Cited by 42Open Education and E-LearningPublishing and Scholarly CommunicationOpen Source Software Innovations
‘Dark reuse’: an empirical study of teachers’ OER engagement
Open accessBeaven, Tita·2018·Open Praxis
Abstract
There is scant evidence of OER reuse or sharing; OER apologists maintain that reuse is happening in private spaces, but others argue there is no evidence of such ‘dark reuse’. The OER lifecycle provides a model of OER engagement, defining five key practices: finding, composing, adapting, reusing and sharing. However, no empirical research has yet investigated whether teachers’ engagement with OER follows this model; evidence from OER repository analytics suggests not. This paper draws on an empirical study of engagement with an OER repository by language teachers at a distance university (The Open University UK). Through the applied thematic analysis of data generated through observation of lesson preparations, the paper’s contribution is to validate the OER lifecycle model and provide evidence of ‘dark reuse’. Qualitative tools, sensitive to the situated nature of OER engagement, are crucial to understanding invisible practices around ‘dark reuse’, and sophisticated models that embrace the complexity of OER ecosystems are needed.
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Difficulty in tracking OER usage as it often happens in private spaces such as a classroom, hence it goes unreported.
“One problem highlighted in the literature is the difficulty in tracking OER usage as this often happens in private spaces, such as a classroom [6], hence it goes unreported.”
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Paterson, J., Oyelere, S. S., Dubay, C., & Izu, C. (2025) · Working Group Reports of the ACM Global Computing Education Conference 2025 · doi:10.1145/3815397.3815774
- Authors
- Beaven, T.
- Affiliations
- The Open University (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Beaven, Tita
- ORCID
- Beaven, Tita
- Venue
- Open Praxis
- Published
- 2018-12-31
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 377
- ISSN
- 1369-9997 (ISSN-L)
- 2304-070X
- OpenAlex
- W2909735456
- Cited by
- 42
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 2.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- Open Praxis (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Open Research Online (The Open University) (acceptedVersion)
- Open Praxis (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Education and E-Learning
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Keywords
- open educational resources, OER repositories, language teachers, distance education, lesson planning, OER adaptation
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