ADOPTING AND ADAPTING: HOW FACULTY REUSE, REVISE, AND REMIX OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Abstract

This dissertation research consists of a case study of how Open Educational Resources (OER) are revised and reused in online courses by faculty at Georgia State University (GSU). GSU is an institution of higher education which promotes OER use and which has access to a repository of OER. This research examined a related set of issues for OER reuse. One concern was how revisable the materials in an OER repository affiliated with GSU are. Another concern was to examine how faculty actually reuse, revise, and remix OER in their online courses. A final concern was to look at whether the Community of Practice model describes this context in which OER are reused. Data collection followed a mixed-methods approach. A questionnaire regarding practices with OER reuse and revision was circulated to faculty teaching online and using OER. Furthermore, nine faculty were interviewed regarding their practices reusing OER in their online courses. The third method assessed the revisability of objects in the OER repository itself. Finally, this investigation examined the affordances of the organization maintaining the repository as well as related documentation to assess whether it can be described as a community of practice. This research found that while a plurality of the contents of the repository were scored as Mostly Revisable, a majority of the contents included elements that marked them as only Somewhat or Not Revisable. From the questionnaire and interviews it was found that faculty take diverse strategies to include OER in their online courses. Faculty find and remix open resources from a variety of sources. Some generate and share their own OER. Links to open web resources were a significant component of OER for most questionnaire and interview respondents and about half (52.5%) of the materials in the repository. Faculty also took a variety of different approaches to revising and remixing resources and scaffolding them in their courses. On the final question, about the context in which collaboration occurs, it was found that there is evidence that at least some departments can be described as functioning as a community of practice when it comes to using OER.