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In the spring of 2018, Choice, a publishing unit at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), deployed a survey to 88,000 undergraduate teaching faculty to learn more about their decision making for choosing instructional materials for their courses. Approximately 1,400 faculty responded. Using twenty-four questions, this survey collects information about the faculty, their courses, and their institutions, with a focus on their instructional content, where they discover it, and the criteria they use to select it. The goal of this survey, in addition to learning more about the behaviors for identifying and selecting instructional materials, was to aid the design of future applications that can enhance the ability of faculty to discover and select open education resources (OER).

This white paper provides an overview of the development and growth of OER in American higher education, followed by an analysis of the survey responses. While the response rate for this survey is relatively low, it builds on what other OER-related surveys tell us about faculty behavior for discovering, evaluating, and selecting instructional material, and adds new insights specific to discovery resources. Its positive takeaway is that those who did respond are supportive of OER as instructional material and are generally familiar with resources to locate it. Still, this white paper concludes that there remains much work to increase the number of faculty who adopt OER, and emphasizes the need for a discovery and evaluation tool that offers time-saving ease of use for faculty searching for OER. While a survey of this type is unable to yield deep insights into why faculty choose OER or what factors prevent them from doing so—or if they are even aware of OER (which Babson surveys suggest many still are not, though it is on an upward trend)—it enables OER advocates and educators to better understand those factors that contribute to instructor decisions about their educational materials.

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