Distance learning lecturers’ awareness and readiness towards open educational resources

With the growing prevalence of distance learning in educational contexts, the open educational resources (OER) declaration mandated tertiary institutions to establish their own repositories to encourage knowledge sharing. As a result, the Nigerian National Universities Commission directed universities to establish their own repositories in order for lecturers to upload their learning contents and take advantage of the universality of knowledge so as to share and distribute knowledge. However, the successful adoption of OER depends on lecturers’ awareness and readiness to effectively implement it. Following the directives, it was discovered that responses by lecturers were low in terms of compliance, and this may not be unconnected to lack of awareness of OER which influences lecturers’ skillful readiness to use it for instructional purposes. In order to ameliorate the problem, this study checked distance learning lecturers’ awareness and readiness to use OER for instruction. A descriptive survey design was used for the study out of which 104 distance learning lecturers from University of Abuja’s Center for Distance Learning and Continuing were drawn as participants in the study through a multi-staged sampling technique. Lecturers’ attitude towards OER and lecturers’ readiness towards OER constructed on a four-point Likert scale which were validated by several experts and yielded a reliability figure of 0.81 and 0.79, respectively using Cronbach’s alpha were used to obtain data. Descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation was used to answer the research questions while inferential statistics involving an independent samples t-test was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that lecturers are aware (grand mean: 3.27) and ready (grand mean: 3.34) to use OER for instructional but no significant difference was found in terms of male and female lecturers’ awareness (t = 2.164, p = 0.61) and readiness (t = 1.012, p = 0.76) to use OER for instructional purposes. It was recommended that lecturers should be trained on how to properly harness the invaluable opportunities brought about by OER repository to add value to their lectures and learning contents and more awareness should be created on the importance of OER and what it brings in terms of making learning universal, flexible and affordable. The results of the study provide insights into the current awareness and readiness levels of distance learning lecturers in relation to OER adoption.