EXPLORING THE VIEWS OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ABOUT THE USE OF OPEN ONLINE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
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Abstract
Online educational resources are generally accessed as digitized materials that are offered freely and openly for educators, students and self- learners to use and reuse for teaching learning, and research purpose (Lakshmana, 2011). This paper presents a qualitative study about the use of open online educational resources (OOER) at university level. Our aim was to exploring explore the university students’ views about the effective use of OOER. By conducting focus group interview, we developed an understanding about university students’ views about OOER and how they contribute to their learning, to what extent university students they use OOER, how they think that OOER contribute in enhancing their academic knowledge, and which the problems that they face in accessing and using OOER.
We analyzed data by making transcripts, generating themes from data, and make findings based on themes. Data revealed that university student use different types of online resources among in which Google, Science direct, Wikipedia, and Digital library are were frequently reported included. Students use OOER for different reasons such as getting up-to-date knowledge, searching relevant literature, and finding a diverse variety of material in a short period of time. However, they face several difficulties in using and accessing OOER some of which include like technological issues, access of data etc. We concluded that the effective use of OOER may help the students in enhancing their academic knowledge.
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