Faculty attitudes are beginning to shift around the use of open educational resources (OER), scholarly search engines such as Google Scholar and cloud-based data storage services, even though there is some divergence between their attitudes and actual behaviors in some areas.
Those are a few findings from a recently released Ithaka S+R survey of nearly 11,000 faculty members at four-year institutions across the U.S. The triennial survey explores faculty members’ behaviors and attitudes in areas including information discovery and access, data management, research dissemination, the value of the library and perceptions of student research skills.
This cycle’s survey features new questions around emerging technologies such as open educational resources and learning analytics tools that impact faculty members’ instruction practices.
“We really construct this survey instrument in a way that we aim to reflect what kinds of trends are emerging in the higher education community,” said Christine Wolff-Eisenberg, manager of surveys and research at Ithaka S+R. “What’s great about a survey like this is it’s all self-report.”
What particularly stood out to the report’s authors were survey results revealing an increase in the share of faculty who, in theory, would like to see an open access publication model. But even with this attitude shift, traditional scholarly incentives – tenure and promotion, contract renewals or reappointments, for instance – influence faculty respondents’ decision-making around the use of a subscription-based publication model, Wolff-Eisenberg said.
“We really see that continue in the 2018 cycle and it’s something we’ve been tracking for many years and have seen relatively little movement on it,” she added of faculty. “But when it comes to their attitude, there’s a growing appetite for [an open access publication model].”
Another notable takeaway was the revelation of many faculty members’ skepticism around the value of using learning analytics tools. For faculty who have used and have not used learning analytics tools, “neither of those groups are especially enthusiastic about the kind of promise that these tools hold for helping them improve their instruction or helping their students in their learning outcomes,” Wolff-Eisenberg said, pointing out that the emerging technology is something that “faculty are still figuring out.”
