Open-ed resources still hindered by lack of awareness and tech
According to Campus Technology, while a number of American universities have arranged partnerships that allow them to pool resources on open educational resources (OER) initiatives, many faculty still do not trust OER or simply lack awareness of exactly what is on offer. Furthermore, the Campus Computing Project’s latest survey of faculty asked about digital and OER resources, finding many faculty do not believe in the learning benefits attributed to digital resources. Community college faculty, whose students are most likely to benefit from free or low-cost digital materials, also report that many of their students do not own the technologies needed to access online course content from home, rendering digital resources less useful and accessible than textbooks.

Open Educational Resources

OER in Higher Ed: 'Huge Awareness-Raising Effort Needed'

Open textbook projects are gaining momentum, says Creative Commons' Cable Green, but there is still work to be done.

When it comes to open educational resources (OER) adoption, is the glass half empty or half full? On the one hand, more than 1 billion works have been licensed using Creative Commons since the organization was founded 15 years ago, and in 2015 alone Creative Commons-licensed works were viewed online 136 billion times. Yet awareness of OER in higher education remains low. Approximately 75 percent of faculty respondents to a 2014 Babson Survey Research Group study didn't know about or couldn't accurately define OER or why it is important.

Changing that situation is the mission of Cable Green, director of open education at Creative Commons and a leading advocate for open policies that ensure publicly funded education materials are freely and openly available to the public. "We still have a huge awareness-raising effort that needs to be done," said Green. "We all need to teach other people about what this is and why it is important."

The Babson study Green cited found that the most significant barrier to wider adoption of OER "remains a faculty perception of the time and effort required to find and evaluate it." According to the survey, 38 percent of faculty members rate the ease of finding OER as "difficult" or "very difficult."

Green took part in a recent Future Trends Forum video chat hosted by consultant and futurist Bryan Alexander to talk about OER trends and adoption. At its most basic level, the use of OER is saving campuses time and money, Green stressed. "When you put an open license on it, other people can use it. They don't have to reinvent the wheel."

He pointed to the B.C. Open Textbook Project in British Columbia, funded by the BC Ministry of Advanced Education, as an example of OER's potential. "They decided they wanted to have a whole project around open textbooks. They were going to have a library of open textbooks as well as faculty reviews of open textbooks, because faculty care a lot about what other faculty think when they are making a decision about whether to adopt or take the time to update or modify a resource," Green explained. "So they started doing that and then they discovered that the University of Minnesota had a very similar project: the Minnesota Open Textbook Library."

That led to a collaboration that is still growing. "Those two got together and said to each other: 'Hey, when you have new textbooks you have put in [your library], let us know and we might put that in our library as well. And when one of your faculty members writes a review of an open textbook, would you be willing to share that review with us?' So they are actually openly licensing the reviews," said Green. Then, California, Oregon and Washington joined because they are sinking a lot of public money into open textbook efforts. They all decided to meet once a year at an Open Text Summit in British Columbia and just share.

"They said, 'Let's not duplicate efforts and let's not waste money' — but we can actually do better than that. We can set plans together. We can divide the labor, so everybody doesn't have to work so hard. We can share the expenses on projects. This group started out with about 12 people, but now there are hundreds attending," said Green.

He pointed to other progress on the OER front in higher education: The University of Maryland University College, the largest nonprofit public online university in the United States, is in the process of matching all course learning outcomes and competencies with open educational resources. The collective savings is estimated to be in the millions for the more than 80,000 students taking classes at UMUC annually. Green added that the Open Education Consortium and the Community College Consortium for Open Education are doing great things.