Challenges and Instructors’ Intention to Adopt and Use Open Educational Resources in Higher Education in Tanzania

Higher education in Tanzania like in many other Sub-Saharan countries suffers from unavailability of quality teaching and learning resources due to lack of tradition, competence, and experience to develop such resources. Nevertheless, there are thousands of open educational resources (OER) freely available in the public domain that can potentially improve the quality of existing resources or help to develop new courses. The uptake and reuse of these resources in higher learning institutions (HLIs) in Tanzania has been very low. The study applied the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model to elicit instructors’ intention to adopt and use OER in teaching. The paper also investigated challenges that hinder instructors to adopt and use OER. A sample of 104 instructors selected randomly from five HLIs was collected and tested against the research model using regression analysis. The study found effort expectancy had significant positive effect on instructors’ intention to use OER while performance expectancy, facilitating conditions, and social influence did not have significant effect. Challenges that were found to hinder instructors to adopt and use OER are discussed. The findings of this study will help those who are involved in OER implementation to find strategies that will maximize OER adoption and usage in higher education in Tanzania.


Introduction
The past decade has seen the tremendous development of information and communication technologies (ICT) and the internet in Tanzania. The recent rollout of SEACOM marine cable has increased internet speed up to 155 Mbps as well as reducing telecommunication costs by 95% (Swarts & Wachira, 2010). Recently, the government has also exempted all ICT equipment imported in the country from value added tax (Sife, Lwoga, & Sanga, 2007). Consequently, the price of ICT equipment has decreased significantly and it has become affordable to the majority of Tanzanians. These developments have heightened the need for higher learning institutions (HLIs) to use ICT to embrace educational delivery.
Naturally, institutions have been spending a considerable amount of resources to procure, install, and maintain various ICT equipment as well as information systems to complement face-to-face delivery. For example, 80.2% of HLIs in Tanzania had installed eLearning systems by the end of 2011 (78% Moodle and 2.5% Blackboard) (Munguatosha, Muyinda, & Lubega, 2011) while others were using audiotapes, CDROMs, videotapes, video conferencing, and other eLearning technologies (Lwoga, 2012).
Despite massive investments made by institutions to procure and manage various educational technologies, far too little attention has been paid to develop course content for students. The majority of existing content is text based in the form of course handouts with minimum content, without multimedia to make them more interactive (Lwoga, 2012). As a result, many institutions have continued to rely on printed resources which are expensive and difficult to share with a wider group of learners (Lwoga, 2012;Nyandara, 2012).
As the cost of text books and other educational resources from commercial companies continue to rise, institutions normally tend to use out-dated books, old course content, or poorly designed learning resources (Keats, 2003;Ngugi, 2011). Clearly, the use of such resources has implication on the quality of graduates. In fact, a majority of instructors in developing countries do not have expertise and experience to develop quality educational resources (Unwin et al., 2010). Nonetheless, the recent emergence of open educational resources (OER) is described as one of the main solutions to help institutions to acquire quality learning resources at no cost.
OER are freely and openly available digitized learning resources that can be adapted, modified, and re-used for teaching, learning, and research (OECD, 2007). The idea behind OER was first introduced by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in a Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries 2002 hosted by UNESCO in Paris, France (UNESCO, 2002). The forum cemented the need to release these resources in order to expand access to education specifically in developing countries. As a result, thousands Despite free availability of these resources, their uptake and reuse in many Sub-Saharan countries like Tanzania is very low (Freitas, 2012;Hoosen, 2012;Unwin et al., 2010).
MIT OCW statistics show that only 2% of MIT OCW traffic since 2004 has come from users in Sub-Saharan Africa (MIT, 2013). In Tanzania, for example, despite efforts made by Open University of Tanzania (OUT) to adapt and use MIT OCW, only 21.8% of 150 respondents indicated awareness of their existence (Samzugi & Mwinyimbegu, 2013).
Similarly, since University of Dar es Salaam signed an agreement with MIT a few years ago to use MIT OCW, none of the departments has reported using these resources.
So far, however, there has been little research around the use of OER in the African context (Percy & Belle, 2012). A majority of existing OER studies focus on development and publication of OER repositories as well as on the integration of policies in various institutions (Andrad et al., 2011). Therefore, this study focused on investigating reasons behind low uptake and reuse of OER in higher education in Tanzania. Specifically, the study aimed to • elicit instructors' behavioral intention to adopt and use OER in teaching, and • identify challenges that hinder instructors to adopt and use OER in teaching.
The study was conducted in five HLIs located in Tanzania. These institutions are: • University of Dar Es Salaam (UDSM), • Ardhi University (ARU), • access of education to disadvantaged learners such as those who are located in remote areas or unable to study due to work or family commitments (Butcher, 2011;Freitas, 2012). In practical terms, since 90% of institutions in Tanzania are government funded, sharing and reuse of content amongst institutions will make efficient utilization of taxpayers' money, thus everyone benefits (Hylén, 2006;Sclater, 2009).
Another advantage of OER in higher education is to attract more students, increase institutional reputation, and attract research funding and new partnerships (Butcher, 2011;Hylén, 2006;Sclater, 2009;UNESCO & COL, 2011). This was demonstrated by MIT, which found that students' awareness of their freely available courses influenced 35% of new students to apply to various courses (MIT, 2006). Similarly, at least 4,400 new students who registered on courses offered by Open University of UK had accessed the same courses on the OpenLearn site before as OER (McAndrew et al., 2008).
Moreover, MIT and OpenLearn's public image and reputation have increased tremendously since they started OER projects and have attracted dozens of funding agreements and partnerships. The same benefits can be reaped by HLIs in Tanzania by participating in OER initiatives.

Theoretical Framework
The study adopted the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model to examine instructors' behavioral intention to adopt and use OER in teaching. Moreover, it was able to explain 70%of the variance in behavioral intention in IT and about 50% in actual use, which was better than the other eight models (Venkatesh et al., 2003).

Research Model and Hypotheses
A majority of studies that adopted UTAUT have extended the model by including new variables or reducing existing variables to suit a particular context of the study.
Likewise, this study extended the model to suit the context of OER adoption in Tanzania. OER is expected to increase accessibility of educational resources that will be integrated into existing courses or used to develop new courses. In this case voluntariness of use in UTAUT was removed. Also, this study does not investigate the effect of gender, age, or experience of instructors in behavioral intention to use OER.
Therefore gender, experience, and age were also removed. The hypotheses and constructs are below. This is the degree to which instructors believe that using OER will help them to enhance their teaching performance (Venkatesh et al., 2003). Venkatesh et al. also demonstrated that performance expectancy is the strongest predictor of behavioural intention to use several technologies in both voluntary and involuntary settings. In a similar study conducted in Africa with 96 respondents, performance expectancy was found to have strong influence for instructors to adopt and use OER in teaching (Percy & Belle, 2012).
Adapting performance expectancy to the OER context, instructors are expected to find OER useful and will enable them to accomplish teaching activities more quickly and flexibly or even help them to increase their teaching effectiveness. Therefore, the hypothesis can be explained as follows: Hypothesis 1: Performance expectancy has a positive effect on behavioural intention to adopt and use OER.

Effort expectancy.
This represents a degree of easiness associated with locating, adapting, and using OER (Venkatesh et al., 2003). Therefore, the study hypothesizes that the acceptance to adopt and use OER will depend on whether instructors believe using OER will be easy and free of effort. Several studies have found effort expectancy to be an important predictor of information technology usage. Likewise, Percy and Belle (2012) found effort expectancy to have a positive influence on adopting and using OER in Africa. Therefore, the proposition is derived as follows: Hypothesis 2: Effort expectancy has a positive effect on behavioural intention to adopt and use OER.

Social influence.
This represents a degree to which instructors perceive how important it is for others to believe they should adopt and use OER (Venkatesh et al., 2003). This construct was considered a very important aspect in predicting acceptance of IT in previous studies such as TRA and TAM 2. These studies called it subjective norms. Therefore, it is expected the OER adoption rate will increase if instructors perceive their colleagues in the department or institution management believe they should use it. The hypothesis can be explained as follows: Hypothesis 3: Social influence has a positive effect on behavioural intention to adopt and use OER.
Facilitating conditions. Venkatesh et al. (2003) define facilitating conditions as "the degree to which an individual believes that an organizational and technical infrastructure exists to support the use of the system" (p. 453). Therefore, the OER adoption rate will increase if instructors believe that institutions have systems and services to support the application and use of OER in teaching. In the context of OER, these support systems can be the availability of reliable internet and having the necessary skills to be able to use OER.
Therefore, the proposition is derived as follows: Hypothesis 4: Facilitating conditions has a positive effect on behavioural intention to adopt and use OER.
The research model is shown in Figure 2.

Research Methodology
The study adopted a research instrument developed by Venkatesh et al. (2003) which uses a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).
The questionnaire was modified by re-wording items to suit the context of the study (see Appendix). New items were added to assess how instructors use internet services to prepare and share learning resources. The questionnaire was created using Google Docs, and emailed to 608 instructors selected randomly from five institutions. Ninetysix emails were undelivered. Therefore, a total of 512 responses could have been received. However, a sample of 104 instructors out of 512 usable responses was obtained. This is 20.3% of all respondents.
All respondents were guaranteed confidentiality of their individual responses, and the name field was treated as optional. Data was collected through Google Docs, and, Instructors' Acceptance to Adopt and Use OER To explore instructors' intention to adopt and use OER, data were tested against the research model using linear regression analysis. First, the reliability of the research instrument as well as individual constructs was measured.

Research reliability and validity.
To measure reliability of the instrument and constructs, Cronbach's alpha ( α ) was used. instructors' behavioral intention to adopt and use OER. However, this is still a good model as Gaur and Gaur (2009, p. 109) pointed out that as much as lower value R square 0.10-0.20 is acceptable in social science research.

Hypothesis testing.
To test the proposed research hypotheses, regression analysis was used to determine the causal relationship between the DV and four IVs.

Challenges Facing Instructors to Adopt OER in Higher Education
Finally, instructors were asked to provide their opinion as to why instructors in HLIs in Tanzania do not use OER in teaching. The following are some of the challenges mentioned by instructors.

Technology.
Some HLIs in Tanzania are still faced with inadequate ICT infrastructure which hinders the adoption and use of OER in teaching. In some institutions access to computers is still limited while some are faced with unreliable internet services and low bandwidth.
Below are some of the comments from instructors: ...lack of facilities and equipment like computers, intranet and reliable internet connections….
...lack of facilities, reliable power and slow internet connection and unreliable …Readiness and willingness are problems. But the availability of ICT facilities is a limiting factor.

Discussion
This study set out to explore challenges and instructors' behavioral intentions to adopt and use OER in teaching. One of the most interesting findings was that many instructors are aware of the existence of OER (83% of instructors) and they were willing to share their course notes freely via the internet (84.6% of instructors). The study also found that the proposed model explains 12.2% of the variance (Adjusted R Square = 0.122) to adopt and use OER in HLIs. Moreover, the study did not find any significant effect on instructors' intention to adopt and use OER using three factors namely facilitating conditions, performance expectancy, and social influence. In general, therefore, it seems that there are factors other than these four which can be used to predict instructors acceptance' to adopt and use OER.
On the other hand, we found effort expectancy to have significant positive effect on instructors' intention to adopt and use OER. These results suggest that instructors believe OER will be easy to use and free of efforts. The findings are consistent with similar studies, Percy and Belle (2012)  repository developers. They should improve the user-friendliness and ease of use of OER and OER repositories in order to attract more instructors to adopt and use them.
Some instructors described inadequate ICT infrastructure as one of the challenges they are faced with when adopting and using OER in teaching. These findings are consistent with a similar study conducted at the Open University of Tanzania (Samzugi & Mwinyimbegu, 2013). This study found a low level of internet connectivity and an inadequate number of computers were hindrance factors to adopt and use OER.
According to Bateman (2008), despite commonalities that exist amongst African Similarly, the Government of Tanzania has been improving ICT infrastructure by rolling out SEACOM marine fibre cable and has exempted all ICT facilities from import taxes (Lwoga, 2012). The SEACOM marine cable has reduced telecommunication costs by 95% (Swarts & Wachira, 2010) as well as increasing bandwidth up to 155 MBps (Lwoga, 2012). Some institutions are already connected and many will be connected in the near future (Mtebe & Twaakyondo, 2012).
Moreover, we found that some instructors do not use OER due to unawareness of copyright issues related to OER implementation. Unexpectedly, 84.6% of instructors were willing to share their course notes freely via the internet. Therefore, there is an urgent need for institutions to create awareness of copyright issues in order to enable instructors to adopt OER and share their resources via the internet. It seems that this is a big problem as several studies (Hoosen, 2012;Percy & Belle, 2012) that were conducted in Africa had similar findings. Institutions should be advised to make use of Creative Commons licensing which has already addressed various license options that can be attached to OER (Sclater, 2009).
The study also revealed that some instructors could not find OER relevant to their curricula or their context. This could be attributed to the fact that many instructors are not aware of the OER repositories with resources relevant to their courses. In addition, some instructors were suspicious about the quality of OER and materials from the internet in general. However, instructors should be advised to use existing quality assurance procedures set within their institutions to choose OER for their courses (UNESCO & COL, 2011).
In fact, the responsibility of ensuring the quality of OER chosen, and how they are integrated into teaching activities for a particular course, resides in instructors themselves (Butcher, 2011;Dinevski, 2008). Once this is explained clearly to instructors, definitely they will start adopting and using them. At institutional level, a majority of institutions in Tanzania  attitude, information quality, and awareness, which were used by Percy and Belle (2012) and Dulle and Minishi-Majanja (2011) in similar studies.
Furthermore, individual perceptions change over time as users gain experience (Venkatesh et al., 2003). Therefore, the results of this study should be considered as perceptions and intention to adopt and use OER at a single point in time. Future research should validate this model in order to apply the findings at a given time.
Despite these limitations, this study provides insights on factors that contribute to successful adoption of OER in higher education in Tanzania.

Conclusion
The advantages of OER to enhance education in Sub-Saharan countries like Tanzania are well documented. However, the perceived benefits cannot be realised if instructors do not use these resources to embrace their courses. There is a need to find reasons behind low uptake of these resources in higher education in order to identify corrective measures that will help institutions to maximise usage of these resources in Tanzania.
Accordingly, this paper was set to explore challenges facing instructors to adopt and use OER as well as elicit their behavioural intention to use and adopt OER.
We found that performance expectancy, facilitating conditions, and social influence did not have a statistically significant effect on instructors' behavioural intention to adopt and use OER. However, instructors believe that OER will be easy to use with effort