Teacher usage behaviors within an online open educational resource repository

Abstract

With instructional methods such as MOOCs and flipped classrooms rapidly gaining popularity and school budget cuts becoming more prevalent across the nation, increasing the usability of Open Educational Resources (OER) is highly relevant for today's educators. Although several OER databases exist providing access to hundreds of thousands of resources, navigating these spaces, evaluating resources, and integrating them within classroom instruction has proven less than efficient. The present research explores learning analytics for understanding real-world interaction patterns with SAS® Curriculum Pathways®, which has over 120,000 active teacher users and over 1,300 freely available resources across multiple disciplines. In this preliminary investigation, users are clustered based on overall usage patterns. Patterns of resource interaction are then identified using association analysis. Results of this exploratory investigation provide insight into how users interact with large OER databases and introduce many avenues for continued investigation.