Awareness, attitudes and participation of teaching staff towards the open content movement in one university

Abstract

This research investigates the current awareness of, and participation in, the open content movement at one UK institution for higher education. The open content movement and the open educational resources can be seen as potential methods for reducing time and cost of technology-enhanced learning developments; however, its sustainability and, to some degree, its success are dependent on critical mass and large-scale participation. Teaching staff were invited to respond to a questionnaire. Respondents (n= 59) were open to the idea of sharing their own content and, similar to other studies, demonstrated existing practices of sharing resources locally amongst colleagues; however, there was little formal, large-scale sharing using suitable licenses. The data gathered concurs with other research suggesting a lack of awareness to the Creative Commons licenses as well as a lack of participation in large open educational resource repositories

Major barriers for participating in online teaching in developing countries from Iranian faculty members' perspectives

“…As the movement to the new approach is in its early stages, it is associated with challenges and issues, one of which is the lack of faculty members' involvement in online teaching. Scholars have adopted various perspectives in attempting to research instructors as one of the major components in online education systems (Al-alak & Alnawas, 2011;Bolliger, Inan, & Wasilik, 2014;Islam, 2012;Reed, 2012;Richardson & Alsup, 2015). However in Iran, as a developing country, this aspect has still not received enough research attention.…”

Striving Toward Openness: But What Do We Really Mean?

“…Similar low levels of awareness were reported in the UK in a second survey conducted at that time, and with the same positive attitudes to sharing locally (Reed, 2012). In a later study in the US, about half of teaching staff who were in an institution that had engaged in OER initiatives were aware of the activity, and those surveyed gave broad interpretations of what their perceived meaning; this included associating open with resources that were free from cost, or practices that were similar to open source computing (Spilovoy & Seamen, 2015).…”

“…When staff participate in open education, they often cite copyright as a training requirement and area of confusion (Rolfe, 2012;Reed, 2012). This would suggest institutions needs to strategically target this, and as the present study highlights, there are many benefits enjoyed by staff once they have acquired a degree of understanding.…”

Guidelines for leveraging university didactics centers to support OER uptake in German-speaking Europe

“…The center for university didactics can act as a link between faculty members and university management in the process of developing a strategy. Additional potential partners for developing university wide measures include interested faculty who are already engaged in OER use, librarians, and deans of study (Okamoto, 2013;Reed, 2012). It is recommended that the first meeting among partners include a discussion of opportunities and challenges involved in implementing OER, as part of a larger discussion that engages partners and helps to ensure their buy-in.…”