From the Implications of Open Education for Teachers to the Design of A Self-evaluation Tool for Open-Only Blended Instruction

Abstract

Integrating open educational resources into blended learning courses or online instruction poses considerable challenges for teachers, particularly when using open-only resources. These include navigating through a multitude of resources, incorporating them into the curriculum, addressing copyright concerns, or collaborating with librarians or IT professionals. This becomes especially important in cases of teachers’ collaboration across multiple organizations, whether for legal, technological, cultural, or pedagogical reasons. To address this challenge, we have developed an instrument to help teachers engage in designing open-only blended learning instruction. A five-phase process is proposed. It starts with a comprehensive inventory of scientific knowledge and ends with validation of an instrument. To begin, extensive reviews of the literature were conducted, specifically focusing on the impact of open educational resources (OER) on teachers in blended learning environments. This allowed us to precisely outline the roles and responsibilities of teachers who adopt OER. Subsequently, advanced artificial intelligence was used to facilitate the development of a self-evaluation tool. To ensure its theoretical soundness, all these findings are cross-referenced to create the instrument. A Delphi method and future ecological tests will be performed to validate the instrument before proper dissemination. The instrument—we called SATOB (Self-Assessment Tool for Teachers in Open-resource-only Blended Learning), consists of four parts: planning and preparation; blending instructional strategies; open education; reflection, improvement and sharing. It contains twenty self-evaluation questions and a scoring system with recommendations for professional development. The instrument was created to facilitate the process of teacher self-regulation to assess the extent to which a course is open resources only and well integrated into a blended instruction design. In the long term, once the tool becomes empirically validated, teachers and institutions committed to open science and open education can use it. However, further research is still necessary.