Global Trends on Adoption of Open Education Resources in Higher Education Institutions: A Bibliometric Analysis

The study examined the trends in the adoption and implementation of Open Education Resources (OER) in higher education institutions (HEIs) by conducting a bibliometric analysis of 911 publications between 2004 and 2022 from the Dimensions database. The VOSviewer1.6.19 software was used to establish visualization networks on the most influential authors, countries and universities. Further analysis was made to establish publications with higher citations, co-authorship collaborations and the co-occurrence of keywords. The results indicate a steady growth of research articles on OER due to the outbreak of COVID-19. The developed countries had a higher rate of research publications and stronger collaboration patterns in OER than the African countries. The analysis of citation score indicates that the “International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education” and “Journal of Interactive Media in Education” were the most popular journals on the topic. The results indicate that the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Spain had the highest links in terms of co-authorship collaboration. In contrast, African countries such as Uganda, Cameroon and Tunisia had very minimal links in terms of co-authorship on the topic. The analysis of keywords occurrence revealed several opportunities for adopting and implementing OER in HEIs which include easy accessibility of digital content and inquiry-based learning. Most of the identified limitations of the implementation of OER in HEIs in sub-Saharan African countries were the high costs of commercial e-textbooks and inadequate funding. Limited knowledge of the institutionalization of OER, institutional low capacity to adopt OER and lack of policies as well as awareness were identified as other factors constraining the effective implementation of OER. This bibliometric analysis provides insights on limitations for effective implementation and institutionalization of OER in HEIs in African countries and paves the way for future research direction on the topic.