Awareness of open educational resources (OER) among U.S. higher education teaching faculty has improved, but still remains less than a majority, according to a new report from the Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG).
Survey results, using responses of over 3,000 faculty, show that OER status is not a driving force in the selection of educational materials – with the most cited barrier being the effort required to find and evaluate such materials. While use of open resources is low overall, it is somewhat higher among large enrollment introductory-level courses. Source: Babson Survey Group
Key findings from the report include:
Faculty awareness of OER has increased, with 25% of faculty reporting that they were “Aware” or “Very Aware” of open educational resources, up from 20% last year.
Only 5.3% of courses are using open textbooks (includes public domain and Creative Commons licensed).
Large enrollment introductory undergraduate courses have adopted openly licensed OpenStax College textbooks at twice the rate (10%) as openly licensed textbooks among all courses.
The most common factor cited by faculty when selecting educational resources was the cost to the students. After cost, the next most common was the comprehensiveness of the resource, followed by how easy it was to find.
There is a serious disconnect between how many faculty consider a factor in selecting educational resources and how satisfied they are with the state of that factor. Faculty are least satisfied with the cost of textbooks, yet that is the most commonly listed factor for why they select resources.
The barriers to adopting OER most often cited by faculty are that “there are not enough resources for my subject” (49%), it is “too hard to find what I need” (48%) and “there is no comprehensive catalog of resources” (45%).
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
Montana: ImagineIF Trustees Hold Special Meeting on Library Security Concerns (via Daily Inter Mountain) Pennsylvania: Philly’s Free Library is Making Space for People to Create (via WHYY) U.S. Officially Leads ...
From the Associated Press: A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were ...
From The Sydney Morning Herald: Authors, illustrators, and editors will be compensated for e-book and audiobook library borrowings for the first time, in a move by the federal government to ...
From the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): A draft Customer Research Agenda was open for public review and comment in October 2022. “We’re grateful for the feedback we received ...
From MIT Technology Review: Hidden patterns purposely buried in AI-generated texts could help identify them as such, allowing us to tell whether the words we’re reading are written by a ...
From the Congressional Research Service: Nearly one in four Americans has a disability, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Congress has recognized that in addition to making ...
From The NY Times: When [Joan] Didion died in 2021 at age 87, the news set off an outpouring of tributes to a writer who fused penetrating insight and idiosyncratic personal voice, ...
Below, Find the Full Text of a Letter Sent to the Carolina Community From Kevin M. Guskiewicz University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz and J. ...
From the Boston Public Library: The Boston Public Library is proud to contribute to the celebration of Black History Month with its annual “Black Is…” booklist. The booklist aims to commemorate ...
From NYU Langone: Researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, unveiled the Congressional District Health Dashboard (CDHD), a new online tool that ...
From a cOAlition S Announcement: Transformative arrangements – including Transformative Agreements and Transformative Journals – were developed to encourage subscription journals to transition to full and immediate open access within a defined timeframe (31st December 2024, ...
From the Library of Congress: The Library of Congress announced today the appointment of Hannah Sommers as the new Associate Librarian for Researcher and Collections Services in the Library Collections and Services Group. In this role, Sommers will lead the future of the Library’s collections and the services it delivers to researchers and users. She will be central ...