Publication Date
Fall 10-30-2019
Document Type
Poster
Abstract
According to recent literature and research, in-service teacher awareness of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Creative Commons licenses continues to be uneven and relatively low. Providing OER education while teachers are focused on learning in their degree-granting programs could be a sustainable long-term strategy to build awareness of OER with PK-12 instructors. A small research team, consisting of two Librarians, an Instructional Designer, and an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at two higher education institutions, designed a survey and intervention for pre-service teachers to measure and increase their levels of OER awareness. The purpose of the survey is to explore the overall level of OER awareness and understanding of copyright and licensing which pre-service teachers have attained through their university courses, external practicums, and student teaching placements. The survey results showed a lack of awareness, knowledge, and exposure to OER and copyright. These results prompted the creation of focused programming designed to expand student and faculty exposure to OER concepts. The focused programming involved creating a lesson plan for upper-level education courses on copyright, licensing, and open education resources that are available for PK-12 teachers. This is a continuation of a long-term study to explore the idea that providing focused OER education to pre-service teachers can be a sustainable strategy to increase diffusion of open education awareness throughout the PK-12 community. Attendees will be able to examine the results of our survey, explore our focused interventions, and use these as models for their own programming. This topic has broad applicability to librarianship and teaching as the majority of colleges and universities have teacher training programs. Due to the national climate of school funding, creative means for procuring instructional materials will be an asset for these future educators. While previous research largely focused on in-service teachers, this novel study is the first to measure awareness of teachers in training. We hope that this study’s population and format will become more ubiquitous across institutions that educate teachers.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Thompson, Liz; Wells, Melissa; and Lantz, Jessica, "Building the Future of OER through Pre-service Teachers" (2019). Libraries. 179.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/letfspubs/179
Included in
Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Library and Information Science Commons, Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons
