Understanding Social OER Environments—A Quantitative Study on Factors Influencing the Motivation to Share and Collaborate

Social software environments are increasingly used for open education: teachers and learners share and collaborate in these environments. While there are various possibilities for the inclusion of such social functionalities for OER, many organizational, individual and technological challenges can hinder the motivation of teachers to share and collaborate in these environments. Current research cannot explain what barriers teachers face in social OER environments and how those challenges influence their motivation to engage in such environments. An exploratory factor analysis was used in the context of schools and higher education institutions to investigate the possible barriers to engaging in social OER environments; a linear regression analysis was used to predict how the extracted factors influenced the motivation of teachers (N = 754) to share and collaborate. The findings allude to barriers within social OER environments; the main challenges relate to the lack of organizational support, language and culture as well as quality concerns. The key results depict how teachers´ motivation to share and collaborate in these environments decreases when they perceive higher language and cultural barriers. These findings can support OER providers as well as educational institutions in their efforts to minimize those barriers.