In order to find out more about open education practice at universities, twillo conducted a survey of teaching staff at universities in Lower Saxony last year — this time in the field of economics. The aim of this survey was to find out more about the motives for and obstacles to the use and creation of open teaching and learning materials in a specific field of study. The results of the survey are now available.
OER in economics: Growing awareness, but still little experience
Economics is not only one of the largest fields of study in the state of Lower Saxony, but is also offered at 13 of the 16 universities in Lower Saxony. This offers the opportunity to identify special features within a study area and at the same time to look at a large number of universities. With the help of partially standardized questionnaires and a metadata analysis, a comprehensive picture of OER use at business and economics faculties and departments is drawn. Among other things, it shows that the number of free teaching and learning materials, active users of OER and repositories or the awareness of portals such as twillo is steadily increasing, even though the majority of lecturers in the field of study still have little experience with the OER topic. The possibilities of open education offerings have not yet reached the breadth of the field of study.
We want to continue this survey in 2025 and survey lecturers in a further area of study. The aim is to shed more light on differences and particularities between subject cultures.
Find out more: Detailed results and further materials
The complete results of the study and the resulting conclusions are available in the HIS-HE media center. Click here to go directly to the publication. Our blog post from November provides an insight into the open teaching materials that have already been created and the role of state funding measures in economics. There we summarized which high-quality resources are already available on twillo and what influence funding programs have had.