We conducted a study on the use of Open Educational Resources in Computer Science disciplines. Open educational resources (OER) include instructional materials, tools, and media used for teaching and learning that are free from copyright restrictions or are publicly licensed for anyone to use, adapt, and redistribute.
While open educational resources grow in popularity, it is difficult for users to find open content they need. Therefore, one of the goals of our study was to better understand what tools and strategies Computer Science faculty use to find open educational resources. Understanding how and with what tools users discover learning resources can inform the design of infrastructures for supporting better OER discoverability..
A SurveyMonkey online survey was created for the study. The survey consisted of fifteen questions - the first three targeting demographic information and the remaining focusing on OER discovery. An invitation for participation was sent through SIGCSE, OCW/OER, UK OER, research mailing lists, LinkedIn groups, selected departments, and individual emails. A total of 374 instructors responded.
A quantitative analysis of the responses can be found here. (Please click the "View" button to see the free-text answers of questions 9, 10, 12, 14 and 15.)
A discussion of the results of the survey can be found in:
Dichev C., Dicheva D (2012) Is It Time to Change the OER Repositories Role? In Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries - JCDL'12, June 10-14, Washington DC, pp. 31-34. (Download from the ACM Digital Library.)
Sincere thanks to all colleagues who spared time to respond to our survey.