Abstract
Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to change the domain of higher education; however, adoption is still limited. As teachers are the pivotal actors to adopt OER, more insights are needed on their practices with OER and need of support. This exploratory study uses the OER Adoption Pyramid as a framework to analyse adoption of OER within a Dutch University of Applied Sciences. A questionnaire (n = 143) and semi-structured interviews with teachers who had some experience with sharing or using OER (n = 11) offered insights into the current state of affairs on adoption and need of support. The results revealed that informal sharing of resources within teachers’ personal networks happens frequently whereas the use of OER is more limited. If teachers use OER, they are mainly used ‘as-is’ or for a source of inspiration. Our findings indicate that the OER Adoption Pyramid does not properly describe the sequence of each layer within the context of this study. Availability must be lower in the pyramid as a prerequisite for teachers to explore their capacity and volition. Hence, the findings underline the need of support on subject-specific overviews of OER and the creation of national or institutional teacher communities. To improve our understanding, future research should focus on qualitative studies focusing on one case in which teachers engage with OER. This could lead to extensive insights on the factors and sequence of the OER Adoption Pyramid within different contexts.
Highlights
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials that use open licensing to permit users to use them for educational purposes (Orr, Rimini and Van Damme, 2015)
This study aimed to identify the current state of affairs and teachers’ need for support to adopt OER
In the interviews it became clear that teachers may have heard of it, but that they are not familiar with the defining characteristics. This is illustrated by Sebastian who showed his confusion by asking: ‘For me it’s like, where does it start and where does it end? When is something open? ’ The findings from the questionnaire and interviews show that the current awareness is limited as teachers do not know how to recognise OER
Summary
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials that use open licensing to permit users to use them for educational purposes (Orr, Rimini and Van Damme, 2015). Reuse, revise, remix and redistribute the resources, known as the ‘5R characteristics’ (Wiley, n.d.) These characteristics offer teachers pedagogical benefits to adapt the resources to their specific teaching needs (Belikov and Bodily, 2016). Despite the growing number of open resources accessible, the use of OER in higher education is low (Allen and Seaman, 2014; Schuwer and Janssen, 2016). This does not imply that reuse is not happening, as it might take place ‘below the radar’ (Glennie, Harley and Butcher, 2012). It is essential to gain more insights into teachers’ practices to examine the current state of affairs on adoption as well as to explore their need of support that could foster adoption
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