Access to good quality educational materials has been a major problem for teachers and students in the developing countries. Even in the developed world the cost of textbooks are prohibitive. In recent times, Open Educational Resources (OER) have emerged as one of the innovative teaching-learning practices. Educational institutions are taking note of this innovation, and trying to leverage its advantages. While teachers are major producers of educational materials in the form of class notes, handouts, presentations, articles, books, etc, many do not share these with others. This is primarily due to lack of understanding of copyright and open licensing issues. With the emergence of Creative Commons as an instrument for facilitating open sharing of educational material, more teaching and learning resources should be available as OER.
Most educational resources are prepared by teachers to help their students in specific contexts, and availability of these openly would foster knowledge generation. Thus, it is important to understand teachers’ perceptions about OER to facilitate development of OER in diverse fields of knowledge. In this context, Commonwealth of Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) is conducting a research supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada to understand “Teachers’ Attitudes, Motivations and conceptions of Quality and Barriers to Open Educational Resources in India”. In the research process we have developed research instruments including the Attitude Towards OER (ATOER) Scale and an interview schedule to gather data within the framework of Activity Theory. We have also developed a workshop based methodology for data collection through interaction with the participant respondents.
This paper is about the qualitative data collection methodology adopted in our work through the workshops. In this paper we will present rationale, the workshop design, methods and some of preliminary findings from the workshops to understand the perceptions of teachers towards creation and use of OER.
Social learning theory (SLT) suggests that the teacher’s social environment and their perceptions are the prime factors that determine their level of contribution in knowledge. In addition, evidence from research studies in the area of OER creation and use, also revealed that perceptions and perspective of teachers towards OER impact their engagements with OER. They develop new knowledge, perceptions and attitude towards OER gradually (Karunanayaka & Naidu, 2005, 2012).
In the process of research, we have conducted two out of our four planned workshops on “Open Educational Resources for Development”. The objectives of the workshops were to collect both qualitative and quantitative data to examine teacher’s attitudes, their motivations and barriers related to creation and use of OER and to analyze their perception of quality of OER. The nature of the research workshop was participative and focused on assessing constructs of the research apart from providing basic introduction to OER to the participants. The workshop used the “Just a Minute” (JAM) interactive discussion strategy, participant panel discussion, and snow-balling techniques apart from presentations on OER. The participants’ views were recorded in these sessions to use these along with the other qualitative and quantitative data collected for the research.
Findings from the two workshops reveal that participants have positive attitudes towards OER. According to them, knowledge circulation is shifting from “bounded to boundless” due to the creation and use of OER providing them with an opening to the world of knowledge. Teachers expressed that developing OER itself is a motivation to share. The creation and use of OER encourages them to share and further create more OER. Some teachers believed that uploading of publications to Web helps receive increased citation, and this is motivating. Participants in the workshops indicated that the interaction and format of the workshop created lot of encouragement and motivation to contribute towards OER. Participants listed personal barriers such as lack of knowledge, lack of awareness of Creative Commons, poor technology access, while institutional barriers such as poor infrastructure, poor digital library, lack of technical support, lack of web-based materials, poor planning and management, lack of administrative support, poor remuneration, and lack of capacity building to create OER, were identified as the common barriers. Participants indicated that flexibility, accessibility, up-to-date-ness, and provision to modify/ adapt in localized context are quality indicators of OER.