Students’ Awareness and Usage of Open Educational Resources (OER) as Learning Tool in their Course Studies at the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU)

The abundance of technology nowadays is contributing to the development of learning practices. This gives learners greater opportunity to find, access, and use resources to benefit learning. Open educational resources (OER) are one of the few educational developments that emerged with technology. While it is true that there are a lot of OERs available on the internet, it is unsure how many learners are aware of their existence. This research aimed to identify how many students are aware of OERs, where they use OERs, and whether the educational institution encourages OERs. The researchers surveyed several students within the University of the Philippines Open University. The survey included learner demographics, statistics on learners' awareness and usage of OERs, learners' OER access locations, and the challenges they encounter when using OERs. The survey showed that the learners, regardless of age, are aware of OERs. They mostly access videos, research, and journals on web pages and Wikis. They find the OERs accessible and relevant, but reliability and visibility are challenging.

The Impact of Agricultural, Industrial and Services Sectors on Gdp of Pakistan- an Econometric Approach

Agriculture, Industry and Services are the major sectors of Pakistan economy. The analysis of sectoral development has an important underpinning in the policy making. The goal of this study was to present development scenario and policy implications to strap up Pakistan''s resource potential and investment to foster diversification and growth in agricultural, industrial and services sectors and to investigate the impact of key sectors on the GDP growth. Systematic econometric techniques have been applied to attain the study objectives. To accomplish the study time series data ranging 1950 to 2014 were obtained from the SBP. The study based upon four specific objectives. Stationarity analysis of time series was made by applying Augmented Dickey- Fuller and Philips - Perron unit root tests. Correlation analysis depicted positive and negative correlations among study variables. Under objective one the results of OLS estimation depicted that firstly services sector remained significant, secondly agriculture sector and thirdly industrial sector. The results revealed that services sector is to lead the economy of Pakistan. Stepwise regression was applied on fourteen sub sectors as independent variables and GDP as dependent variable to attain the suitable model for Pakistan economy. The model was selected with nine significant variables. Fisheries, forestry, mining & quarrying, construction and ownership of dwelling were found weak sub sectors of the economy. The selected model was used for forecasting analysis in subsequent section. To attain objective two Engel Granger two step method was applied. The co-efficient indicated long run relationship among the variables. The Error Correction Model’ short run coefficient was found significant and depicted convergence to long run equilibrium. The Granger causality analysis explored the existence of bidirectional causality between agriculture and GDP, bidirectional causality between industry and GDP, bidirectional causality between GDP and services sector, unidirectional causality between industry and agriculture and industry was found granger cause agriculture, bidirectional causality between agriculture and services sector and indicates unidirectional causality between industry and services sector and industry was found granger cause services. To acquire objective three, the decadal decomposition analysis carried out to examine the structural transformation in Pakistan economy. To accomplish this analysis parsimonious Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) and Ordinary Least Square (OLS) were applied. It was observed that firstly the agricultural share to GDP declined over the study period, secondly the industrial share has increased significantly ,thirdly the share of services sector increased to greater extent, fourthly the services sector has emerged as the dominant sector .The analysis explored that over the data period regardless the changes in the political fronts, on an average, there was increasing trend in the growth of economy. The vigorous economic appearance during first four decades was observed and industrial sector remained at leading position as compared to agriculture and services sector but after 90s, the growth of services sector was higher than other sectors. The rising growth trends of services sector contributed significantly to economic development in recent decades. Under fourth objective, the forecast of the data under VAR concluded that the forecast of approximately all the sub sectors was changing its behavior from short run to long run as their source of variation has almost totally changed from short run fluctuation to long run except (Public administration & defence and transport and communication). The forecasted errors clearly indicated that in case of Pakistan there is dire need for consistent policy making that bring all the sub sectors of the economy close to each other and increase inter dependence and support for each other to boost the economy in future. The collaborative effort to promote industrial based agriculture development is required. As in the past decades due to lack of synchronized efforts to make agriculture based industrial policies both of these sectors suffered a lot. Now in the eve of new era of economic development there is need to develop dynamic industrial and agricultural policies aggressively to overcome decades long deficiencies not only in policy front but also internationally. Weak sub sectors of the economy as identified in this study needed to be focused in the new policy framework to increase their contribution in the economy.