Open Educational Resources and Mathematics Skills 2014-2015 (Chile)

Abstract

This study examines the effect of the use of two Open Educational Resources (OER) (a Khan Academy online tutorial and an open textbook hosted on Wikibooks) on logical-mathematical outcomes for first and second-year students in higher education institutions in Chile. It also investigates perceptions of instructors and students about the use of OER, in order to understand how these resources are used and valued. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to collect student performance data via a student survey, student focus groups, interviews with instructors, and sourcing institutional records.

Only the institutional records, focus group data and interview data are included in the final dataset. Student survey data is not made available for confidentiality reasons. Findings indicate that students in a contact-study mathematics course who used a Khan Academy online mathematics tutorial obtained better examination results than students who did not use any additional resources, or those who used the open textbook. Moreover, it was also found that instructors and students have positive perceptions about the use of Khan Academy and Wikibooks materials.This study is Sub-project 9 of the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project, hosted by the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Wawasan Open University, Malaysia.