Open Education 2015

In early 2015, Rajiv Jhangiani, Jessie Key, Christina Hendricks, Beck Pitt from the OER Research Hub (http://oerresearchhub.org), and Clint Lalonde from BCcampus (http://bccampus.ca/) surveyed faculty in British Columbia (and beyond) on their use of and attitudes towards open textbooks and other open educational resources. In particular, the questionnaire focused on faculty adoption of open textbooks created as part of the BCcampus Open Textbooks project (http://bccampus.ca/open-textbook-project/) which is in the process of creating a library of open textbooks across 36 subject areas. To date the project has involved 14 institutions, saved students an estimated $476,400-$713,921 (CAD) and seen over 140 adoptions of the textbooks across the province (see: http://open.bccampus.ca/)

On the survey we asked faculty a range of questions, including:

- whether and how they have used and/or created OER and open textbooks, and their experiences with doing so

- the challenges they face most often with using OER

- which factors would make them most likely to choose a particular open educational resource over another

- their perception of the impact of using OER, for students and for themselves as teachers

- institutional or other policies that affect their use and/or creation of OER

Headline findings include:

- Participants who were more open to experience were more likely to have adapted and/or created OER

- The top reasons cited for using OER (those given by 50% or more of respondents were (in order starting with most cited)

- - for ideas and inspiration

- - to supplement existing coursework

- - to prepare for teaching

- - to broaden the range of resources available to learners

- - 58% of respondents have difficulty finding suitable resources in their subject area

- - 39% of respondents do not have enough time to look for suitable resources

- - 58% have used OER, 33% have adapted OER, and 25% have created OER

We have also done analyses breaking down such findings according to type of institution (e.g., those that focus heavily on research versus those that do not), years of teaching experience, full-time versus part-time employment status, and more.

In this presentation we will report these and other findings from the survey, within the context of respondents from different institutional environments and other data about faculty attitudes about OER from the OER Research Hub.