Investigating Associations of Teacher Characteristics With Open Educational Resource Usage in Social Media Communities

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Synergy in Action: Collaborative Knowledge-Building in Education (Table 33)

Abstract

Teachers use various social media for collaboration and to informally learn from each other. Previous studies have shown that teachers use Twitter (now known as “X”) to share and acquire Open Educational Resources (OER), which are cost-effective and help teach current topics. However, research on how these OER are used in their teaching practice is limited. This study examines how teachers share and use OER in four hashtag-based communities and investigates which user characteristics are associated with sharing, positively perceiving, and using OER. We found that the percentage of tweets including OER is overall high (33-57%) and that OER are best perceived and more likely reported to be used in classroom practice when they are shared by highly influential teachers.

Authors

• Fitore Morina, University of Tübingen

• Tim Fütterer, University of Tübingen

• Joshua M. Rosenberg, University of Tennessee

• Jeffrey P. Carpenter, Elon University

• Christian Fischer, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen