There still appears to be confusion among faculty
members when it comes to open educational resources (OER). According to a 2014 Babson Report, 75% of the more than 2,000 faculty members it surveyed said they
were unaware of OER, with 67% unable to provide the right explanation of what OER are.
While instructors expressed interest in using OER, finding
high-quality resources that fit the goals of the course was an issue. Nearly
60% of the instructors who said they were aware of OER claimed locating appropriate
material was a barrier to its use.
“The lack of a catalog and the difficulty of finding what
is needed are the most-often-cited barriers,” wrote the authors of the report
Opening the Curriculum: Open Educational Resources in U.S. Education. “All
three of the most-mentioned barriers are related to the ease of finding appropriate
material.”
A solution for finding OER content could be just around
the corner. Russ Walker, a former software designer and faculty member at DeVry
University-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, created OER Assistant to “semi-automate”
the selection of OER for himself and his colleagues.
Using OER Assistant, instructors are able to copy and
paste a learning objective of a course into a form and the software then uses
key phrases to search OER repositories, such as Merlot II,
OER Commons, and
OpenStax CNX. The software
then ranks the top possibilities.
It’s still possible the user will have to work through
the hundreds of results, but OER Assistant does push to the top rankings used
by OER repositories, when available, and key phrases it finds the most often.
“I’ve just pulled together some available resources and
put them to a particular task,” Walker said in an article in Campus Technology. “I think this is something that many folks could easily
re-create on their own, maybe with their own particular tweak to how it
displays the results or what repositories are searched and so on.”
