Contrasting the awareness and attitude of French university teachers towards open educational resources sharing across academic fields

ABSTRACT

This study examines the disparities in open educational resource sharing among various academic disciplines in French universities. Conducted shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic, it involved an online survey with 947 participants. The findings reveal significant differences in knowledge sharing practices across academic fields. For example, computer science instructors demonstrated greater familiarity with Creative Commons (CC) licences. However, awareness of these licences did not always translate into a willingness to use them. In contrast, law professors, despite being aware of CC licences, were less inclined to share their course materials. The study found that faculty in the hard sciences, as classified by the Becher-Biglan framework, were more inclined to share their resources. These observations highlight the need to consider the academic discipline of instructors when exploring their attitudes towards open education and in formulating policies to enhance the availability of resources on the internet.

KEYWORDS:

• Open educational resources
• creative commons
• COVID-19
• pandemic
• discipline

Acknowledgments

We thank our colleagues from the twelve universities of the Hype13 consortium for providing their support in the circulation of the survey. We must also acknowledge the contribution of three blended learning specialists for their thorough comments on the items of the survey. We thank the ethics committee of CY Cergy Paris Université for examining this research (approval n° 2321).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthieu Cisel

Matthieu Cisel is a researcher in the field of Open Education. During his PhD, defended in 2016, he focused on MOOCs and since then has undertaken significant research activity on Open Educational Resources. Following quantitative and mixed methods approaches, Matthieu investigates instructors’ motivation to share their digital resources, as well as the use of this content by online learners.