Open Educational Resources and Institutional Repositories: Roles, Challenges, and Opportunities for Libraries

Abstract

The adoption of digital-born, Open Educational Resources (OER) has been proven to improve student retention and learning outcomes, and OER has the flexibly to support multiple modalities of instruction. Institutional Repositories are uniquely situated to act as a platform to support and distribute content that can be created collaboratively between faculty researchers as well as students. However, faculty are still largely hesitant to adopt OER sources for a variety of reasons, not least among them being a lack of exposure and understanding of the potential benefits for both faculty and students in keeping curriculum affordable, up-to-date, and nimble through media-rich, annotated platforms. This study seeks to provide a model for institutions to adopt in using their open-institutional repositories to support broader OER adoption and use across institutions. A mixed-method case study will present results from faculty-student surveys and institutional data to provide a framework for the best practices in raising awareness among faculty, in outlining the benefits for students, and in supporting programs via library services.