This post follows the release of Data Report 2013-2015: Informal Learners and Data Report 2013-2015: Formal Learners

To recap:

In 2013 the Hewlett-funded OER Research Hub Project created a bank of survey questions to test eleven hypotheses related to the impact of OER use on teaching and learning. In the two years that followed, a number of bespoke surveys were designed and administered in collaboration with the Flipped Learning NetworkVital Signs, the Community Colleges Consortium for Open Educational ResourcesOpenLearnSaylor AcademyOpenStaxBCcampusSiyavulaSchool of Open-P2PU and CoPILOT. Responses from each survey were then combined into a larger dataset to allow for comparison and in-depth examination. The final dataset is comprised of 7,498 cases –44.4% informal learners, 28.4% formal learners, 24.3% educators and 2.9% librarians.

The current report, third and final of the series, presents a frequencies analysis of responses from educators: 32.3% teaching in school/K12, 16.7% in FE and 25.2% in HE.

Some key findings:

  • 46.5% of educators agree or strongly agree that OER broaden the range of teaching and learning methods they use
  • 43.9% of educators believe that OER allow them to better accommodate diverse learner needs
  • A majority of educators perceive the impact of OER on student learning as increased interest in the subject taught, increased satisfaction, independence and self-reliance rather than improved student grades
  • Relevance, reputation and clear learning objectives guide educators’ selection of open content
  • Content needs to be relevant, high-quality and discoverable for educators to adopt OER

Educators_Report

The full dataset has been anonymised and is available for download under a CC BY license as a csv file or excel file.

We hope these reports are useful to those interested in the OER field. If you have any feedback, please leave a comment below.

Featured Image by justgrimesCC BY-SA 2.0