No 2

This spring edition of IRRODL begins with several articles describing open educational resources (OER) followed by some financial considerations and a MOOC investigation. These papers will also be included in the OERKnowledgeCloud, which is supported by the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning/International Council for Open and Distance Education Chairs in three countries. (I am one of them.) For those readers, who are interested in OER and MOOCs, I would recommend that they visit this repository of more than 600 research articles and reports on issues of relevance to researchers in the field. These are followed by papers on student interaction and support as well as synchronous and asynchronous learning. The later articles investigate blended learning, educational research, and the mobile cloud. Schuwer and Kusters lead off the OER topic with an investigation into mass customization in industry and how it can help address individual learner needs in open content development. Using the concepts of “self-efficacy ” and “outcome judgment”, Kelly, in the next article, analyses educator perceptions of OER and makes recommendations on “easy to use ” designs to improve the effectiveness of OER. Mteb