A new survey from TES.com, the largest online teacher network, has revealed some interesting findings about how educators are currently using Open Education Resources (OERs).

The survey, the first "State of Open Educational Resources” from TES, asked 1,000 educators to weigh-in on topics like how often they share OERs, how they prefer to access OERs and the what challenges they face when accessing and sharing digital resources in general.

Overall, the survey found that despite rapidly increasing interest in OERs, there are many missed opportunities because a majority of teachers do not share their own work.

TES is calling it the “80/20 rule:” for every 20 educators that share their resources, 80 do not. In fact, 83% of educators do not share resources they have created.

When that is broken down even further, TES said the survey revealed a "whopping 60% don’t share their original work, while 23% say they only share occasionally.”

TES is calling this a display of “untapped potential.”

"Over one million classroom resources are downloaded every day on tes.com, alone, but there is untapped potential with even mega users not tending to share their own work online,” said the company in a statement.

The survey went on to ask educators the challenges they face when searching for and using digital resources.

Finding and engaging and relevant materials was the number one challenge for most educators.

61 percent said finding relevant resources, such as ones that are standard-aligned and age-appropriate, is the biggest challenge they face when finding digital resources.

50 percent said that finding materials that are engaging to students is a top challenge, while others found organizing and curating resources and combining a variety of resources into one lesson to be the most difficult feats.

An overwhelming majority of educators said that when they do use OERs, their preferred way to use them is on mobile devices.

"Survey respondents expressed a preference for mobile-friendly tools: over 85% think it’s important or very important that any classroom resource or tool is optimized for mobile,” said TES in a statement.

Interestingly enough, survey respondents are not so enthusiastic about virtual reality in the classroom despite the recent explosion of resources this year. Only 33 percent said they believe virtual reality will have the greatest future impact on the classroom.

Read more about TES here. 

Nicole Gorman, Senior Education World Contributor

8/24/2016