OOER resource discovery/re-use survey

A SurveyMonkey online survey was created and access was open to all during February and March 2010. A link to the survey was widely publicised using various JISCMail mailing lists, newsletters from the MEDEV and HSAP Subject centres, educational blogs and Twitter.  The survey and its analysis is available as a PDF file taken from the appendix of the OER Phase I Final Report.

A total of 155 respondents completed the survey. Although the target audience was primarily teachers in medicine, veterinary science and dentistry, responses were welcome from related subjects including health science and biological science. There were also a number of responses from other disciplines.

There were 20 questions in the survey, and what follows is a summary of the main findings. The profile of respondents confirmed that we were reaching our intended primary audience with 80% of respondents identifying themselves as either teachers or those directly supporting teaching. We reached the MEDEV Subject Centre audience as more than 60% aligned themselves with either medicine, dentistry or veterinary science, and taken with a further 20% aligning with the Health Sciences & Practice or Bioscience Subject Centres, more than 80% or respondents were from a medical, health or life sciences background. Almost 85% or respondents worked in higher education with 10% working in FE and 3.5% working in the NHS.

The survey was not specifically targeted at students because we assumed that some of the motivations behind resource discovery by students might be different for teachers. Nonetheless a small number of students did complete the survey. In addition one of the focus groups involved students.

Respondents were split almost 50/50 between those who declared they were often searching for online learning resources whether or not they had a specific need, and those who only tended to be looking online when they had a specific need. This indicates there was a lot of opportunism in learning resource discovery, or at the very least a lot of teachers are often on the look out for learning resources for future use.

As for where most people look for learning resources, anecdotally we might think Google, and the survey confirmed this with almost 95% of all respondents declaring they use Google to search for learning resources. Interestingly the next most used services were PubMed and other bibliographic search services such as ISI Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar, with 60% of respondents claiming to use these sources. Given the nature of the resources indexed by these services, a lot of teachers use published literature as learning resources, which was reassuring. What was surprising given the survey audience was that 50% of respondents use Wikipedia. When asked many academics decry Wikipedia because of the perception of dubious provenance or factual accuracy of information, but of the 155 people who respondents to this survey, half claim to use it, albeit not as a sole resource. The so-called web 2.0 social media sites such as YouTube and Flickr fared well with many respondents using these, 43% and 20% respectively. An interesting observation of the remaining search services was that Jorum was less used than the Subject Centre’s own web sites or even Amazon and iTunesU. Intute fared rather better than Jorum, with 18% of respondents using that service. The open question asking for other sites that people use regularly threw up many interesting sites and collections of resources. The survey did not explore reasons why a particular search service was popular or not.

In terms of searching strategies, most people initially try short descriptive phrases or keywords rather than go straight to advanced search. Almost a third of respondents declared to not always having a clear idea of what they were looking for so they tried an iterative mix of searching and browsing and refined searching. Half of the respondents would resort to using advanced search features if they couldn’t find what they were looking for with a simple search, and a further 20% declared they seldom if ever use advanced search. In general, 70% of respondents claim that it’s relatively easy to find learning resources to suit their needs, but a quarter claim to often have difficulty. There may be training issues associated with this as open responses to using advanced search show some teachers have difficulty constructing search queries, or at least have to try many searches to find what they are looking for.

The next set of survey questions asked how people evaluate the usefulness of learning resources. When asked how influenced they were by who created a resource, opinion was split 50/50 between those who felt this was essential, and those who felt it was not important. Opinion was clearly divided about the significance of provenance of a learning resource. This was unpicked further in the focus groups. Ninety two percent of respondents would prefer not to have to register with a web site to gain access to a learning resource, but 60% would do so if the resource were worth it. This was a strong message in favour of open ER really meaning open, with no login or registration restrictions. Only 18% of respondents felt that it was important to know the target audience or educational context that a learning resource was created for. Just over half thought that if this information were available it would be useful to know but not essential, and around a third didn’t need to know this information at all.

So, once someone has found a learning resource to suit their need, and evaluated it, what do they do with the resource? Just over a third prefer to download a copy, a third prefer to link to it in place, and the remaining third have no preference. Amongst those preferring to download, the most commonly cited reason was because the resource might move or disappear if they didn’t. Half of respondents tend to want to either use only a part of a resource or to repurpose it by mixing with other content, and just under half like to download because it gives them more control over how their students access a resource. The overwhelming majority don’t mind what format a resource was in because they can either use the resource as-is, repurpose it themselves or know someone who can do this for them. Thirteen percent specify what format of resource they want and will incorporate this into their search strategy. A lonely 2 respondents declared they never seemed to be able to find ER to meet their needs!

How influenced are people by comments others have made about a learning resource? Around 20% use comments or ratings when choosing a particular learning resource. However the majority declared that providing a resource was fit for purpose this kind of information wasn’t a factor when choosing a learning resource. Only a small number (7.5%) would not use a resource that had received a bad rating or review. The majority (70%) of respondents have themselves never left a rating or review of a learning resource.

Do people tend to ask for permission to use learning resources created elsewhere? A surprising 60% declared to specifically search for resource with a clear licensing statement so that they don’t need to ask. Almost a third of respondents either don’t ask for permission or assume that permission was granted if a learning resource was online, even without a license statement. Only 13% would ask for permission to use a resource, whether or not there was a license statement. This was strong evidence for the use of clear licensing frameworks.

The final question was open-ended asking respondents to say what was most important for them when searching for learning resources online. Of the 117 responses to this question, the following categories of response (with number of responses) were identified:

·       should be easy to find (69);

·       meets the needs identified by the teacher (47);

·       should be good quality (38);

·       should be from a reliable/credible source (10);

·       should be clearly licensed (7);

·      should be peer reviewed (3).