One of the early design decisions I made during my research project was to include a content analysis along with interviews as part of my research methods. Interviews would provide great first-hand insights from teachers using Free Learning, however, I also wanted to take a broad look at OER repositories to see how they’re designed. Rather than performing a document analysis of existing research papers, I chose to use a content analysis approach to enable me to visit OER repositories and analyze their functionality. This enabled me to look across a range of websites and develop a coding system, which led to identifying common themes among the various repositories (Schreier, 2015). These themes complemented the themes that emerged from my interviews, which then informed the recommendations I developed.
Table 1. Example of tabular data from my content analysis.
Conducting the content analysis proved to be challenging because it was not something I had done previously in the program. I followed Schreier’s (2015) approach to coding to create a spreadsheet, which I used to identify functionality that was present or absent in each OER repository. I found the paper by Santos-Hermosa, Ferran-Ferrer, and Abadal (2017) to be a great help when choosing how to present my findings. Their paper included a wide-scale content analysis of over 100 repositories, which identified a number of different themes and metrics. Although on a much larger scale than my own content analysis, their paper presented its findings in easy-to-understand tables, grouped by theme. I used a similar approach to present the findings for my own content analysis, which enabled me to support the themes I had identified with tabular data (see Table 1). In the end, I analyzed 14 repositories during my content analysis. With more time and a larger scope, it would have been interesting to analyze more repositories and perhaps use alternate selection criteria, knowing what I now know about the importance that pedagogy and communities of practice have in my final recommendations.
References
Santos-Hermosa, G., Ferran-Ferrer, N. & Abadal, E. (2017). Repositories of Open Educational Resources: An assessment of reuse and educational aspects. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(5), 84–120. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3063
Schreier, M. (2015). Qualitative Content Analysis. In Flick, U. (Ed.). (2013). The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis. Sage publishing.https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526416070