Exploring faculty attitudes and awareness of open educational resources in technical universities

This study aims to explore the awareness, usage, preferences, participation and perceived barriers of the faculty members regarding the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in selected technical universities of Odisha. The data collection method was quantitative survey and structured questionnaire for data collection was used in this study. Descriptive and inferential statistics using chi-square test were used in analyzing the data in IBM SPSS 22. The results reveal that the faculty members were very aware of OER as 100% reported awareness. The use of OER was mainly to get information on a specific area of study and a large percentage of the respondents reported using OER every day. The preferred formats for OER included research articles, videos, open access journals and open textbooks. The ease of access to and support for online learning were significant drivers of the use of OER. But the level of involvement in OER practices was much lower than the level of general use; the percentage of those who developed OER was 16.77%, while the percentage of those who modified existing OER was 17.74%. Lack of training and access to relevant resources, concerns about resource reliability and quality, and institutional policy constraints were significant barriers. The results show a gap between OER awareness and open educational practice. Faculty need to be supported through structured training and licensing guidance, technical assistance, library support, and institutional policies to enhance the development, adaptation, and sharing of OER.