The Babson OER Survey and the Future of OER Adoption

The Babson OER Survey is incredible. If you care at all about OER, you absolutely need to read it. Then go read what Phil has written at e-Literate and 20 Million Minds. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

The popular media will no doubt focus on the awareness findings in the report. On the most liberal measure of awareness, 65.9% faculty are completely unaware of OER. On a stricter measure, 73.6% of faculty are completely unaware. Phil characterizes these awareness findings as bad news for OER advocates in his 20MM article. He’s right, but for a far deeper reasons than he suggests. These awareness findings are bad news for OER advocates because it means there is still a huge window for traditional publishers to organize a massive FUD campaign against OER. If publisher’s can control faculty members’ first exposure to OER and attempt to control the messaging around OER, there may still be a chance for publishers to turn the tide back against OER. And make no mistake, the report clearly shows that the tide has already turned in favor of OER among faculty who are aware of OER. To me, the biggest takeaway from the Babson survey is this question – who will introduce the remaining 66%-75% of this country’s faculty to OER? Haters or advocates?

On the 20MM website, Phil characterizes the following graph as bad news for OER proponents because cost appears at the very bottom of the criteria faculty consider when selecting educational resources:

Selection Criteria

(Well, at least that explains why textbooks are so expensive – less than 3% of faculty consider cost an important factor to consider during the adoption process!)

The “bad news for OER” conclusion is easy to reach if you consider cost savings to be the only significant benefit that OER bring to the table. But of course there’s far more to the OER story than cost savings.

For example, the most important selection criterion identified by faculty in the graph above is proven efficacy. If you review the data tables on page 38 of the report, you’ll see that when faculty who are aware of OER are asked to compare the proven efficacy of OER to traditional textbooks, 16.5% of faculty say OER are superior while only 15.3% say that traditional materials are superior. In other words, once faculty become aware of OER, OER beat traditional textbooks on faculty’s most important selection criteria.

Realizing this, of course I thought we should look at the correlation between where faculty rank the importance of selection criteria and how OER and traditional materials do on those criteria. The following graph plots the percentage of faculty who rate a criterion as Important on the X axis, and the percentage of faculty who rate OER (blue) or traditional materials (red) Superior on the Y axis. (Excel file with raw data)

image001

The trend lines in this graph show the correlation between how important faculty think each selection criterion is and how superior each type of educational material is on that criterion. The news in this graph truly isn’t good for OER – there’s a strong negative correlation between the importance of selection criteria and the superiority of OER on those criteria, while traditional materials have a strong positive correlation with importance. However, a lot of the action in this graph and correlation is driven by outlier criteria like cost, which less than 3% of faculty think are important.

What would happen if we plot these values again, but only include the top half of the selection criteria as rated by importance? In other words, what if we only look at the selection criteria that at least 14% of faculty agree are important? It becomes a very different story:

image002

When you look at the correlation between superiority of resource types and the selection criteria faculty care most about, faculty perceptions of OER correlate positively, while faculty perceptions of traditional textbooks actually correlate negatively with the criteria they self-report as being most important. Neither of these correlations is incredibly strong, but the directions flip-flop nonetheless.

This is why, as Phil writes on e-Literate,

Once you present OER to faculty, there’s a real affinity and alignment of OER with faculty values. Jeff [Seaman, co-author of report] was surprised more about the potential of OER than he had thought going in. Unlike other technology-based subjects of BSRG studies, there is almost no suspicion of OER. Everything else BSRG has measured has had strong minority views from faculty against the topic (online learning in particular), with incredible resentment detected. This resistance or resentment is just not there with OER. It is interesting for OER, with no organized marketing plan per se, to have no natural barriers from faculty perceptions.

Combine the fact that OER are superior to traditional materials on the selection criteria faculty care most about with this quote from the Babson report:

“When faculty members that are not current users of open educational resources were asked if they expected to be using OER in the next three years, a majority (77.5%) reported that they either expected to use OER or would consider consider using OER.” (p. 31)

Many people think my prediction that “80% of all US general education courses will be using OER instead of publisher materials by 2018” is crazy talk. But it isn’t. It’s not crazy at all. OER align better with faculty’s top adoption priorities than traditional materials do, and the majority of current non-users will try OER between now and 2017:

3 years

Things are looking very good for OER. Which means that things are looking very good for students – let’s not forget which is the means and which is the end here.

While things are looking good, advocates of improving student learning and increasing affordability can’t sit back. Remember the quote (disputedly) attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” As I warned at the very top, the awareness findings of the Babson survey indicate that publishers may still have an opportunity to protect their market through a campaign of mockery, scorn, and other FUD – somewhere in the transition between Gandhi’s laughing and fighting. Now is the time for advocates of improving student learning and increasing affordability – and hence, advocates of OER – to be on the offensive with honest, positive messages about OER.

5 thoughts on “The Babson OER Survey and the Future of OER Adoption”

  1. Great analysis – I hadn’t thought of doing the correlation thing. I also think you have a very important question on “who will introduce the remaining 66%-75% of this country’s faculty to OER?”

  2. __I found this survey very interesting too. Hopefully this survey series will continue and the data set expanded to include Faculty – Student user-comparisons of specific existing ©ER vs OER resources – ideally including examples of both Faculty-customized ©ER and OER resources. As an aside, I’m wondering if I’ve been missing signs that publishers use FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt – as a tactic in their sales, marketing, public relations . . . Nicole Allen likely knows something about that.
    [P.S. perhaps it would improve understanding of the correlations you’ve discovered by adding descriptive labels to your graphics]

  3. Thanks for the analysis. I think the question about “who will introduce the remaining 66%-75% of this country’s faculty to OER?” is really more about content discovery in general than any particular organization (although an organization or organizations could certainly reshape the discovery of learning content in the market). The issues that must be solved over the coming years are related to making it as easy for faculty to discover and use open content as it is for them to discover and use commercial publisher content. I believe this is a a solution that will actually come about in the next 2-3 years and my predictions from 2012 are similar to yours (although I extended the timeline to 2020).

  4. Regarding your comment: “To me, the biggest takeaway from the Babson survey is this question –
    who will introduce the remaining 66%-75% of this country’s faculty to
    OER? Haters or advocates?”. I was just listening to an interview with Marianne Williamson who was describing the type of people/advocates it takes to make a significant change/shift. Reminds me a lot of the critical mass that is currently working in the field of Open- not necessarily the majority, but a critical mass that will slowly begin to be the growth of change.
    “What you need is a critical mass, you don’t need the the majority. It is always a small group of people usually considered radicals, by the status quo, of their time, who stand on an idea that is truly aligned with the ages.”

  5. My name is Kevin Yokoyama. I am a math instructor at College of the Redwoods. I am currently serving on the California Open Education Resources Council. Our council consists of nine faculty members from the University of California, California State University, and California Community College systems (serving over one million students).

    We are in the process of building the California Open Source Digital Library. You can get more info about our work at the following site:

    http://www.cool4ed.org/about.html

    We are currently working on finding or creating OER textbooks for 50 highly enrolled courses taught in the UC, CSU, and CCC system. Faculty who choose to adopt these textbooks for use in their courses will give their students access to high quality, peer reviewed open source textbooks at no or very low cost. We are currently in the process of reaching out to the thousands of faculty members in the UC, CSU, and CCC systems to encourage them to adopt an OER textbook for use in the courses they teach. We hope that this outreach will help us move toward reaching critical mass.

    You can find us on Facebook at (please give us a “like”):

    https://www.facebook.com/CaliforniaOpenEducationalResourcesCouncil

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