The idea of Open Educational Resources (OER) has become widespread in education all over the world. Since the term was initially coined by the UNESCO's Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries, OER have evolved as a central element of open education.

The underlying potential of OER is that they permit the 5R activities – the right to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute teaching and learning materials. Based on this potential, so the assumption, teachers are empowered to develop open, collaborative, and sustainable learning and teaching scenarios. These prospects of OER have also manifested in the two follow-up concepts of Open Educational Practices (OEP) and Open Pedagogy that have emerged in the course of the debate about the practical implications of OER. While no rigid definition for both concepts exist, a narrow definition describes OEP as the use and creation of OER in pedagogical practices (Cronin & MacLaren, 2018). The same hold true for Open Pedagogy, where the concept of OER-enabled Pedagogy, defined by Wiley and Hilton, captures educational practices that are only possible due to the 5R activities (Wiley & Hilton, 2018).    

While it can be stated that OER and related concepts are well established in the broader educational discourse (Bozkurt et al., 2019), one persistent problem is the low adoption of OER in education. Notwithstanding an increase of repositories and the growth of resources (Santos-Hermosa et al., 2017), empirical studies have repeatedly documented that there is a low uptake of OER for teaching practices (Otto, 2019). The same hold true for OEP and Open Pedagogy for which hitherto few empirical examples can be identified.

To address this gap between the proclaimed benefits of OER and the lack of their use, various studies have concentrated on the investigation of barriers for OER. Bozkurt et al. (2019) in their review state that the central barriers for OER are meanwhile well documented and predominantly comprise three main factors; lack of time, legal uncertainty and institutional obstacles.

Although we acknowledge that these identified barriers constitute important challenges for the use of OER, in our article, we argue that the current focus of the literature is too narrow on barriers while neglecting to investigate incentives and facilitators that might increase the use of OER. Associated with this focus is another problem that is often inherent in the research design of many of the respective studies: Predominantly these studies survey the awareness of OER or the lack thereof as well as the reasons why there is no use of OER. However, we argue that it might be more auspicious to examine the perceptions of those who are already experienced in the use of OER in their teaching. Scrutinizing their experiences help to render insights on what strategies, measures or incentives are likely to enhance the use of OER in higher education. The few analyses that exist, for instance, by Santos-Hermosa et al. (2021) find that the offer of incentives for teaching staff for the creation of OER is rare.

Following these observations, we examine the following research question:

What strategies, measures, or incentives are likely to enhance the use of OER in higher education teaching?

To answer this research question, we use a focus group as a method of data collection, which we combine with a pre-test survey. The mixed-method design first conducted a pre-expert survey that results were then subject to a discussion among experts in the focus group. We use this mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods for triangulation as well as to validate and pinpoint the results of the first survey data.

The focus group method is a methodology that is well-established in educational science (Parker & Tritter, 2006). It is often contrasted with one to one interviews. Therefore, the advantage to set up a focus group instead of conducting interviews lies in the interaction that takes place among group members and which can be observed as well as be steered by a moderator to obtain the desired results. Typical challenges that can occur in focus groups are individuals that dominate within the groups, tendencies towards normative discourses, as well as conflicts and arguments within focus groups (Smithson, 2000). All of these challenges have to be reflected in the analysis of the data. Overall, focus groups can especially be helpful if it is the intention to generate ideas and receive feedback for the purpose of developing recommendations for future change and development (Breen, 2006). To accomplish all of these desired outcomes, for our research design, we decided to prepend the focus group with an expert survey as a pre-test. The survey helped to rank the proposed measures and, thus, serves as a central input for the discussion in the focus group. Therefore, the survey presents different measures to the participants that we expect to increase the use of OER in higher education. These measures were derived from current literature (Rolfe, 2016; Santos-Hermosa et al., 2021; Schuwer & Janssen, 2018) and our own research (Heck et al., 2020; Otto, 2019). Overall, we ínvited 41 teachers to the survey, from which 32 took part. Of these 32 teachers, 20 accepted our invitation to participate in the focus group. To analyse the data that was obtained through the focus group, we decided to use an ethnographic approach.

The collected data is currently in the process of being analysed so that no reliable results are available yet. However, they will be present at the time of the conference. Overall, the findings are intended to provide deeper insights into the question of which measures should be prioritised for the promotion of OER in higher education teaching. The findings will also contribute to formulating concrete measures to encourage more teachers to use OER in their teaching. To date, there are still not enough studies on this specific challenge, but also not on the more fundamental problem of a lack of incentives for OER adoption. The paper, therefore, aims to initiate a debate on this topic.

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