Postgraduate Student‘s Open Educational Practices and Hurdles among Faculty of Science at Alagappa University during the Pandemic

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the practices and hurdles of open educational resources (OER) among faculty of science postgraduate students at Alagappa University, Tamilnadu, India, during the pandemic period. The present study has employed the “questionnaire” as a tool developed by the investigator through a systematic and comprehensive approach in the research design of the questionnaire forms for the survey in various phases. The investigator conducted a pilot study in different Alagappa University, India, departments. The faculty of science students of Alagappa University, Tamilnadu, India, has been selected for the population of the study. A total of 396 postgraduate faculty of science students from the departments chosen at Alagappa University, Tamilnadu, India, were initially collected. However, 30 samples were excluded due to incompleteness. A simple random sampling method was employed to select 366 data for the study. All faculty of science students at Alagappa University, Tamilnadu, India were aware of OER. However, one-fourth of students rarely used OER per day, and only a few students used it monthly. OER was taught to students by faculty at Alagappa University, which created awareness and usage of OER. More announcements or news about OERs being posted on official university websites would increase student awareness of OERs. The significant hurdles shared by students in this study in using OERs are the low quality of OER, limited technology, the OER repository, and the time-consuming to download OER resources.