Co-creation of OER by teachers and teacher educators in Colombia

This chapter, based on research conducted by members of the Collaborative CoCreation of Open Educational Resources by Teachers and Teacher Educators in Colombia (coKREA) project, assesses whether and how a contextually based, bottomup approach to the promotion and advocacy of Open Educational Resources (OER) – in which teachers are encouraged to collaboratively co-create resources – supports the adoption of OER in Colombian schools. The study, conducted with public school teachers in southwestern Colombia, used a Participatory Action Research approach, in which the object of study is not external to the researchers, as the social practices under study are performed by the same subjects who are conducting the investigation. This allows teachers to identify possibilities of OER in their own educational practices, as well as the conditions required for their adoption, based on collective thinking processes immersed in their own sociocultural contexts. A call for research participation was issued to teachers who were experienced in using information and communication technologies (ICT) in their teaching. The data collection process was undertaken through administration of a series of online questionnaires (completed by 19 teachers), a survey (completed by 248 teachers), webinars (in which 28 teachers connected and 14 participated actively), unstructured telephone interviews (with 30 teachers) and a series of focus group discussions (with a cohort of 49 teacher educators, teachers and students). A face-to-face workshop was also conducted with teachers to provide an introduction to OER, after which they identified challenges to incorporating OER into their pedagogical practices and discussed their own OER-related activities.