Towards utilising emerging technologies to address the challenges of using Open Educational Resources: a vision of the future

The rapid advancements in online education have pointed to a new open learning approach using Open Educational Resources (OER). In this approach, educators and learners can freely access or redistribute educational resources that have been released online in the public domain under an open licence. Whereas this approach looks appealing in reducing learning costs, as well as in enhancing learning quality and facilitating knowledge sharing, several challenges might hinder the adoption of OER, such as locating and selecting the most appropriate resources among the thousands that are published and that are available online, and trusting them. This paper elaborates on those challenges and suggests an emerging technologies-based perspective for addressing the efficient inclusion of OER. To this end, this paper discusses how the integration of emerging yet essential technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain, with big learning data and educational data mining algorithms could have a profound impact on enhancing OER-based learning and teaching. The dynamics of incorporating these technologies to solve several OER challenges are demonstrated through numerous examples, and the potential limitations are also discussed. The paper concludes with visions of the future, possible research challenges and directions.