The concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) evolved from the integration of two movements: the open source / free software movement in the late 1990s and the introduction of the Creative Commons licensing system in 2001. UNESCO (2002) coined the term “open educational resource” (p. 6) during the 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. While the OER movement began with a focus on technology-driven instructional materials, today open educational resources are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions” (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2018). OER continue to grow in popularity, yet awareness of OER from a teacher perspective has not reached universal acceptance.

While most published research reports on PK-12 in-service teacher and higher education instructor OER awareness levels, a small research team at James Madison University (JMU) is exploring OER awareness among pre-service teachers. This initial research explores the level of OER and copyright awareness JMU pre-service teachers have through their courses, practicums, and student teaching placements and specifically addresses the following three research questions.

Keywords

OER · OER movement · pre-service teacher awareness