Academics' perceptions of adopting OEP for engineering education: Peradeniya perspective

Abstract

Open Educational Practices (OEP); creation, use, or repurposing Open Educational Resources (OER) mainly with the Creative Commons (CC) licenses is an emerging trend in the education sector to establish inclusive education effectively. Sri Lanka has identified the significance of OER and initiated the development of an OER national policy to adopt OEP for education and included it as a criterion when evaluating higher educational institutions. University academics in Sri Lanka tend to work individually in teaching-related activities. Since possessiveness is a prime concern for Sri Lankan academics in their publications, they do not show a higher tendency on social media usage, sharing contents, open for peer-reviewing, and accepting the use of externally developed teaching materials. Therefore, this study was designed as a case study in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Peradeniya to analyse university academics' (total-117) perceptions of adopting OEP. Random samples were selected using a proportionate stratified random sampling technique considering eight departments and two units as strata. The total sample size (82) was calculated with a 90% confidence interval and 0.05 error rate. An online questionnaire was emailed to the randomly selected academics, and it was available for three months from December 2019. The questionnaire's overall response rate was 28%, while having more than 25% in 8 strata and 13% in 2 departments. All the respondents use educational web-based materials, but only 52% use OER for their teaching and learning. Also, 87% is willing to encourage students to follow Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). However, only 30% is ready to publish their creations as OER with global access, while most prefer to submit them only within the institution. Therefore, more awareness sessions, recognitions and awarding mechanisms are required to popular OAP for the benefit of educational reforms in the field of engineering in Sri Lanka.