Motivation and OER Adoption

Katherine Williams, Rachel Messer, and Eric Werth from the University of Pikeville presented at the 2021 Lilly Conference online on “Faculty Motivation and Concern During a Campus-wide Free Textbook Initiative.” Their objectives included identifying areas of faculty concern from transitions to free materials and what faculty found motivating and demotivating. They defined Open Educational Resources (OERs) as “teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute” citing Open Education. They also recognized that copyrighted but freely accessible online materials, public domain, and library resources purchased by the library are not OERs. I appreciate the clarification as we now often mention OERs and not all may actually be subject to 5R activities. Werth explained self-determination theory as consisting of three basic human needs that drive motivation: competence, relatedness, and autonomy, citing the work of Deci and Ryan 2000. Self-determination theory says that there are four extrinsic regulatory processes: external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, integrated regulation (in order from less to more autonomy); intrinsic motivation involves intrinsic regulation.

The study the presenters described was conducted at a four-year liberal arts institution with ~1,000 undergraduates. The institution is open-enrollment, predominantly white, and 38% of first-generation students are enrolled. For the first stage of the study, they administered the Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ-A) used to assess faculty at the institution in preparation for interviews. The stage one data was used to identify four themes identified by PCA. Then, five individuals were selected from each group for semi-structured recorded interviews. Werth described the quantitative aspects of the survey: their scores for self-determination theory or faculty. I thought it was interesting how they displayed the sample min and max and the reported instrument min and max. Werth explained the difference between motivation and value that are often used interchangeably. Characteristics faculty valued included financial benefit to students upon adoption of OERs. Financial benefits to students and the need to review new content were mentioned by faculty as what motivated them to adopt OERs. Several faculty mentioned that OER adoption was “required.” Williams mentioned that anger/frustration from faculty seemed to come from limited choices or wanting to choose materials. To mitigate faculty concerns, Messer recommended defining the goals of the initiative, collaborating with library staff, recognizing that one size doesn’t fit all (some fields may have more options)… defining the narrative from administration, and including collective terminology. I like the idea of collective terminology. These suggestions may help with the RLOE initiatives. While the study is still ongoing, the presenters shared valuable notes and questions to bring about more autonomy when using OERs.

Table with dozens of books spread out.
What textbooks and texts are used in the courses you teach? What was a potential barrier, and what motivated you to adopt an OER? These were questions addressed by the speakers of this Lilly 2021 session. Photo by Ekrulila on Pexels.com