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Does your faculty actually know what OER are?

Open educational resources (OER) are not quite the driving force that some advocates might believe, due in large part to the effort required to locate and evaluate them, according to a study of more than 3,000 U.S. faculty.

The study, Opening the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education [1], attempts to discern the process faculty use to select educational materials used in their courses, and it focuses in part on OER awareness and use.

Though overall OER use is low overall, its use does increase somewhat for introductory-level courses with larger enrollments.

Only 5.3 percent of courses included in the study use an openly-licensed required textbook, though openly-licensed OpenStax College textbooks are adopted at twice that rate–10 percent–for large enrollment introductory ungraduate courses.

While faculty awareness of OER has increased over the past year, it still remains low–just 6.6 percent of faculty said they were “very aware” of such resources, with 18.9 percent saying they were “aware” and 16.5 percent saying they were “somewhat aware.”

Faculty awareness of open textbooks, classified as a specific type of OER in the study, was a bit lower than awareness–just 34 percent of faculty claimed some level of awareness.

(Next page: Faculty awareness and barriers to adoption)

“The exact wording of the question is critical in measuring faculty’s level of OER awareness,” according to the report. “Many academics have only a vague understanding of the details of what constitutes open educational resources. Many confuse ‘open’ with ‘free,’ and assume all free resources are OER. Still others will confused ‘open resources’ with ‘open source,’ and assume open educational resources refers only to open source software.”

The most-cited barriers to adoption are:

The study also noted that faculty concerns about permission to use or change OER have decreased, while concerns about the quality of the materials have increased.

“Because the availability of open licensing and the ability to reuse and remix content is central to the concept of open educational resources, it is critical to understand faculty awareness of these concepts12. Most faculty continue to report a high degree of awareness of copyright status of their classroom content,” according to the report.

Faculty awareness around Creative Commons licensing has remained relatively stable, though it is lower than faculty copyright and public domain awareness.

“Faculty continue to have a much greater level of awareness of the type of licensing often used for OER than they do of OER itself. It is clear that they do not always associate this licensing with OER,” according to the report. “… Since licensing and the ability to reuse and remix content is critical to the concept of OER, examining the difference between faculty who report that they are aware of OER and faculty who report that they are aware of both OER and Creative Commons licensing provides us a good indication of the depth of understanding of OER among faculty members.”

When it comes to future OER use, 6.9 percent of surveyed faculty said they would use the resourcse in the future, while 5.3 percent are already using them. Thirty-one percent of surveyed faculty said they will consider future OER use.