Learners’ Access to Educational Materials in Select Institutions within the Commonwealth

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to assess students’ access to educational materials in select institutions within Commonwealth countries. The report starts with a review of the existing literature on problems and barriers to students’ access to educational materials, including textbooks. The review is used to develop a research study and appropriate questionnaire tools to undertake a survey of students in select institutions. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are then used to analyse the data. The findings indicate that learners are now engaging with a complex ecosystem of learning materials, both print and digital, in a multitude of differing forms and formats, with various terms of use and durations of sustained access. Furthermore, the results show that learners are not acutely aware of open educational resources (OER) and in some cases conflate OER with online knowledge resources, indicating that much more work needs to be done to educate learners about OER, where to find them, and how they can be used. // Keywords: open educational resources, learning materials, access to education