The Open Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project conducted a survey to find out about the level of awareness of open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP) among Higher Education (HE) institutions in Scotland.
Key findings
- Awareness of OER among Scottish HE educators is generally low
- Awareness of Creative Commons (CC) licenses is lower than public domain or copyright (but awareness of all license types is higher than awareness of OER in general)
- Most educators share teaching materials via their institution’s virtual learning environment (VLE) but few share them openly online
- Lack of awareness is perceived as the highest barrier to adoption of OER
- Scottish HE educators use OER to broaden the range of materials available to their students
- Staff who attend continuing professional development (CPD) opportunities are more likely to engage with OER and OEP
Recommendations
- Efforts to raise awareness of OER and OEP among HE teaching staff in Scotland need to be scaled up
- Opportunities for development around the use of OER in the curriculum, and especially the affordances and limitations of open licenses, should be provided
- Institutions should consider the possibility of ‘opening up’ their VLEs, and establish how to best support and encourage their teaching staff to share resources openly
The full interim report is available for download here.