Impact Analysis Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), Open Educational Resources (OER), innovative learning paradigms, educational scenarios and the associated digital technologies, learning environments, applications and content are continuously changing and rapidly evolving nowadays, thus affecting not only the effectiveness, the impact and the cognitive outcomes of teaching, but also the quality of the learning process and outcome as a whole. The impact of TEL environments and portals using OER can be evaluated in terms of usability, effectiveness and pedagogical use. Impact evaluation has always carried great potential for improving learning outcomes and tailoring learning toward the users’ needs, motivation, satisfaction and expectations. However, impact assessment of the use of teaching and learning resources, environments and portals in a systematic manner has proven to be difficult.
The research work described in this paper contributes to assess the impact of using Open Learning Resources in a shared and distributed way, on an innovative portal, namely the “Open Discovery Space” (ODS) portal. In this European example case, there are different dimensions of impact to consider, including impact on teachers, students, stakeholders, schools and the educational system at large. The focus of the impact evaluation in this research is to understand how best such TEL environments are to be accommodated, adopted and used within the educational processes, and how well they can fit within the current national/regional curricula and educational systems. To achieve this, this research aims to evaluate how best the e-learning portals and services like ODS are to be accommodated within existing teaching and learning processes/practices as they are seen by teachers and learners.
The objectives of the impact assessment activities are to discover the nature and extent of effects and changes, and demonstrate the outcomes on the micro-level stakeholders, including on individual teachers, learners and schools and the macro-level stakeholders, including regional, national, and EU-level stakeholders, and also the policy makers. In this context, it is expected that identifying and measuring the actual impact that a portal like ODS has on educational systems will help stakeholders to fully exploit the strength of such portals and services and will facilitate improvements in terms of the application of digital technologies in educational systems and in their decisions for educational processes.
Impact assessment of an eLearning portal such as ODS involves evaluation and assessment of educational aspects that directly relate to the context of the teaching and learning activities. For this reason, the results of such assessment can be used as a basis to improve the educational system. This type of assessment contrasts with traditional approaches, which focus on a limited number of factors and are usually used for grading and accountability purposes. Thus, our impact assessment methodology considers various impact factors including motivation factors, engagement, support, empowerment, involvement, satisfaction, accessibility, availability, usability, effectiveness, achievement, performance, sharing, interaction, communication, collaboration, innovation, training, creativity, search facility, socialising, culturally and linguistically appropriate features, etc.
Taking into account the early results of this research, it appears that the use of an e-learning portal like ODS, in EU Educational Systems has a great impact on the whole educational system and on the learning processes and learning practice, and has the potential to greatly improve the quality of the work done in schools. Such an initiative is generally suitable for a wide range of teaching practices, while it enables the accomplishment of the learning tasks easily and offers a wide range of useful and updated learning resources. Further work is planned, in order to benchmark the results with previous studies, in order to conduct the qualitative research effectively and detect trends/patterns, and improve the reliability of ODS impact assessment survey results over time and across multiple assessment tools and instruments.