The White Paper, published this year by Cengage Learning (2016), exposes the results of a survey they implemented on open educational resource (OER) use and creation in the educational community. What they disclose to the reader is that OER will potentially triple in size over the next five years. Additionally, it also exposes that there continues to be barriers to adoption, use, and creation which are inhibiting the full adoption of OER. This claim of increased OER production and use with the continuation of barriers restricting full OER adoption requires further investigation to fully understand.
This quantitative study, which replicates a preexisting study by Turkish researchers Kursun, Cagiltay, and Can (2016), further explores their report on faculty perspectives to OER use and the barriers, incentives, and benefits to OER which exist. This research was specific to Turkey and the faculty who were employed with local universities in that country. By replicating this research to include a wider geographical area (i.e., Canada, North America, etc.), and also to expand the population sample to include K-12 and higher education educators, a greater understanding of this topic can be obtained. This quantitative study replicates the preexisting and pretested Likert scale survey to expand on this research for a wider geographical and demographic population, providing a broader view of this topic to further validate the existing research. The results will be compared with the Kursun et al. study. The benefit of this study will be to provide insight into the barriers, incentives, and benefits for K-12 and higher education educators, to provide support in areas which do require attention, and to encourage potential policy and sociocultural modifications.