Development and validation of a scale to measure faculty attitudes towards open educational resources

Meenu Sharma, Sanjaya Mishra and Atul Thakur
Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia
New Delhi, India

Livingston and Condie (2006) reported that teachers lack the technical skills for effectively integrating new open educational resources (OER) into their courses to assist students to become more independent learners. Similarly, Petrides et al. (2011) revealed that 'faculty with lower comfort levels with using online technology uses the open textbooks in more traditional ways.' With the advent of digital technologies, it has become much easier for teachers to share their work, not only with their students but also globally. Traditionally, some teachers are more willing to share their work than others. Therefore, there is a need to understand teachers' psychological and behavioural determinants that may influence a better use of OER.

This study describes the development of an 'Attitudes towards Open Educational Resources' (ATOER) scale within the framework of a project in the global south which explores the use of OER and evidence of its impact.

The research focuses on understanding why some teachers share educational resources and others do not. In order to investigate this, we developed a conceptual model for understanding the OER perceptions (use and contribution) of teachers in universities through the combined intertwined psychological constructs of teachers' attitude, motivations, and perceptions of quality and barriers.

While this research is part of a wider project, we report here the aspects related to the tool development for the study, in which we followed the six steps suggested by DeVellis (2003) to develop the scale. This paper discusses the series of steps in scale development to assess faculty attitudes to OER and presents the results of the scale development process.