Pre-service Teachers’ Assessment of Open Educational Resources for Learning and Research in Universities in Kwara State

Abstract

Open pedagogy or Open Educational Resources (OER) aims to democratize 
knowledge. Thereby, providing free access to users to become knowledge 
co-creators and learn by exploring educational resources according to their 
own interests. Having a platform to explore is not as important as having 
the required resources to explore the platform. Aside from this, evidence in 
the literature showed that students in developed countries are avoiding the 
use of OER despite the availability of required resources to use OER. The 
question is what will be the situation among developing countries 
undergraduates who have access to limited resources to utilise OER? This 
can only be imagined. Thus, this study examined pre-service teachers’ 
assessment of OER for learning and research in universities in Kwara State. 
Two main research questions were answered descriptively using frequency, 
percentage, mean and rank ordering. A two-stage sampling technique was 
employed in selecting 313 pre-service teachers across two universities in 
Kwara state. A validated researcher-designed questionnaire with a 
reliability value of 0.83 was employed in collecting data in this study. The 
outcome of this study indicated that pre-service teachers have access to 
minimum required resources to access OER and they positively assessed the 
use of OER for learning and research. In line with this, this study concluded that OER provides avenue for knowledge democratization. This study thus, 
recommends that pre-service teachers need to be motivated to keep using 
OER for learning and research purpose, as this will serve as an enabler in 
building a greater knowledge-based society.