An Examination of Community College Faculty’s Motivation And Professional Development Needs For Implementing OER

Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Professional Studies in Instructional Design Leadership (DPS)

Committee Chair

Yi Yang

Committee Member

Yuerong Sweetland

Committee Member

Joel Gardner

Abstract

Administrators often encourage faculty at Community Colleges to find ways to reduce the cost of their course materials (Moore, 2021; Bliss & Smith, 2017). Open Educational Resources (OER) have become the solution many faculty have implemented to reduce the costs (Allen, 2023; Fischer et al., 2020). This qualitative study explores faculty's experiences in OER implementations in a public two-year institution in the Midwest United States. Interviews were conducted with Community College faculty who had experience implementing OER to learn what motivated them to implement OER, what challenges they encountered, and what professional development topics they wanted to see offered to reduce their challenges for future implementations. The thematic analysis approach was utilized for the analysis of interview transcripts. The results of this study indicate that Community College faculty are motivated to use OER because of the cost-savings for students, the quality of the content, the ability to ensure all students have first-day access, the ability to customize OER, the fact that OER is easy to access, the opportunity to customize the content, to eliminate poor publisher experiences, and because other recommended using it. While the faculty successfully implemented OER, they did encounter challenges such as difficulty locating OER, lack of instructor resources, and miscommunications with the bookstore. This study found that faculty desire professional development to learn more about OER, including best practices for implementing OER, what their peers experienced with implementation and teaching using OER, how open licensing works, how to locate and evaluate OER, how to use artificial intelligence to locate OER, how to implement OER into courses, and how to create customized resources.

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