Who’s Using OERs?

One of our favorite resources throughout our OER research has been Making the Case for Open Educational Resources by Watson and Rush-Marlowe. They created a ton of amazing graphics that (as can be expected from authors writing on OERS) are available for anyone to download and reuse. We love these graphics — they are easy to read and get the message across fast. We include them throughout our book, but here, we want to emphasize the graphics that visualize who is using OERs.

While the 7% increase of OER usage is fantastic to see, it is important to qualify this trend. Research shows that the faculty with the most OER awareness are those that have taught an online course and have 16-25 years of teaching experience. Clearly, those teaching online might be more keyed in to online learning materials, but the statistic about teaching experience surprised me.

I assumed that younger faculty, those more accustomed to learning online during the pandemic or even just having recently been a student themselves, slaving over textbook prices, would be more motivated to use OERS. Perhaps more experienced faculty would be set in their ways, using textbooks the same way they had when they were in school. But it is these teachers, who have been around students for longer, that know what students need. They have heard the complaints and have therefore become willing to experiment with OER. Their adoption shows that they trust the information in OERs and have seen the significant and beneficial impact of OER integration that this whole book focuses on.

This finding is less surprising. It makes sense that smaller universities need to focus on more cost-effective solutions and have tighter community connections. However, one of the main goals at universities, no matter how big, is to foster a community. This statistic seems to suggest that OERs can be a way to do that. As students, we agree. Feeling like your complaints are not only heard, but also prioritized through the adoption of solutions could only bolster a sense of collectivity.