A Needs Assessment of ODL Educators to Determine their Effective Use of Open Educational Resources

Nigeria has joined the global race of teaching and learning in a changing educational environment by adopting open and distance learning (ODL). Although it is a global trend, ODL poses some challenges at local levels, one of which is the untimely production of teaching materials currently affecting instructional delivery in Nigeria. The modern approach to ameliorating this challenge is the deployment of open educational resources (OER), and this practice is enabled by information and communication technology (ICT). Hence, today’s educators need OER tools and ICT skills to address the changing nature of education. This paper assessed the needs, readiness, and willingness of ODL professionals from two dual-mode universities in Nigeria to deploy OER in teaching and learning. Data were collected using structured questionnaire items. The major findings of the study’s survey indicated that educators have not really embedded OER in teaching and learning, but they are very eager to be trained in the rudiments of OER and wish to employ them thereafter. The results indicate there is an urgent need for professional development to include training in the rudiments of OER for educators.


Résumé de l'article
Nigeria has joined the global race of teaching and learning in a changing educational environment by adopting open and distance learning (ODL). Although it is a global trend, ODL poses some challenges at local levels, one of which is the untimely production of teaching materials currently affecting instructional delivery in Nigeria. The modern approach to ameliorating this challenge is the deployment of open educational resources (OER), and this practice is enabled by information and communication technology (ICT). Hence, today's educators need OER tools and ICT skills to address the changing nature of education. This paper assessed the needs, readiness, and willingness of ODL professionals from two dual-mode universities in Nigeria to deploy OER in teaching and learning. Data were collected using structured questionnaire items. The major findings of the study's survey indicated that educators have not really embedded OER in teaching and learning, but they are very eager to be trained in the rudiments of OER and wish to employ them thereafter. The results indicate there is an urgent need for professional development to include training in the rudiments of OER for educators.
Introduction "Everyone has the right to education" (United Nations, 1948, Article 26); this right was enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights over sixty years ago. Therefore, many countries are making a concerted effort to ensure that all people have the opportunity to be educated, a target in line with Education for All (EFA) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which both placed emphasis on the issue. This effort is examplified in the modern adoption and deployment of open and distance education delivery systems in Nigeria to fulfill the nation's commitment to provide education for all, within the context of reaching the World Forum on Education for All (EFA) goals by 2015. These goals involve ensuring that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life skillls programs; improving all aspects of quality of education; and ensuring excellence for all so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes are achieved, especially in literacy, numeracy, and essential life skills (Federal Ministry of Education, 2002).
The substantial efforts several governments have made to achieve EFA and MDGs have led to a significant increase in the number of children attending primary and secondary schools in developing countries (Wright & Reju, 2012). Many African countries have invested heavily in education because it is widely accepted as a leading instrument for promoting economic growth (Bloom, Canning, & Chan, 2006, p. 1), and Nigeria is not an exception. Nevertheless, higher education in Nigeria has been under immense pressure to grow from a population that increasingly demands access. The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), the premier open and distance learning (ODL) university in the country, was established to widen access to all. But demand is still high, so ODL has come to be recognized in Nigeria as a viable alternative to the conventional school system which hitherto dominated the country's education sector. There are currently six schools in the country which may be regarded as dual-mode universities, with limited capacity to deliver degree programs using open and distance learning in addition to the conventional face-to-face mode (NUC, n.d.).
Researchers have observed that only 36% of those who want to enroll in secondary education programs in sub-Saharan Africa can find seats in schools (UNESCO, 2011). In Nigeria, this situation is even worse at the tertiary level of education, which is expected to provide the opportunity for those willing and able to further their studies. But providing education for all is a daunting task, considering the size of the country's population (about 150 million), and the compelling needs of the people (Okonkwo, 2012). The ever-growing demand for education in Nigeria cannot be met by the traditional means of face-to-face classroom instructional delivery alone. Also, in South Africa, 85,000 potential learners applied for one of the only 11,000 seats available at the University of Johannesburg (Polgreen, 2012). Allen (2010) opined that, "globally, of those 20 years old or younger people, 30 million are qualified to attend university, but there are no places for them. This number is likely to increase by 100 million in 2020." In their own report, Atkins, Brown, and Hammond (2007)  In some local areas in Anambra State of Nigeria, teachers are hired and paid by the parentteacher association (PTA) to teach in primary schools in order to make up for the shortage of the required number of teachers in the system. This challenge is not peculiar to Nigeria alone. The Niger Republic also hired "Volunteer" teachers (Lambert, 2004) who had no teaching experience and often lacked knowledge of subject matter they were teaching.
In the Republic of Congo, some teachers were not paid for several years (Prozonic, 2011).
These realities mean it is therefore not feasible for governments to continue to build, staff, and resource schools, universities, and teacher training facilities in order to meet the demand over the next 5, 10, and 20 years (Wright & Reju, 2012).
In order to fully realize the concepts of education for all and equitable access to educational oppportunities, experts are exploring other options. Notable opportunities are the increased use of distance education combined with information and communication technologies (ICTs), which have greatly influenced education and teaching practices in recent years, in addition to OER, which are being researched for use in both conventional and distance education settings.
It is clear that unless the assumptions that guide academics in open and distance learning are precisely defined, problems of "quality" and "equity" will haunt this mode of education (Das, 2010). There has been a remarkable increase in OER production since 2002, when it was first defined in a UNESCO workshop. There has also been a strong international debate on how to apply OER in actual practice, and UNESCO chaired a vivid discussion about this through its International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP) (Das, 2010 longer what it used to be. In the changing arena of higher education today, the description of open and distance education has to include "arrangements to enable people to learn at the time, place and space which satisfies their circumstances and requirements" (Das, 2010).
Open education resources make learning available at the time of the learner's choice and at a place suited to his or her requirements. Thus, addressing the issue of openness in distance education contextually and pedagogically brings along with it the need to use digital technologies and ICT beyond borders. I envisage OER as a tool to enable viable outreach in higher education systems in general, and ODL in particular, incorporating innovative strategies in teaching and learning. I also anticipate that OER are capable of enriching learning much more than the materials that we have in the face-to-face institutions, which hitherto have been handicapped by a lack of resources. Despite the laudable vision of ODL globally, it poses some challenges to educators in Nigeria (Okonkwo & Ikpe, 2011). For instance, the writing and development of instructional materials, the backbone of instructional delivery, continues to be a major hindrance to NOUN's vision and mission (Okonkwo, 2012).

Conceptual Framework
Open education resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or creative common area and are freely available to anyone over the Web.
They are an important element of the learning infrastructure and range from podcasts and digital libraries to royalty-free textbooks and games. There have been many definitions of OER; I provide four here. Other scholars have also defined OER as teaching, learning, and research resources with intellectual property licenses that permit them to be reused, reworked, remixed, and redistributed (D' Antoni, 2009;Hilton, Wiley, Stein, & Johnson, 2009;Plotkin, 2010;Wiley, 2009). They observed that some conditions may be placed on the use of OER, such as the provision of attribution, but all OER are accessible to anyone. They are seen as having the potential to change the practice of learners, educators, and organizations in a profound way (McAndrew, 2010). These untapped resources have the potential to reduce costs, improve quality, and increase access to educational opportunities (Daniel, 2011;Plotkin, 2010;Wright & Reju, 2012 oer-quality.org/). (Leichty, 2012) Benefits of OER The potential benefits of OER for users already identified in literature (Das, 2010) are • independent discussion forum and news forum for programs; • online interaction facility among fellow students, faculty members, and even officials of the institution; • old examination questions posted online so that students can learn the patterns of questions that are asked; • recent activity reports on the members/users in the community; • online self-assessment tests, which a student can use to test himself or herself on a particular topic or issue; • provisions for uploading special writings by teachers/experts; • facility where students can view the list of online participants reviewing a particular topic so that they can communicate with each other through chatting.
Open and distance learning institutions and educational leaders must grasp the potential of OER by making the collective commitment to use this innovation in order to pursue the goal of education for all. This can be achieved by building on the OER success stories of the African Virtual University (AVU), OER Africa, SAIDE, the Virtual University for Small States of Commonwealth (VUSSC, http://www.vussc.info/), and other African and global OER initiatives. In addition to earlier identified benefits, Wright and Reju (2012, p. 189) opined that OER • have the potential to increase accessibility to quality educational materials at a lower cost to the user, thereby allowing governments and institutions to divert funds to other critical areas such as learner support, faculty professional development, research, and teacher recruitment and retention; • enable individuals to freely access information they can use to make decisions that affect their lives and ultimately the progress of societies; and • have the potential to allow for flexible, quality education through distance learning, and to assist most African countries to meet the increased demand for secondary and higher education. Kanwar, Kodhandaraman, and Umar (2010) (Kanwar et al., 2010). They advocated based on the lessons learned from the above experience that, henceforth, there were three important issues to address.
• It was not enough to develop a capacity and content, the creators must ensure a buy-in from local partners and have a clear implementation strategy; • A governance structure must be put in place to steer the project and monitor progress according to agreed-upon quality standards; • There must be increased capacity in online course development; content writers should develop courses that are needs-based and freely available to strengthen national educational and tertiary institutions.
The advocacy of Kanwar et al. (2010) can only be effective if teachers are first empowered with the necessary ICT skills. Giving basic ICT training will open more opportunities for them in the following ways: • increasing their modern teaching skills (including ICT), which enables instructors to use educational resources available beyond their borders to enhance their teaching abilities; • allowing them to reach a larger number of students by tapping into their expertise to improve literacy through frequent interaction with the students and helping them to solve their problems; • upgrading their knowledge and transferring this to students without having to wait for the new edition of the content to be printed and then distributed; • transforming them into content developers able to generate their own materials according to the specific requirements of the learners they serve by using local languages and examples that are easy for their students to grasp.
The institution will also benefit if teachers start producing educational materials using multimedia because they will be able to develop their own customized content; instructors will be free to modify and update content from time to time according to curriculum requirements with minimum cost; and the teaching quality of the institution will increase. Teachers with ICT skills can also put their content on the Internet and get it peer reviewed. This will ensure that more resources on the Internet are authentic and valid. It will also allow individuals who are not able to get a formal education to access learning resources.
The concept of open educational resources has become well known in Nigeria. Nevertheless, the extent of educators' use of OER and how they were used was not very impressive.

Objectives
The objectives of this study are 1. to identify the participants' knowledge of and experience with OER; 2. to identify the participants' purpose for using OER and the extent of this use; 3. to identify the participants' preferences in OER and how regularly they use OER tools; 4. to identify the participants' levels of agreement with relevant OER issues; and 5. to determine the participants' readiness to attend workshops or training on OER.

Methods and Procedures
The study used a survey which collected data with a structured questionnaire adapted from an unpublished RETRIDAL (2011)  302 questions with percentages only was set at 55%. The 55% cutoff point served as benchmark for acceptance of a participant's response to a given item because it is above average and therefore is meaningful. Thus, any response of 55% and above was accepted as favorable.
This condition applied to objective 1 and 5. The Likert-type scale was used for objectives 2 to 4. The responses for objective 2 and their weight were very regularly (3), regularly (2) Similarly, for objective 4 responses and weights were strongly agree (4), agree (3), disagree (2), strongly disagree (1), and not applicable (0). The boundaries of each response in the 4-point Likert scale were calculated by dividing the serial width (4) by the number of responses (5) and was found to be 0.8 (Topkaya, 2010). This value was used to interpret A score of 2.4 and above on the scale was taken as an indicator of participants' moderate agreement with identified OER issues, while 3.2 and above showed strong agreement. Any score below 3.4 was taken as an indicator of low agreement with OER issues.

Results
The data analyses and results are presented in the tables below. The tables show a summary of the research objectives dealing with the various sections of the study.   Table 1 reveals that the participants have used OER before (63.2%) and they are very familiar with OER (84.2%). Their level of familiarity is also moderately high (high, 10.5%) and (moderate, 47.4%). However, they have not really used the various formats of OER meaningfully, and this is obvious from their described experience of using OER, which was below the acceptable cutoff point, and was therefore rejected.     308 for active involvement in the demands of OER. This is observed in their responses, which ranged from 2.58 to 3.68, that is from moderate (item 2 mean = 3.00; item 3 mean = 2.58) to high mean scores (ranging from 3.32 to 3.68).

Conclusion
It is obvious that the capacities of our conventional institutions cannot ensure that the learning needs of our young people and adults will be met. Education for All (EFA) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have both placed emphasis on the importance of education to economic prosperity. These have brought about open and distance learning (ODL) in Nigeria, a method of instruction which has received a global acceptance. But ODL is highly dependent on self-directed instructional materials as the backbone for course delivery. So far, the realization of a complete ODL program in Nigeria has been greatly challenged by the untimely production of instructional materials (Okonkwo, 2012). Ameliorating this challenge necessitates continuing professional development for educators in ODL.
Indeed, OER and the emergence of ICT in education are playing key roles in repositioning educational provision in higher education, especially in ODL scenarios, since it has come to stay in Nigeria as a viable alternative to conventional systems of education. The ODL approach worldwide depends largely on the deployment of OER and the use of technology to thrive and succeed. Hence, effective and efficient implementation of ODL in Nigeria calls for the professional development of educators, who are the backbone of high-level academic institutions. These personnel are needed for the effective delivery of classes and have been introduced in response to strong social demands for access to higher education.
However, the results of this study indicate the following.
• The participants are familiar with OER but have not actually been using them sufficiently and effectively. Hence their experience using OER is below the acceptable cutoff point. Mere familiarity with and casual use of OER is not enough to meet the demands of teaching and learning in our changing environment. Adequate experience in using 309 OER is necessary to bring about the desired education demanded by an increasing portion of the population.
• The instructors in higher education institutions have yet to use OER for the purposes which they are supposed to serve in teaching and learning in a changing environment.
• The tertiary educators need urgent instruction in the rudiments of OER and even ICT to enable effective OER utilization in line with current global practices.
• The respondents agree that the issues of OER are meaningful and relevant.
• Above all, they had no reservations about taking full advantage of OER provision and indicated a strong interest in relevant workshops and training.
The paper therefore recommends that there should be training programs covering the rudiments of OER and the ICT skills needed for effective implementation of OER for all educators (both those serving in the conventional systems and those in the open and distance learning environment). This can be done with workshops and seminars for practicing professionals, and the program should be deliberately included in the curriculum for students in Nigerian teacher education institutions.