A Typology of Educators Using Open Educational Resources for Teaching

Abstract

With Open Educational Resources (OER) teachers have free access to high-quality educational resources and open licenses to prepare, enhance, or supplement their teaching practice. Yet adoption rates are understood to be low and teachers face many challenges when they want to use OER. In a survey study, 1819 educators from various educational sectors reported their use of OER, the types of OER they used, the purposes of the OER used, the challenges they face and the impact they see. Most teachers adapt OER to fit their own needs and considerably less teachers create, publish or add OER. The main challenges relate to finding resources that are relevant, up-to-date and of good quality, time issues and – to a lesser extent- acceptance at the workplace and institutional support. A typology of OER users has been developed with five types of OER users. Implications for practice for each type of educators are formulated.