The use of open educational resources in pre-school education: An ALMS analysis

Open educational resources (OER), with the features of openness in terms of the five ‘R’s’ (Wiley, n.d.) — retain, reuse, redistribute, revise and remix — have been promoted for more than a decade and gradually adopted in higher education institutions. For other levels of education, however, there remains a lack of OER culture, which has been identified as one major obstacle to OER adoption (Hoosen, 2012). This paper examines the use of OER in pre-school education as an area receiving little attention in the past. From a total of 61 related publications collected from Google Scholar and Scopus, and further screened, finally only three were identified as relevant case studies. The case studies were analysed following the ALMS framework — Access to editing tools; Level of expertise required to revise or remix; Meaningfully editable; and Source-file access (Hilton III, Wiley, Stein and Johnson, 2010). The results showed that the OER presented in the case studies in general can be revised and remixed easily with the source files and editing tools available. The editing of some resources requires more specific computer skills, which is a possible reason for their limited adoption in pre-school education. Based on the results, the opportunities and challenges for promoting OER in pre-school education are discussed from the perspectives of language and cultural diversity, digital literacy and the parents’ involvement.