Investigating Student Engagement with Open Educational Practices: The Results from an Exploratory Survey

The proliferation of open online teaching and learning resources including educational content, multimedia, shared learning designs, software, and learning activities provide both a challenge and an opportunity for educators and learners. The challenge for faculty, students, and independent learners is in navigating this new landscape of abundance, dealing with new formats and representations of knowledge, and combining appropriate resources for use in teaching and learning. This abundance creates a complex environment for individuals who are both designing and accessing education as they require an emergent set of open and networked literacies. Further, digital literacies are required to access and recognize components of the open web and, in doing so, further contribute to knowledge in technically appropriate and legal ways. The goal of this study was to understand how learners are integrating digital literacies in relation to open access resources, open copyright models, networked learning environments, and open educational resources for their academic and creative works. This presentation focuses on the early results of the study, which include a survey conducted with teacher candidates.  The findings from this study will offer insights into potential curriculum gaps related to the development of digital literacies in the context of open education.