To succeed in being a prosperous country, it is important for the Netherlands to remain on the forefront of innovation and knowledge development. One of the key pillars to succeed is to raise the next generation to possess 21st century skills encompassing critical inquiry, problem solving and participating in learning networks. This puts a demand on the teaching and education in being innovative and switch from a teacher centered to a learner centered process. A learner centered approach to education requires, amongst other things, more flexible educational resources. For several years now, more and more schools in secondary education are experimenting with these kinds of educational innovations. In most cases these innovations were enabled by (new) possibilities of current technology.

Most current paper-based textbooks are not designed to support these developments, because of their “one size fits all” approach of the learners, thereby hindering a more personalized teaching process. For teachers this means that they have to create their own learning materials, preferably in a digital format. Although these materials can be created from scratch, teachers increasingly use available open educational resources (OER) to rearrange these in an appropriate and meaningful way. The Wikiwijs initiative, launched in 2009, supports these processes by offering a platform where teachers can find, share, create and rearrange OER. Important conditions for success of these innovations are teachers’ attitudes towards and motivation to create and use digital learning materials and their level of competencies in this field. A considerable part of the population of teachers have little experience in the digital area and need training into it.

To learn more about the competencies in using, creating and rearranging OER and the motivation and attitude towards this, a survey was conducted among all teachers in a school for secondary education in a provincial town in the Netherlands. This school has the ambition to have personalized learning implemented in 2016. They have started a path towards realisation of this goal in 2011. In 2012 a first year will start using tablets with learning materials as much as possible. These materials are both self created and bought from a commercial publisher. The results of this survey will be used to device training modules for the teachers and to implement other lines of interventions to facilitate the implementation of this innovation, specifically in terms of stimulating motivation and supporting positive attitudes of teachers.

Keywords

create use DLM · motivation · OER