Teaching Experience on Faculty Members’ Perceptions about the Attributes of Open Educational Resources (OER)

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of online teaching experience on faculty members’ perceptions about attributes of OER. Rogers’ (2003) attributes of innovation theory was adopted as the theoretical base in this study. And questionnaire survey was carried out at Zhejiang University (ZJU) in China. 360 faculty members from ZJU were randomly invited to complete a questionnaire. The results of data analysis found that (1) only small portion of surveyed faculty members had online teaching experience while there was large portions of participants indicated that they would be willing to share their educational resources on the ZJU website or on outside websites; (2) the majority of the participants tended to agree that there is a relative advantage and compatibility of OER, though they were more neutral regarding the complexity, trialability and observability of OER; (3) online teaching experiences significantly impacted faculty members’ perceived trialability and observability of OER. Based on the finding, the study suggested that universities may carry out more initiatives efforts to increase faculty members’ online teaching experience and to improve faculty members’ perceived attributes of OER.