Dissertation
Open to all, not known to all: sustaining practices with open educational resources in higher education
In higher education, Open Educational Resources (OER) are available for anyone to use, but they are not widely used.
- Author
- Marjon Baas
- Date
- 05 October 2023
- Links
- Fulltext in Leiden University Scholarly Publications
Higher education curricula are regularly transformed to stay abreast of the diverse societal, technological, and domain-specific developments. To aid students’ learning, teachers use a wide range of resources to prepare students for this changing world. Nowadays, many educational resources are available online with open licenses, better known as open educational resources (OER). Yet, despite the opportunities OER can have to contribute to high quality and accessible education, reuse appears to remain low in higher education. Numerous OER initiatives have been initiated across the globe, but many tamp out after the project funding ends. Sustainable practices with OER are still constrained and limited empirical research has been undertaken to investigate how structural adoption of OER in higher education can be enhanced. This dissertation aimed to examine the challenges of OER adoption in higher education to contribute to insights into sustainability issues many OER initiatives encounter. Four studies were designed: (1) teachers’ current practices with OER and their need for support to foster OER adoption, (2) teachers’ assessments of OERs on quality, (3) the role of brokers in cultivating an inter-institutional community on OER, and (4) teachers’ perceived value of an inter-institutional community. Recommendations for future research and OER practices are presented.