2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for anyone to use, modify, and share. OER have the potential to enhance engineering education by providing access to high-quality, diverse, and relevant content for students and instructors. However, OER are currently only used by a small segment of engineering courses, including those of both authors who have written and continue to support OER textbooks for their courses. Authoring OER materials is a challenging and time-consuming process that requires specific skills, motivations, and support. In addition to the considerable amount of work involved, the scarcity of engineering OER authors can make the process of developing and maintaining these resources a lonely endeavor full of unanswered questions. This paper seeks to address some of these questions and to offer advice and guidance to engineering faculty members who are considering or have just started the process of writing their own OER.

To better understand the experiences and perspectives of engineering OER authors, we conducted semi-structured interviews with faculty members who have created and published OER across various engineering disciplines. Through this interview process, the authors seek to answer questions such as: What drove you to author your own OER? What kinds of faculty members are authoring OER? What resources were available to help you? What kinds of people helped you along the way, and what could they offer? How were these activities considered as part of the promotion or faculty review process? The interview results were then evaluated for trends. Finally, insights and recommendations for prospective authors of OER engineering content are summarized. We hope our findings can inform and inspire current and prospective engineering OER authors and guide institutions and organizations aiming to foster a culture of OER in engineering education.