Open is an invitation: exploring use of open educational resources with Ontario post-secondary educators

During the 2017-2018 academic year, I worked as Program Manager for a government-funded post-secondary organization in Ontario, Canada. A core part of my professional role was creating awareness and increasing the use of open educational resources (OER) in partnership with Ontario educators. I conducted this work with the support of colleagues and OER advocates at public colleges and universities. Collectively, we focused on the use of OER as an opportunity to: (a) reduce the cost of post-secondary resources, (b) diversify the types of resources used in teaching and learning, and (c) explore opportunities to create assessments and activities that empowered learners as co-creators of knowledge. Alongside my professional role during this year, I engaged in a mixed-methods action research study using change management strategies and Ajzen’s (1991) Theory of Planned Behavior. The purpose of the study was to determine the usefulness of an awareness and support strategy designed to increase the use of OER among post-secondary educators in Ontario.

For many of the participants in the study (n = 38), OER were new elements in their teaching practice. I engaged in focused and meaningful dialogue with them as part of professional development sessions in order to fully explore their perspectives about use of OER. I chose two facilitation designs as the action of my action research. The first was a pair of face-to-face workshops, and the second was an open online course commonly called a MOOC (massive open online course). These were the interventions (and innovations) for the study. From the perspective of the participants, the awareness and support strategies were determined to be useful for increasing their use of OER.