Awareness about Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the purposes for offering and adopting OERs and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were analyzed using a detailed survey of higher education across Japan, which was conducted in 2015. A comparison with a similar study conducted in 2013 revealed that awareness of OERs has increased slightly and the number of MOOCs offered has increased significantly in the intervening two years. The increase of offerings and adoption was low for OERs but high for MOOCs. OERs are used to improve the learning environment for students, while MOOCs aim to promote lifelong learning. Only one-fifth of the institutions surveyed in 2013 offered MOOCs or advanced their plans to offer them in 2015, and institutions that did offer MOOCs or advance such plans to offer them after the previous survey tended to provide MOOCs for society and for promotional purposes, not only for themselves because Japanese institutions are self-sustainable in terms of open education activities, operating without the support of the government or foundations.

Keywords

awareness of OER · higher education · Japan · MOOCs · national surveys · online courses · Open Educational Resources