Abstract:

Open Educational Resources are considered to be an important component for the realisation of education which is of high-quality, inclusive and offers equal opportunities (UNESCO, 2012; 2017). But above all, they are a highly-promising approach in order to sustainably reduce costs in the education sector, without having to compromise in the quality of teaching (Hilton, 2016; Abramovich & McBride, 2018). Despite a broad academic discussion and extensive financial support the consolidation of OER in international education systems up until now has been much less effective than originally hoped (Jung, Sasaki & Latchem, 2016). One of the most important areas of activity to address this problem is viewed in the localisation of OER, which a large number of projects are already addressing - usually in the form of repositories and research tools available online (Santos-Hermosa, Ferran-Ferrer, & Abadal, 2017). Furthermore, Ebner and Schön (2017) discuss the need for education marketing in the context of OER. They recommend not limiting the budgeting of public OER projects to their creation, but rather to also allocate money in order to raise awareness about OER. Education marketing, according to Ebner and Schön (2017, p. 2), is absolutely essential in order to not only create OER – but also to make them known to as many people as possible who can use it. The application of marketing insights for OER appears logical, because marketing deals essentially with the efficient and needs-oriented creation of exchange processes (Meffert, Burmann & Kirchgeorg, 2015, p. 3). However, in our view an examination reduced to the advertisement of OER is insufficient. Marketing is not simply advertising, but rather a principle of consistent orientation to market and customer benefit (Bruhn, 2016). In the process promotion is just one possible area of activity and alongside the traditional systematisation of marketing instruments it is also important to take into account price, product and place.

The focus on promotion also observed time and again in other contexts is based on the implicit assumption that the free learning resources available on the ‘market’ are already sufficiently appropriate in order to satisfy ‘customer needs’ and perhaps even better than competing offers. It is said that all that is standing in the way of this is the insufficient awareness of the OER offers. However, there is currently a large number of teaching and learning resources available on the market to the two essential customer segments of OER, teachers and learners. This ranges from the conventional textbook to YouTube videos and interactive smartphone apps (Solis & JESS3, 2017). Competition exists between these offers. It remains unclear, whether a comparative net use benefit arises from the specific attributes of OER from a customer perspective, compared with alternative offers, which ultimately lead to intention of use.

In this article we discuss OER from a marketing perspective and advocate a customer-oriented approach. Do OER actually address the needs of customers and do noticeable comparative customer benefits arise from the core attributes of open licences and being free of charge? In order to answer these questions, we will take the conventional 4P approach and view OER under the aspects of price, product, place and promotion.

Keywords:

OER, Marketing, customer-orientation, acceptance.