Open Educational Practices and Attitudes to Openness across India: Reporting the Findings of the Open Education Research Hub Pan-India Survey

Abstract

In recent years India has shown a growing appetite for open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP). Despite this, there is a paucity of research on OER use and impact, the extensiveness of OEP, and attitudes towards openness in India. This paper reports on research intended to help fill that knowledge gap by conducting a pan-India survey using many of the questions developed by the UK Open University’s Open Education Research Hub (OERH) for use in its OER impact research around the world (http://oerresearchhub.org/collaborative-research/instruments/). Delivered online, in English and Hindi, the pan-India survey is the biggest of its kind to have been conducted in India. Analysis of the collected data reveals extensive evidence of educators using OER to improve their teaching, and survey respondents’ common belief in the educational benefits of OER. In addition, despite encountering greater technical and structural barriers to OER use than those typically experienced by OERH survey respondents from the Global North, the pan-Indian survey respondents tend to show more engagement with OEP than their developed country peers, notably in terms of creating resources and publishing them on a Creative Commons (CC) license, and in adding comments to OER repositories. Accordingly, this paper presents an emergent model intended to better capture the rich contextual factors inhibiting and enabling OER use and OEP in the Global South. It must be acknowledged, however, that our findings relate to a fairly highly educated selection of educators, teacher-educators, students, education managers, academics, activists and policymakers. We therefore plan to expand on our model by conducting further research with a more diverse group of respondents, to include people facing technological, economic and societal barriers to using OER.