An Analysis of Faculty Perception, Awareness and Use of Open Educational Resources in Technical Education

This research explores the purpose, awareness, access, types of Open Educational Resources used by Faculties, involvement of faculties in promoting the OER, conduct of the program on OER by the faculties, perception of the faculties towards OER, advantages, and limitations of Open Educational Resources (OER) among faculties of the Government. State Universities in Odisha. Adopting a survey-based method, 500 questionnaires were distributed across departments of the universities, and 306 valid responses were received. The results show that 306(100%) faculties are aware and 131(42.81%) of faculty members use OER daily, 295 faculty members (96.40%) access DOAJ and TED, (92.81%) of faculties refer to research articles, (76.47%) reported that they have used OER, (306, 100%) all faculty members recommended any OER to others to use, it was found that around 53.26% of the faculty attended the programs on OER, maximum(97.05%) were involved NDLI. While OER has advantages like free accessibility to the whole community, time saving and limitations such as limiting teacher-student interaction, finding the appropriate OER can sometimes be difficult, diminishing students’ interest in classroom participation. Lack of training in the effective use of OERs, institutional Policies, and the reliability of the retrieved information affects the maximum usage of OER.