Relationship between Students’ Awareness and Utilization of Open Educational Resources for Academic Work in Private Universities in Kenya

Abstract

Access to information and knowledge is the fundamental right of every human, but this is not always achieved without limitations. Today, an increasing number of institutions and individuals share digital resources via the Internet free of any legal, financial or technical barriers. The high demand for university education in Kenya has put more pressure on the existing learning resources such as print resources, whose cost partly makes education more expensive among other factors. As such, open educational resources may be part of a solution to this problem. The purpose of this study was to establish the relationship between students’ awareness and utilization of open educational resources for academic work in private universities in Kenya Correlational research design was used and the target population of the study was 5,375 undergraduate part time students. Purposive sampling was used to select participating private universities since not all of them offer Bachelor of Education part time programme, while proportionate sampling was used to determine the respondents from each university. Simple random sampling was used to select respondents from the 3rd and 4th years. Data was collected using students’ questionnaire. Reliability coefficient was estimated using the Cronbach alpha. A reliability coefficient of 0.77 was found acceptable for this study since it was way above the 0.7 alpha coefficient set as adequate. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse quantitative data while regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses. The study revealed that there is a positive relationship between utilization and awareness index and therefore the relationship is significant (r (321) = 0.373; p <0.05). The researcher concluded that the students need to be sensitized more on OERs so that their awareness is increased and thereby increasing OERs utilization.