Dive Brief:
- A national survey of 2,000 faculty members by Babson Survey Group and University of California-San Francisco researcher Elaine Allen finds that 75% of faculty are unaware of open education resources.
- Related to the confusion around what qualifies as OER, relatively few faculty connect Creative Commons licensing with the use of the free educational resources.
- According to eCampus News, faculty and administrator respondents called for a single OER clearinghouse to make discovery of open educational resources faster and easier.
Dive Insight:
The fact is, faculty find it difficult to discover new types of educational resources, whether they reside in the public domain as OER or not. Faculty surveyed by Babson rated ease of discoverability of open education resources at the same level of traditional resources. In general, faculty “overwhelmingly” use and assign their own resources in class, according to the survey. If finding quality resources is hard, it makes sense that faculty would trust themselves and skip the work of vetting outside resources.
Colleges and universities would do well to band together and create a clearinghouse or create internal committees to investigate use of the free resources. Once materials are selected, it would save money for the school and for students.