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Do Open Educational Resources Help Contingent Sociology Faculty Acquire Teaching Resources and Form Collegial Relationships?

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Abstract

Access to resources and social relationships are important for teacher development. Unfortunately, within higher education contingent faculty often are under resourced and poorly integrated into their department’s social network. This shortfall could be addressed by Open Educational Resources (OERs), which are websites that freely distribute pedagogical resources and provide a platform for educators to form collegial relationships. The current research focuses on the OERs that have formed around American sociology to assess the characteristics of the faculty who use them, the pedagogical resources they acquire from them, and how often their users form collegial relationships online. Analysis of an online survey of 275 sociology OER users finds that contingent faculty are acquiring resources from the sites. While only a small percentage of faculty are forming collegial relationships via these sites, they are doing so without occupational status, gender, or racial differences.

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Notes

  1. OERs, like the Internet in general, are hard to define because they are often a loose constellation of sites and social media channels. However, when the United Nations coined the term OERs they identified them as any free and publicly available online repository of pedagogical resources (Atkins et al. 2007). Weller (2011) encourages us to distinguish between Big OERs, which are operated by formalized collections of people and often connected to traditional educational institutions, or Small OERs, which are typically operated by a single individual or just a few contributors.

  2. Within American sociology there are multiple OERs that educators could access. For instance, there are many sociology sections within the major multidiscipline big OERs like Merlot.org or Jorum.ac.uk. There are also small OERs like The Sociology Toolbox, Sociology Source, and Teaching TSP that are solely focused on distributing ideas and resources for teaching sociology. Far more sociology OERs intermittently distribute pedagogical resources in addition to publishing blog posts that comment on news events, review recent publications, discuss on going debates in the field, and/or share other miscellaneous musings. OERs also vary widely on how focused they are on distributing pedagogical resources. Some sites exist solely to distribute pedagogical resources (e.g. Merlot.org), while a far larger number of sites distribute pedagogical resources in addition to providing commentary, accounts of personal experiences, and the sharing of media and resources that have nothing to do with teaching, education, or learning directly.

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Acknowledgements

We sincerely appreciate the helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper from Drs. Julia McQuillan, Helen A. Moore, Lory Janelle Dance, Philip Schwadel, and Joanna Schreiber.

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Correspondence to Nathan Palmer.

Appendix

Appendix

List of Sociology-Focused OERs provided to respondents:

  1. 1.

    Creative Sociology (www.creativesociology.blogspot.com)

  2. 2.

    Sociological Images (www.thesocietypages.org/socimages/)

  3. 3.

    Sociology In Focus (www.sociologyinfocus.com)

  4. 4.

    Sociology Sounds (www.sociologysounds.com)

  5. 5.

    Sociology Source (www.thesocietypages.org/sociologysource/)

  6. 6.

    Sociology Toolbox (www.sociologytoolbox.com)

  7. 7.

    Teaching TSP (www.thesocietypages.org/teaching/)

  8. 8.

    The Everyday Sociology Blog (www.everydaysociologyblog.com/)

  9. 9.

    The Society Pages (www.thesocietypages.org)

  10. 10.

    The Sociological Cinema (www.thesociologicalcinema.com)

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Palmer, N., Brimeyer, T. & Schueths, A.M. Do Open Educational Resources Help Contingent Sociology Faculty Acquire Teaching Resources and Form Collegial Relationships?. Am Soc 49, 119–134 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-017-9355-z

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