Open Educational Resources

Abstract

The open educational resources initiative has been underway for over a decade now and higher education institutions are slowly adopting open educational resources (OER). The use and creation of OER are important aspects of adoption and both are needed for the benefits of OER to be fully realized. Based on the results of a survey developed to measure the readiness of faculty and staff to adopt OER, this paper focuses on the measurement of OER use and creation, and identifies factors to increase both. The survey was administered in September 2012 to faculty and staff of Athabasca University, Canada’s open university. The results offer a snapshot of OER use and creation at one university. The survey tool could provide a mechanism to compare and contrast OER adoption with other higher education institutions. Forty-three percent of those in the sample are using OER and 31% are creating OER. This ratio of use to creation is introduced as a possible metric to measure adoption.

Introduction

Open educational resources (OER) can be defined as “materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone” (Downes, 2011). Open educational resources are still in the early adoption stage; the genesis of OER was the open source computing movement (Brown & Adler, 2008) and its first application to learning was “learning objects.” Wiley tackled the definition of learning objects in 2000 and offered the following: “any digital resource that can be reused to support learning” (2000, p. 4). Compare this to Downes’ 2011 definition of open educational resources above and indeed they have similarities: Wiley (2000) suggested the critical attributes of learning objects are “reusable”, “digital”, and “resource”. Downes (2011) included these attributes in his definition of OER – although digital is not mentioned it could be construed as implied in this digital age. Thus the term “learning object” could be considered a formative definition preceding OER.

Types of OER include lessons, modules, full courses/programmes, guides, e-texts, articles, audio tracks, videos, multimedia, and any other learning materials (UNESCO & Commonwealth of Learning, 2011; Hylen, 2007). One of the main purposes for OER is to support education; they do so with heightened accessibility and they have the potential to reduce barriers to learning through enhanced attention, motivation, and engagement of students (Sclater, 2010).

Open textbooks are one type of OER initiative that has gained attention recently with several governments, such as the state of Washington (Overland, 2011) and the state of California (Volmer, 2012), investing millions of dollars in the development of these resources for use by community college students. The province of British Columbia has also announced funding for 40 open textbooks (Government of BC, 2012). These bold actions can reduce the financial barriers to education for many; a recent report from the center for Public Interest Research found that using open textbooks could reduce student costs by 80% .

The above examples of policy changes at the government level may minimize some of the barriers to adopting OER, but several more exist. Nie (2012) noted multimedia skills, knowledge of copyright law and licensing practices, and search ability as barriers. There are many good repositories but not knowing where to look constitutes a barrier for time-challenged faculty and staff. As the OER movement is worldwide there are cultural differences as well (Nie, 2012). Murphy (2012) notes time, organizational culture, and availability of resources as being significant barriers. De Liddo (2010) confirms this higher education cultural barrier of “opening up” and suggests technology aimed at connecting and collaborating could minimize this. One of the main issues that inhibits sharing and openness in higher education is intellectual property. Organizations such as Creative Commons preserve the rights of the authors by providing a variety of licences that allow them to choose the conditions for sharing their work. Their mission is to “develop, support and steward legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing and innovation” .

Downes (2007) noted that OER production is largely voluntary and motivation is altruistic. He pointed to two human characteristics of the community OER approach: Human interaction is needed to build OER; and the users of OER must be respected (Foote as cited in Downes, 2007). Pawlowski (2012) suggested that one factor which could further the adoption of OER is increased emotional ownership, defined as “the degree that individuals perceive that knowledge or resources belong to them” (Clements & Pawlowski, 2012). While this view could be seen as antithetical to the community OER approach outlined by Downes (2007), in fact, because of altruistic motivation for creating OER, emotional ownership strengthens the community. Emotional ownership, in concert with organizations such as Creative Commons, could also contribute to opening up the private practice of teaching and scholarship in higher education institutions. Pawlowski (2012) outlined a four-phase collaborative development cycle for OER:

Four-phase development cycle

In this cycle, emotional ownership can increase as reuse and republishing occur in their respective communities (Pawlowski, 2012). Pawlowski concluded that OER collaborators must be encouraged, engaged, and supported throughout the OER development process (Pawlowski, 2012).

The key issue this research project addressed was measuring the health of the Athabasca University OER collaborative development cycle. Using OER is an indicator of adoption, but creating OER and adding back to the community are key to broader adoption and sustainability, both within the community and beyond.

Our goal was to determine how our institution is adopting OER so that insights could be made about how to further adopt, develop policy, and recognize the commitment of our community. Surveys have been created recently such as Murphy (2012), Open Access Textbook Project (2010), Petrides et al. (2010), The OER Impact study (White & Manton, 2011), and the UK-OER Synthesis and Evaluation Project (McGill et al., 2013) to measure key factors in OER adoption, and our survey is designed to be a reusable instrument which can be easily administered to determine OER adoption progress. Our survey is different from Murphy’s (2012) benchmark study, which has a considerable policy focus. While our pilot was offered specifically at an open university, our intention was to provide a valuable tool to measure the use and creation of OER in any institution.