A Review of Reviews on Open Educational Resources

Conceptualized as open educational resources (OER) in 2002, the field has a relatively short history. During this period, there have been some significant developments, including the availability of more resources and research publications (including literature reviews) in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. This review of reviews adopted a combined approach of tertiary review and integrative review to analyze the corpus of data collected from SCOPUS, Web of Science, Academic Premier, and Google Scholar. In all, 42 reviews on OER could be identified for the analysis, which indicated that most of these are published as journal articles, with only five published in conferences. Journal articles are published in 29 unique titles, with the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning at the top, followed by Sustainability. 62% of these are available in open access, with most being systematic reviews. The field demonstrates high research collaboration with multiple authors in most reviews. The average quality rating of the reviews is low. Most of the reviews are published by authors from the USA, while researchers from Anadolu University and Beijing Normal University are top contributors. The thematic analysis using UNESCO's recommendation on OER as a framework indicates research gaps in the areas of sustainability and international cooperation. The study concludes with a set of guidelines to promote effective OER implementation.