Trends in Faculty Use of OERs - Open Educational Resources in Higher Education: A Case Study of Palestine Ahliya University

Abstract

The most important issue of rapid change in the field of teaching is the emergence of OERs during the last decade which described as a revolution in the field of learning and teaching. There are many great initiatives appeared in the world to adopt this concept. e.g. some universities offering all its courses with all their resources and materials online and freely and openly, imposes the managers of Arabic universities, besides Arabic educational and training institutions keeping pace with these developments, as well as making plans always to continuously integrate modern technologies in accomplishing their tasks in teaching and research, due to its great benefits in terms of improving the effectiveness of teaching and learning, as well as the achievement of justice and equality of educational opportunity and raise the institution profile.

This study is founded upon the direction of Palestine Ahliya University to encourage the use of these resources, to explore the trends of faculty members towards the use of OERs in higher education. It used the descriptive approach and it used a designed questionnaire as a tool to get the data from faculty members, consist from (27) paragraphs. The study sample chosen randomly and they were consisted of 67 faculty members of Palestine Ahliya University. The results showed that there were no statistically significant differences at significance level (α =0.05) in the trends of faculty members in the use of OERs in university education due to the following variables: Gender, college, years of experience, age, published research, degree, full-time working, the daily use of Internet, English language proficiency.