OER Adoptions on the Rise — from insidehighered.com by Lindsay McKenzie
The number of faculty members choosing open educational resources over traditional textbooks has nearly doubled in the last year, but awareness over all remains low.
Excerpt:
More and more instructors are choosing open educational resources over traditional textbooks, a survey of more than 2,700 faculty members reveals.
The “Opening the Textbook” survey, published by the Babson Survey Research Group today, reports that the number of faculty members at two- and four-year institutions using OER as textbooks has nearly doubled in the last year — from 5 percent in 2015-16 to 9 percent in 2016-17.
Awareness of OER — openly licensed and freely accessible teaching and learning materials — has also increased. Twenty-nine percent of faculty described themselves as “aware” or “very aware” of OER this year, up from 25 percent last year and 20 percent the year before. The proportion that reported they had never heard of OER fell from 66 percent in 2014-15 to 56 percent this year.
But while increases in adoption and awareness have been significant, Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, points out that over all, awareness of OER is still low. He noted that many faculty members also continue to report significant barriers to wider adoption of OER, particularly finding and evaluating the quality of materials.
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