaps often seemingly too abstract and difficult to
understand to be of any use, was important to give meaning to different
empirical results, and to provide predictability and transferability to
other cases. This was brought home to me when I began researching the
community library movement in Indonesia (later published on
[E-LIS](http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00014659/)). Not only was there
almost no existing research available on my specific case - the
community library movement in Indonesia - but to my great surprise,
there was a huge dearth of research on community libraries for
development in general.

The few studies that existed all “started from scratch”, and were
usually simple descriptions of different individual cases, a [tent
library in
East-Africa](http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla71/papers/137e-Sarjant.pdf%20)
here, a [mule library in
Venezuela](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6929404.stm)
there… But nobody tried to develop meta-studies, overviews, theories,
taxonomies… What kinds of community libraries are there? What are the
criteria for success? What theories exist on how community libraries
effect local education? Economic participation? Citizenship and
democracy?

**A map of the field**

What was lacking was not just individual theories, but what the OPLRN
proposal calls “a map of the field”. This description has staid with me,
because it fit so perfectly, not just the OER reality, but the
“community libraries in developing countries” reality:

> *****“…In more established fields such as cancer research, there is a
> consensus map of the structure of the field, the major research
> questions, and the different sub-communities and associated
> methodologies. It is possible to place oneself on the map, and to
> coordinate effort in a well understood way. In contrast OER research
> is a relatively young field, which has not yet being fully articulated
> and defined…”*
>
> (from the OPLRN proposal, availably by [Google
> Cache](http://74.125.95.104/search?q=cache:UnmczomPY5wJ:iet-public-wiki.open.ac.uk/index.php/OPLRN_proposal+http://iet-public-wiki.open.ac.uk/index.php/OPLRN_proposal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca&client=firefox-a)).

**Only theories provide transferability**

Today I was reading [a collection of
papers](http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45951736&referer=brief_results) by
[Jim Cummins](http://www.iteachilearn.com/cummins/), a researcher on
bilingualism and linguistic rights at
[OISE](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca). A recurring theme is the disconnect
between academic research and policy; there seems to be very strong
evidence in the scientific literature for certain kinds of bilingual
education, however, this is not translated into policy, especially in
the US. In his paper “[The Role and Use of Educational Theory in
Formulating Language
Policy](http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ387333&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ387333)”
he states explicitly:

> *“A major reason why many policy-makers in the United States regard
> the research bias for bilingual education as minimal or even
> non-existent is that they have failed to realize that data or ‘facts’
> from bilingual programs become interpretable for policy purposes only
> within the context of a coherent theory. It is the**theory rather than
> the individual research findings that permits the generation of
> predictions about program outcomes under different conditions.
> Research findings themselves cannot be**directly applied across
> contexts.*
>
> *[...]*
>
> *In short, although research findings cannot be applied directly
> across contexts, theories are almost by definition applicable across
> contexts in that the validity of any theoretical principle is assessed
> precisely by how well it can account for the research findings in a
> variety of contexts. If a theory cannot account for a particular set
> of research findings, then it is an inadequate or incomplete theory.”*

This really struck home with me. (Incidentally, after spending hours
transcribing interviews with children on the nature of science, and
trying to grade them from level 1 to 3 in “understanding of science”, I
realized that maybe politicians need courses on using science for policy
formulation as well.)

**Case study: Video for math education at Open Ed 2008**

So where does that leave us with OER? One of the things that struck me
at the [Open Education 2008](http://cosl.usu.edu/events/opened2008/)
conference I participated in, at Utah State University, was that very
few of the attendees were from faculties of education. Furthermore, I
was quite frustrated by the quality of many of the presentations from a
scholarly perspective. I promised my good friend Haishuo Lee during the
conference that I would rip his presentation to pieces, so I will use
that as an example here (with his permission). Haishuo’s university in
Taiwan put video recordings of math classes online, and designed a
summer course around this - so that incoming students who were admitted
in spring could follow these math classes online during summer, take an
exam, and if they passed, receive credit and not have to take this class
again in fall.

They wanted to evaluate this initiative, and they conducted both surveys
as well as analysis of the test results of various groups of students,
and all this was presented very ably by Haishuo during the conference
(he is a born presenter). All well and good, but to me this was a paper
that lacked an introduction and a conclusion. Where was the “literature
review”? If this was simply a program evaluation for internal use, that
is one thing, but if this is presented as academic research, why would
you design a study without consulting the literature? What previous
research has been done in this field? What are the various theories?
What can this study help prove/disprove or improve our understanding of?

One problem might be that many of the proponents of open education seem
to think that this is something brand new, and thus there isn’t any
“literature”. To a certain extent, that is true, but slow down… The
reason this study was presented at Open Education 2008, was that the
videos produced were made “open access” for the whole world. However,
for the students enrolled in the university, it would have made no
difference if they were closed access, and only available for enrolled
students through a password… So basically, this was a study on the use
of online multimedia resources for self-instructed math classes - and
surely there would be reams of studies on this. The use of video in
teaching has been written about since the 1970’s (in fact, I just found
out that the first video ever to be released on VHS was the South-Korean
film “[The young
teacher](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Teacher)“).

And distance education has a very rich and long history of research, as
is the case with instructional design, and the topic of math instruction
itself. So while it might be very challenging to grapple with all these
various disciplines, some theoretical foundation would mean that this
study would not only help the Taiwanese university understand the
strengths and failures of its own program better, but the study would
make a contribution to the scholarly literature, and help inform
projects at other universities, and perhaps eventually contribute to
improving the theory itself.

**Where does that leave us?**

Note that I am picking on Haishuo as an example here, what I listed
above was typical for most of the presentations. Granted, if you
conceive of the conference more of a “meeting of geeks”, where we show
each other the cool things we’ve come up with, this might be acceptable.
But for me, who is in an MA program and wish to write both my final MA
thesis, and a number of papers on the way, on different aspects of the
OER movement, this presents a problem.

There are lot’s of possible angles. [Candace
Thille](http://www.educause.edu/Community/MemDir/Profiles/CandaceThille/58820)
at [CMU](http://www.cmu.edu/index.shtml) leads the [Open Learning
Initiative](http://www.cmu.edu/oli/), which is a great model of learning
scientists working closely together with OER designers, and they have
produced a wealth of new data and theoretical insights in what seems to
be a very fruitful collaboration. She also hosted a symposium to bring
learning scientists and the OER movement together, which is [available
online with video](http://www.cmu.edu/index.shtml).

I previously posted on my blog a[n assignment in a class on
international
relations](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/10/17/the-great-international-ocw-debate/),
where I tried to map different theoretical positions (compensatory
liberal, realist etc) to the idea of OER from an
institutional/economic/political perspective. Currently I am thinking
about my final paper, and one idea I had was to use the framework of
policy lending and borrowing from [Gita
Steiner-Khamsi](http://www.tc.edu/faculty/steiner-khamsi/pub.htm) (see
for example “[The Global Politics of Borrowing and
Lending](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2248/is_157_40/ai_n13774375)“)
to look at how the idea of Open CourseWare was taken up by the Chinese
government.

But I need more. So I would love to get in touch with people who are
researching open learning and open educational resources from different
theoretical perspectives and disciplines, and pieces of research as
well. Hopefully the new [OER research
repository](http://oer.issuelab.org/research) at
[IssueLab](http://oer.issuelab.org/) will help with this.

**China**

One quick note at the end, and this is something that I wish to explore
more fully in a later post, is that the situation seems to be slightly
different in China. During the [Open Education conference in
Dalian](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/05/01/open-learning-conference-in-dalian-2008-lessons-for-future-events/)
most of the Chinese participants seemed to be working for faculties of
education (with many of them coming from the various open universities,
thus having a background in distance education theory), and part of the
“divide”, which I have written about before, was that the Chinese
participants seemed to view the conference as an academic conference for
them to share their research and findings, whereas the foreign
participants saw it more as a place to exchange ideas and examples of
what they themselves had done.

And indeed, recently I did a search for literature on the [Chinese
OpenCourseware](http://iftf.typepad.com/virtualchina/2006/09/more_on_mit_ope.html)
project, sponsored by the Chinese government (often called China Quality
OCW, CQOCW or CNQOCW - 精品课程 in Chinese), and was flabbergasted to
find over 2,000 peer-reviewed articles (all in Chinese) on this topic.
This is roughly as many articles as I could find about Open Courseware
(MIT and other) in any other language put together - and while most of
the Chinese articles were entirely about CQOCW (with most listing the
term in their title), many of the articles in English mainly mention
Open Courseware as one of many innovations in higher education, etc.

It will be very interesting, as I start conducting my research on this
literature, what kind of theories and perspectives are employed, and how
many of the articles are simply reports on a university’s own projects.

Stian