Unveiling the potential of Open Educational Resources (OER) for Vietnam: Insights from higher education provider

This proposal reports on a study investigating the perceived benefits of Open Educational Resources (OER) from the perspectives of higher education providers in Vietnam. OER was introduced in Vietnam in the early 2000s and until now, many OER initiatives, programs and activities have been implemented and developed (Do, 2019; Truong, 2019). However, this type of resource is not very widely used in this country. Recent research into the adoption of OER (such as Kelly, 2014; Tang et al., 2020) highlighted that teachers' attitudes and intentions to utilise OER are contingent upon their perception of its usefulness. This exploratory research is designed to understand the perceived usefulness of OER from higher education providers' perspectives in order to have appropriate solutions and efforts to effectively promote the OER movement in Vietnam. This study employed an inductive reasoning approach and an interpretivist paradigm. The research findings are based on the analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews. Participants were university administrators, library administrators, library staff, faculty administrators, faculty members and OER champions from 14 universities and education-related organisations in Vietnam. They were recruited using non-probability sampling techniques. The qualitative content analysis approach (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) was used to analyse collected data.

Previous studies (for example, Henderson & Ostashewski, 2018; Grimaldi et al., 2019; McGreal, 2019) suggest that Open Educational Practices (OEP) can benefit stakeholders directly and indirectly. Weller et al. (2015) suggested that the short-term, direct advantages of OER exert immediate benefits while the indirect ones are expected to provide longer-term impacts for stakeholders. All interviewees believed adopting and producing OER could lead to various positive short-term and long-term impacts on stakeholders such as students, learners and researchers, educators and universities. One of the significant impacts highlighted in this study is the substantial change to the national education system brought by OEP. Most of the benefits of OER proposed by participants in this study are consistent with the literature. Although all of the open characteristics of OER, namely open access, open software, open format and open license, are believed by the respondents to provide associated benefits to education, the advantages of open access seem to outweigh the others. However, the researcher envisages that the challenges currently faced by the OER movement in Vietnam, as identified by the interviewees, may hinder stakeholders from perceiving these advantages.

From the study findings and previous research, there are some grounds to believe that practices that support the production, use and reuse of OER will benefit and improve higher education in Vietnam. In a long-term prospect, these direct benefits will potentially lead to broader and meaningful positive consequences for higher education organisations and society. Nevertheless, the potential of OER to Vietnam will never be realised without a critical mass of Vietnamese users utilising and producing OER. Therefore, practical approaches and strategies to promoting the OER movement and its potential for higher education stakeholders in this country should be implemented and prioritised.