Opening Up: Why Are We not Using More Open Education Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) have the ability to alleviate the student dropout rate, make faculty course design easier, and allow faculty to contribute and participate in the OER undertaking that is swiftly spreading through our nation. In addition we are able to save our students $2,000 - $3,000 dollars over the course of their education. This work looks at findings from a survey which was sent out to list serves and by direct email to faculty. The survey posed questions to try to determine why faculty were having a difficult time accepting and using OERs in their own classrooms. It was discovered that the major issue was trust. 141 respondents felt that OERs could benefit students, but felt that they had no oversight of the content used in the open resources. I propose a method of peer review which helps build the trust of faculty to begin to use more OERs in their courses