Abstract:

Open educational resources enrich teaching and learning processes but their use and reuse is also bringing new challenges for teachers, such as finding appropriate learning materials, minding copyright, technological issues, adequate use in real learning environment etc. Are teachers using open educational resources? Do they produce them and collaborate with colleagues and students? These questions were main motivation for conducting survey among teachers.

In this paper results of survey completed by 595 teachers mainly in secondary and tertiary educational institutions in Croatia will be presented. The survey instrument used was developed during ExplOERer project - Supporting OER re-use in learning ecosystems and for this purpose translated into Croatian. In the first of two stages teachers were invited to complete questionnaire available online and in the second stage teachers that expressed their interest for open educational resources were interviewed via online platform. The survey was conducted from November 2018 till March 2019.

According to their job role, three major group of participants were identified; vocational educators (n = 258), university level teachers (n = 172) and school teachers (n = 134). Participants were predominantly females (73 %, n = 437). Median age of participants was 41. The results indicated that regarding activities related to development of new educational materials and collaboration with colleagues, teachers do collaborate but also observe or replicate colleagues’ strategies to design a resource or solve a curriculum-related problem. Regarding the need for designing a new course or lesson results confirmed that university level teachers are more often developing new materials in comparison with school and vocational teachers. In the context of openness it was interesting to note that 48 % (n = 288) of teachers are considering sharing their resources with colleagues. With regards to seeking information about copyright status of learning resources; in 32 % (n = 193) teachers did so very often, but 20 % (n = 118) of them never sought copyright information.

The collected data showed there is still need to help teachers to explore the benefits of developing, using and reusing open educational resources. Our institution is providing infrastructure and services for higher education institutions in Croatia actively contributes by developing learning resources available under Creative Commons licence (OER), providing free online courses for teachers about use of ICT in education and by developing and implementing a central repository of learning objects in DABAR (Digital Academic Archives and Repositories).

Keywords:

Open educational resources, teachers.