The Infrastructure of Openness: A Multi-Institutional Survey on OER Platform Use

Recently, there has been a lot of conversation regarding the role of platforms and courseware in the delivery of Open Educational Resources. Some of this conversation has been tied to recent announcements from publishers to deliver OER in their own proprietary platforms. Despite this conversation, there has been a dearth of empirical research looking at how institutions select technologies to support OER. In this session, we will report on a research study designed to help us better understand institutional uses of OER platforms. We did this by creating a survey distributed through Twitter and various OER-related email lists. The 33 institutions that responded to the survey give us detailed insight into the types of technologies being used to deliver OER, how that technology is selected, and levels of satisfaction with the technology’s ability to support the key tenets of OER. Equipped with the results of this project, we can have more informed conversations about the role of platforms in the OER movement. Our hope is that this information will help us to be more strategic about how we use technology to support OER at our individual institutions.