OCWC Conference 2012 OCW Creation on 4 Continents: Recent Surveys of Faculty and Students Joseph Hardin, Mujo Research 1

What Studies Are About  Conditions for building local “Communities of Contribution,” i.e., local OCW sites.  How do faculty and students think about OCW?  How familiar are they with OCW sites?  Would faculty contribute their materials to an OCW site?  Would students contribute their time to help prepare, clear OCW materials? 2

The Surveys Queensland University, Brisbane, Australia Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain Aristóteles Cañero, University of Cape Town, South Africa Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, cheryl.hodgkinson- Glenda Cox, University of Michigan, USA Joseph Hardin, Danubius University of Galati, Romania Severin Bumbaru, Andy Pucă, 3

Studying early or non-OCW Schools  Faculty and students would only, or primarily only, be familiar with OCW sites at other schools, not their own.  This is unlike most studies at MIT, which are able to ask faculty and students what they think about their own site, or how they use it.  And it is different from studies of OCW site users, the ‘pop-up’ surveys of active sites, like MIT and Tufts have done.  And it is different from user/learner evaluation studies such as Open U and CMU are doing. 4

Contribution Studies  Let’s call these kinds of studies “Contribution” or “Creation” studies, vs User or Evaluation studies.  There will be overlap in these types, especially Contribution and User studies, as the OCW sites develop at the local school  Key research questions are: “Who would contribute to the local OCW site?” “Why would they contribute?”  These studies are meant to help understand the faculty whose contributions are the foundation of an OCW effort.  And, ultimately, to use that understanding to build a “culture of contribution” among those instructors, and local OCW efforts and sites 5

Routes to Institutional OCW There are great institutional and individual benefits to a comprehensive OCW effort, however:  Relatively few institutions around the world have a comprehensive OCW effort  Funding to jump-start projects has largely dried up  Understanding the foundations and distribution of support for OCW locally has become important  Building a case internally has become necessary  Faculty willingness to contribute to OCW is a key part of this case  Hence the value of local surveys 6

Survey Samples and Response Rates The surveys reported on here vary in their sample strategies and their sample sizes, and in their response rates. In the University of Michigan survey for 2010 “all instructional faculty were invited to respond (n=7,626). There was a 13% response rate to the survey (n=1,017). A random sample of 25% of the student body, stratified by college/department, was invited to respond (n=9,095). There was a 16% response rate to the survey (n=1,415).” (Lonn & Teasley2010) For the 2010 survey all UCT staff were invited to respond (n=3170). This total includes academic and administrative staff. There was a 6% response rate to the survey (n=174). All students were invited to do the survey (n=24,887). There was a 10% response rate to the survey (n=2474). The 2011 University of Queensland survey used a random sample of staff classified as having teaching as their focus, where sample size was Complete responses were received from 189 respondents, which gives a response rate of 12.6%. The student survey was sent to three random samples of students where combined sample size was completed surveys were obtained, giving a response rate of 8.1%. The Universidad Politecnica de Valencia survey used a random sample of 30% of the instructors (n=800) who were invited to respond, and a random sample of 5% of the students (n=1,920) stratified by college who were invited as well across the set of OCW questions. They had responses from 230 instructors and 186 students; which resulted in response rates of 28.7% for instructors and 9.7% for students. For the Danubius survey 1953 students and 98 faculty were invited to respond. The studentresponse rate was 9,06% (177 students responded) and instructor response rate was 24,49% (24 faculty responded). 7

8 Familiarity with OCW – Teaching Staff

Familiarity with OCW - Students 9

Instructor Potential Use 10

Student Potential Use 11

Would Encourage Others to Publish OCW – Teaching Staff 12

Faculty and Students Like the Idea of OCW Even though familiarity with OCW is low in most cases, teaching staff and students are receptive to the idea of using and, as we shall see, publishing, OCW materials. 13

Intention to Contribute/Publish – Teaching Staff 14

Intention to Contribute Time to Help Publish OCW - Students 15

Should Institution Support OCW Effort?

Contribution 2010 GSI Tenure- track ClinicalLecturer 52% 48%42% 40% 17

50% 46%48% 34% Contribution 2009 GSI Tenure- track ClinicalLecturer % = Agree + Strongly Agree 18

Contribution Willingness VS Time as Faculty UM 2010 survey More Willing To Publish OCW More Time as Faculty 19

Generational? UM-2009 Holds within categories of Tenure- track, Clinical, Lecturer 20

Familiarity/Contribute  Statistically significant, increasingly positive correlation between familiarity and intention to contribute for Tenure-track, Clinical, Lecturer faculty (older instructors)  Controlling for age/time as instructor  This is probably good. Could be higher, but the more older faculty know about OCW, the more likely they are to contribute.  And young instructors like the idea when presented with it regardless of familiarity  No statistically significant correlation with intention to contribute among GSI (younger) 21

Widening Investigations of Open Activities  Open content, OCW, is only one type of OER, or open practice undertaken by faculty  Open access publishing, open textbook creation, open data archiving, open book and monograph publication open learning object creation, are all examples of other open activities of faculty  What do we know about how faculty think about these types of open activities, and what do we know about the relations among them? 22

Open Access Survey Quex Open Access (OA) publishing includes the practices of: a) publishing in journals that make their contents available on the web to anyone, without requiring readers or their institutions to subscribe to the journal; and b) the placing by authors of copies of their articles, either before or after peer review, on an open web site of their own, such as their homepage, or an open institutional web site, such as a disciplinary, departmental or library web site. 23

2010 OA Questions Please rate your agreement with the statements below:  I am familiar with OA publishing.  I place pre-print versions of my journal articles on personal or institutional open sites.  I place copies of my published, peer reviewed articles on personal or institutional open sites after publication in a journal.  I think that OA publishing is becoming more important for the generation and dissemination of knowledge in general.  OA journals are important in my field.  I use OA journals in my research.  I plan on publishing in an OA journal in the future. 24

25

Open Access Perspectives Very Discipline-Specific In looking at these results we need to be cognizant of other research on OA, specifically the CSHE study (Harley, 2010) that pointed out the extreme disciplinary-specific nature of much OA activity. What the CSHE study found was that for those faculty in disciplines where OA was already regularly used, there was much higher acceptance of OA publishing. This was reflected in our results, with medical and natural sciences faculty participating in OA more than others. Combine this with the findings from Mann, 2009 that while many faculty find OA a good idea, they also look to the accepted journals in their area as most important publishing venues, whether those journals are OA or not, and we see faculty being reasonably self- interested. The results here also show a belief that OA has a rising importance among many of our respondents, and we find that there is some relationship between beliefs in the growing importance of OA and the intention to contribute OCW materials, but there is more work needed to understand relations between these beliefs and OCW. 26

Request for Participation Join the effort to research open scholarship activities by surveying your instructors and students 9 schools in Europe, USA, Africa and Australia have now administered the survey to their institutions (that I know about) Others are in various stages of planning and implementation Universities that have already given the survey are planning follow-ups, so longitudinal data can be developed Developing protocols to make the data from such studies open is very difficult, since this is human subject data, but efforts are underway The website at MujoResearch.org has info and provides help to anyone interested in doing studies like this on their own campus Contact me at 27

Expanding OCW Data Base  Questions from UM OCW study available at  You can use these questions and administer a study on your own campus - as Sakai institutions, such as UPV, have done, whether or not you use Sakai:  I can help with your local survey and/or set up a survey you can have your subjects link/click to  As in MISI studies, it is important to cover human subject review issues, and lay the groundwork to share data under CC0 license  I’m setting up a site with results and data from as many institutions as I can, and with results from related surveys, such as use surveys; contribute yours – see mujoresearch.org 28

Quick Recap  Familiarity is modest at some schools, higher at others…  There is a considerable base of support among teaching staff at all schools for OCW contribution  Students at all schools express willingness to help with OCW; so student support for production is there if it can be channeled  Faculty rate well, though with some variation, in Willingness to Use, Encourage Others to Use OCW materials  Different elements of teaching faculty support differently  There is a generational element to it, though that is certainly not all of the picture; contribution falls off with time teaching (age), and while familiarity is lower among younger teachers at UM, willingness to contribute higher  OA support is different, though related, and relations are discipline-specific  You can contribute to the research by doing surveys at your own institution– please do – help is available 29

MujoResearch.org A site for OCW/OER survey research support and support of research use in local OCW efforts Just starting to populate; check back as we develop; contribute.

Expanding Notions of “Accessibility” OCW/OER and accessibility efforts can go hand in hand, in our thinking and in campus efforts They approach different aspects of being able to use educational materials Having access to the materials of courses without limitations of availability and legal reuse (OCW) Having materials be accessible to everyone, without limitations from medium, format or design (IncDes) Legal reuse can often mean ability to reformat, reorganize, redesign and recreate contents to make them approachable by everyone The MujoResearch.org website will look at overlaps between 'open' and 'inclusive' technologies and efforts This is of increasing interest, especially as I continue to age

From OCWC 2012 Paper The author has a developing interest in those places where open scholarship activities intersect with problems of accessibility, resulting in an expansion of the notion of “open” to include creating ways of overcoming barriers to the use of open content that stem from the creation of materials that a significant proportion of the population simply can't see, hear or navigate through. There are a number of places where concentration on notions of “open” in one area, can realize increased inclusivity in another area. The use of open copyright licenses, for instance, translates into increased ability for transformation of materials into forms that are accessible to a wider population of learners. Likewise, some approaches to the design of materials emphasizing accessibility, and hence the inclusion of wider communities in the use of those materials, can expand the impact of open contents. Research on the mutually reinforcing aspects of these approaches would be valuable, if only to surface areas of mutual interest. It could investigate places in institutional contexts where efforts to provide OCW, for instance, might benefit from collaboration with accessibility efforts, and vice versa. We do not know how faculty, and supporting educational technologists in our institutions, for example, might view or contribute to efforts that explicitly approached such dual goals. Would the combination be viewed as creating further cost barriers, or providing significant off-setting benefits? How cognizant are institutional members of emerging technologies and methods for incorporating cross-platform and individualizable content in the development or translation of educational materials, such as the Fluid Project ( and how do open notions of return on value feed into these understandings? If one goal of providing open content is to increase the reach of the authors' influence, do authors see access to, for example, the increasing population of aging learners a real benefit? Do their institutions?

Thanks Joseph Hardin, Mujo Research, Papers on surveys conducted at: University of Michigan, USA; Universidad Politecnica Valencia, Spain; Universitatea Danubius-Galati, Romania University Cape Town, S.A. and University of Queensland available at: Mujoresearch.org This presentation is CC-BY 33