Awareness and Acceptance toward the Role of Open Education Resources (OER) in Teaching and Learning Aftermath COVID-19 Pandemic: PLS-SEM Approach

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic continue worsens, the educational environment is being compelled to shift from traditional classroom or blended teaching modes to online models. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education systems requires further development to ensure the continuity of the teaching and learning process. Open educational resources (OER) are learning materials that are straightforwardly authorized the educators and learners to share and gather related information and permits others to retain, reuse, revise, remix or redistribute (the 5Rs) these materials. Even though OER has numerous advantages, still the awareness and acceptance of this strategy remain low and some also highlighted that all things considered, there are still hurdles to OER implementation in Malaysia. Therefore, this study is aimed to empirically investigate the level of awareness that can influence the acceptance of OER in teaching and learning process. To evaluate the study's hypothesis, PLS-SEM 3.0 is used to test the measurement and structural model. A total of 225 respondents is gathers from the students on what is their awareness and acceptance toward the establishment of OER to assist their teaching and learning process especially after the pandemic which has change the traditional method to online based. The finding indicates that awareness is significantly influence the acceptance level toward the establishment of OER with a value of R2 (61.7%) at more than moderate level that explained the dependent variable. This study is crucial for academics, higher education institutions, and policymakers as a guideline to create proper improvement and enhancement to any problem that arises from the inability and failure of OER.