Rob Nyland presented at the Open Education Conference Oct. 10-12 in Niagara Falls, NY.
His presentation was titled, “The Infrastructure of Openness: A Multi-Institutional Survey on OER Platform Use.” In this 15-minute lightning talk, Nyland shared his results of a multi-institutional survey designed to collect information about the use and selection of platforms for the distribution of open educational resources (OER). The results, from 33 institutions who responded, indicated that the learning management system was most frequently used to distribute OER content, followed by third-party courseware tools from companies by OpenStax, Lumen and Cengage.
Respondents also discussed their process in selecting an OER platform, with allowing faculty to decide as being the the most common theme in selection. Respondents also were asked to rank criteria used in the selection process. Integration with existing technologies, cost of the platform and ability to edit content ranked most highly. Nyland’s research was funded by his participation in the 2017-18 cohort of the Open Education Research Fellowship sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.