My post this week is based on the following article, " Recognizing and Overcoming Obstacles: What It Will Take to Realize the Potential of OER," by Julie Irvine, Royce Kimmons, and Jacob Rogers. They identified three main barriers to OER adoption: perception of quality, accessibility & usability, and perceived time commitment.
Perception of Quality
It is well known in the education community that OER materials are perceived as low quality when compared with their counterparts. This low-quality perception is a major obstacle to adoption. Some tips they gave to improve the quality of OER materials are:
Providing faculty access to editors and graphic designers would make it easier for them to produce these materials.
Platforms for hosting OER can provide content creators with easy tools and friendly instructions.
Teachers may invite students to participate in creating, improving, and evaluating open educational resources.
Accessibility & Usability
According to Irvine et al., there are a number of accessibility and usability issues with the OER materials mentioned. These issues include design, compatibility, and limitations in the video transcript. Some ways to overcome these problems are:
Prior to publishing OER on a website, creators should work closely with software developers experienced in these technologies to resolve system-level accessibility and usability issues.
Platforms can provide creators with simple tools to fix these issues
Level-appropriate content
Perceived Time Commitment
A faculty member's responsibilities include publishing in peer-reviewed journals. The time they spend writing and publishing OER content does not count towards tenure requirements, so their jobs are at risk. According to Irvine et al., OER publications can have a more significant impact than traditional publications, so universities should consider changing their expectations of publications and counting those that are more impactful, including OER publications. One advice:
If you're interested in creating OER materials, push your university for a change in the tenure track requirements.
These are great tips for overcoming barriers to adopting openly licensed materials. Students and faculty will benefit greatly from OER if we can overcome these barriers
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