Management of Open Education Resources in Academic Libraries of Nigerian Public Universities

1 Introduction

The ubiquitous nature of information and communication technology (ICT) has transformed the way research and educational information is developed, accessed, and disseminated. Consequently, the users’ needs in terms of access and dissemination of information have also changed. Arguably, open access is one of the significant ways to facilitate access to research and educational materials; thus, academic libraries and higher education institutions, in developing countries like Nigeria, are embracing open-access ideas to support academic teaching, research, and learning (Adebowale, Ibidapo, & Abiola, 2023). One of the services of the open access movement is the open education resources (OERs). The OER movement is driven by the need for freely accessible, reusable, and openly available online educational materials. OERs refer to publicly available teaching, learning, or research materials that are issued with an open license, allowing them to be used, shared, and adapted freely, with attribution to the authors, but devoid of the mandated permission required of copyrighted resources (Dare, Olujinmi, & Ifeduba, 2022). They include full courses or programmes, course materials, modules, student guides, teaching notes, textbooks, research articles, videos, assessment tools, and instruments, interactive materials such as simulations and role play, databases, software, apps, and any other educationally useful materials (Commonwealth of Learning, 2017).

OERs gained traction globally in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a means of increasing access to educational materials and enhancing teaching and learning. It was also in response to the challenges of the high cost of education resources, inadequate funding, affordability, and quality education. OERs can expand access to learning for all students, notably for those in non-formal educational settings, and bridge the gaps between non-formal, informal, and formal learning; which will invariably increase student participation in higher education (Bringula, 2016). Furthermore, since the emergence of OERs, they have become an important method of providing access to and enhancing the teaching and learning experience for both lecturers and students which have created substantial educational opportunities, thereby promoting lifelong learning for individuals and the government (Zaid & Alabi, 2020). Arguably, the advancement and ubiquitous Internet and mobile technology have also made OERs sought after in the Nigerian educational system (Gambo & Aliyu, 2017). In response to this necessity, academic libraries around the world are developing institutional OER initiatives or creating OERs themselves; and in some instances, collaborating with IT professionals and the centres for open and distance learning. As centres of knowledge management on campuses, academic libraries play a pivotal role in improving the discoverability, use, and impact of OERs. This may involve assisting faculty with identifying and integrating OERs into courses, providing copyright and open licensing advice, hosting OER repositories and platforms, supporting accessibility and metadata improvements, tracking OER usage analytics, and providing open publishing support services (Hutson et al., 2022).

In Nigeria, the 2017 National Universities Commission (NUC) draft OER policy mandated educational institutions including universities to set up their own OER repositories. The policy provided guidelines for the creation and use of OERs to increase access to and support quality teaching, learning, and research in the Nigerian Higher Education System (Agbu, Okechukwu, Dahunsi, & Vincent, 2015). According to the policy, materials that constitute OER include curriculum maps, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, pictorial materials, multimedia applications, podcasts, and any other materials. Consequently, several Nigerian universities adopted OER initiatives, launching OER repositories or leveraging existing repositories to host resources such as lecture notes, presentations, videos, journal articles, conference papers, and course materials. Furthermore, the NUC ranked the OER initiatives in the universities in 2018. However, effective OER management practices entail a lot more than policy mandates. According to Wordu and Nwaizugbu (2021), it requires understanding user needs and the enabling factors; successful inter-departmental partnerships, and developing sustainable service models taking into cognisance the Nigerian university context. Furthermore, several studies on OER in Nigeria (Gambo & Aliyu 2017; Jong, Munnik, & Will, 2019; Onaifo 2016; Zaid & Alabi, 2020) focused on reviews and developing sustainable frameworks and policies. Other studies (Akomolafe & Adegun, 2014; Jong et al., 2019; Salau, Oyedum, Abifarin, Udoudoh, & Alhassan, 2020; Wiche & Ogunbodede, 2021) focused on the perception and awareness of OERs by academic staff, students and librarians respectively. These studies and the NUC draft policy have set a precedence for the adoption of OER in universities. However, no study to the best of the researcher’s knowledge has investigated the management of the OER initiatives 6 years after the initial policy mandate. Consequently, this study explored the current state of OER management in Nigerian public university libraries with the following objectives:

1. find out the availability of OER links, repositories, or databases on the websites of the universities or libraries;

2. identify the types of OERs accessible in the universities or libraries; and

3. interview selected librarians/repository managers to understand the management of OERs in their institutions.

2 Literature Review

3 Method

A sequential mixed method was adopted for this study using the sequential explanatory strategy. The sequential explanatory strategy in mixed methods research involves first collecting and analysing quantitative data, followed by the collection and analysis of qualitative data in a second phase, which is designed to expand upon the findings from the initial quantitative phase (Creswell, 2009). Quantitative method was used to gather data to inform the study population for the qualitative part of the study; in this study, the example stated by Tashakkori and Teddlie (1998) where the results from one method can help identify participants to study or questions to ask for the other method was used. Furthermore, in line with one of the philosophical assumptions of mixed methods, stated by Creamer (2018), the qualitative and quantitative data for this study were analysed and presented separately in the results. The quantitative data was analysed descriptively, while the qualitative data was analysed thematically, but integrated in the discussion of findings to provide robustness and complementarity. Consequently, an adapted procedure of Hurrell (2023) was used for this study. Quantitative data were gathered from.

4 Results

4.2 Website Analysis

4.2.1 Availability of OERs in the Institutions

The researchers found that 51% of the universities had no OERs (either self-authored or external) available from the institutional or library websites (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Availability of OERs (n = 85). Source: Field data.

4.2.2 OER Sources

In the analysis of institutional websites, the researchers sought to find out where the OERs are domiciled. 34 universities had OER links, OER repositories, or repositories with OERs. OER links or contents were not available in 24 other universities, while 26 universities had links to external OER databases (journal articles/courseware). The researchers observed that some of the institutions have an OER repository link and the standard institutional repositories (Figure 2).

Figure 2

OER sources (n = 85); Source: Field data.

4.2.3 Availability of Self-Authored OERs

In the analysis of the websites, the researchers found that self-authored OERs were not available in majority (76%) of the universities (Figure 3). Only 24% had self-authored OERs, and they include inaugural lectures, past questions, lecture notes, conference papers, videos, and E-books. Apart from the resources in the repositories which were mainly journal and conference papers, most of the self-authored OERs were inaugural lectures and past questions. It is pertinent to note here that all of the available ‘self-authored OERs’ found in this study might ironically not fall under the categories of OERs because there was no Creative Commons Licence attached to them. Only one of the universities had self-authored OERs licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License. This gives credence to the findings of Meinam, Meinam, Deepti, and Singh (2023) that engagement with OERs is only prioritised and discussed at the top level, with limited focus on scholarship and capacity development programmes. Evidently, these universities labelled these resources as OERs, while they are not indicating the lack of comprehensive understanding of OER.

Figure 3

Availability of self-authored OERs (n = 85). Source: Field data.

5 Discussions

The findings from this study revealed that the OER initiatives in Nigerian public universities were low. Also, the existing OER initiatives were set up due to ‘normative pressure’ (Bringula, 2016). Normative pressure is a practice where institutions adopt innovations because stakeholders are embracing or have mandated the same practice; most times the adoption is with little or no management sustainable plan. Interestingly, since UNESCO’s initial involvement, researchers have warned that simply providing access to OER is not enough without support systems that encourage and facilitate its use (Zaid & Alabi, 2020). A pointer to this is that none of the institutions studied had an available OER policy on their website; most of the OER initiatives in these universities were based on the 2017 NUC OER directive to universities, which seems to have been halted, and later the recent THE ranking of universities that factored resources in repositories. The implication is thus shaky and ill-managed OER projects, as evident in the findings of this research. A similar situation occurred with the implementation of institutional repositories ab initio (Salau et al., 2020).

At the national level, there seems to be no holistic understanding among the stakeholders on the concept of OER which cascades down to the institutional and individual level, thus issues of policy summersault are apparent. A pointer to this fact is that the TETFUND, a stakeholder in the development of the draft OER policy, doesn’t have a clear policy on the sharing of publicly funded outputs from book development and research publications through open access publishing and licences. For instance, the books published through the book development fund which were distributed freely in print copies to libraries were not copyrighted for open licenses, which will make digitisation and subsequent sharing of these books, translating or illustrating these books without permission from the authors illegal. Debatably, TETFUND left the license option at the discretion of the authors, which shouldn’t be since they were part of the OER validation meeting in 2017 and should understand the concept of OER better and incorporate it in 2021. Leaving this option at the discretion of authors and publishers who are still used to the traditional copyright ownership retained, and unaware of open licenses and OERs (Adebowale et al., 2023; Belikov & Bodily, 2016) is arguably why these books were not openly licensed. The TETFUND guidelines were more about reviving and revitalising academic and scholarly publishing through the printing presses than opening up these resources (TETFUND, 2020).

Furthermore, the situation is not different at the institutional level. The researchers observed that some of the OERs at the institutional level were not distributed in such a way that the focus was for others to adopt or adapt them to their teaching, research, or even for developing other OERs. For instance, one of the institutions had a fee-based model to access their OERs. Two other institutions had access control and digital rights as part of the functionality of their repositories. Only one institution published its OER under the Creative Commons license. Also, although the NUC directive to universities was to include full-text, non-copyrighted resources, including journals, articles, lecture notes, etc., these resources were not published under the Creative Commons open licenses. The fact that they are open doesn’t mean the contents can be re-used or remixed without permission. Open licenses provide a way for content creators to allow others to use the information resources without undue restrictions, such as requesting permission to translate or illustrate them Osuigwe (2023). Yet, the majority of these ‘OERs’ in public universities were without the creative commons open licences. The principles of open access to education resources are based on the premise of David Wiley's 5R model. The 5R model asserts that the basis of publishing educational resources is sharing them openly in such a way that it is easy for others to adopt or adapt them to their teaching, thereby making it easy for students and educators to be less dependent on commercial resources and instead work with resources that can be reused, revised, retained, remixed, and redistributed (Wiley, 2014). The fear of plagiarism due to the holistic understanding of OERs may be an enabler of the low use of OERs for teaching (Zaid & Alabi, 2020).

The fee-based model practised in one of the institutions deviates from the NUC directive. However, it is pertinent to note here that, there may be justification for the fee-based model as funding is very fundamental in the management process of projects. This situation indicates two things: first, there hasn’t been proper monitoring and evaluation of the OER projects since the 2017 directive. Secondly, funding is the lifeline of sustainable OERs and educational institutions providing funding in silos may not be sustainable. From the literature, the sustainability of initial initiatives launched by educational institutions to provide funding for professors to create OERs in developed countries proved difficult (Zhou, 2022). Thus, there is the need to have a holistic sustainability and management model, which includes funding for OER projects, to be included in the national OER policy or educational institutions pooling funds together. Other sustainability models that can work within the Nigeria context were discussed by Zaid & Alabi (2020).

Additionally, some institutions had existing repositories with some OERs; surprisingly, instead of leveraging this existing infrastructure, some institutions set up separate OER repositories. While it can be argued that some of the content on the existing repositories may not be OERs because of the rights of third-party publishers, especially for books and journals, ironically, some of these contents were included in the OER repositories. In the opinion of the researchers of this current study, OER sub-communities could have been created specifically for this purpose in the institutional repositories. Commendably, thirteen (13) institutions retained their existing repositories and merged the repository contents with the set-up OER repositories.

It is pertinent to state here that the essence of the Open Access Movement and, by extension, the OER initiative is availability and visibility. This seems to be lost with OER initiatives in Nigeria. The institutions with self-authored OERs were situated in different locations outside open repositories. Open repositories have several characteristics that make them ideal locations for the management and visibility of OERs like the indexing on Google and Google Scholar in comparison with other online locations on institutional websites (Hurrell, 2023). One of the institutions under study had a fee-based system to access OERs on their website, which negates the essence of openness.

Another interesting finding from this study is that the ICT units are enablers and not drivers of OER initiatives in the institutions under study; thus, leaving these projects solely at their discretion sometimes comes with management challenges. Most of the initiatives were implemented by the ICT unit or committees that leveraged the expertise of the ICT units. However, deployment of technology is only an aspect of OER projects, a lot goes into the administration and management of these resources that librarians can handle, by their training. The researchers observed that after the initial deployment of the technology, nothing much happened afterwards, which showed a gap to be filled by librarians; librarians that weren’t involved in these projects’ ab initio.

Consequently, university librarians must have sufficient knowledge or comprehend issues around teaching, learning, and research support services and how to advocate for and negotiate their roles at the national level and in individual institutions. The lack of enthusiasm and drive on the part of some university librarians for initiatives such as the OERs goes a long way in determining their inclusion in such projects if and when it is to be taken up at the top management level. For instance, it can be argued that the OER project started as an NUC initiative, it wouldn’t be out of place for university libraries to inherit these projects and play a consistent role in the promotion, management, and sustainability of OERs. The researchers observed that librarians in Nigeria usually play laid-back roles when they should be championing these initiatives, which could be due to a lack of capacity. The African Library and Information Associations and Institutions and, recently, the Librarians’ Registration Council of Nigeria have taken up this challenge and have been building the capacity of African librarians on the OER initiatives (Itasanmi, 2020; Osuigwe & Levey, 2023). However, this is not sufficient, and thus, it is pertinent for the associations at local and national levels, institutions, and OER development partners to include this as part of the capacity development initiatives. A learning model similar to the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) capacity building initiative https://sparcopen.org/ where an annual cohort of librarians in Africa/Nigeria go through a leadership programme on Open Access initiatives might be a good model to consider. One of the outcomes of such a leadership programme should be building OER community of practices at the institutional level. This would help increase the awareness and use of OERs for teaching and learning. In addition, the curriculum of library schools should be reviewed to include trends such as open-access publishing and scholarly communication.

Looking at the issue from another perspective, the lethargy portrayed by librarians could be because advocating and managing initiatives like the OER projects are not included in the assessment metrics for the promotion and tenure of academic librarians; hence the trend to focus more on current research assessment roles like publishing in journals, conference proceedings and books. Issues like the above give credence to the growing trend of calls for cultural shifts in the research ecosystem towards more holistic and equitable forms of research assessment outside traditional research outputs (Salau, Olijhoek, & Oaiya, 2024). Other researchers have also called for the recognition of librarians’ dual responsibilities of delivering quality library services to patrons and creating scholarly publications (Adebowale et al., 2023; Hollister & Jensen, 2023). Maybe, the academic librarians in Nigeria will take up their rightful place in the management and advocacy of open access initiatives through routine training and sensitisation in relevant OER areas.

6 Conclusion

The study concluded that the management of OERs in Nigerian institutions and libraries is poor. Arguably, this is due to the incoherent implementation and non-inclusion of librarians at the initial implementation stage. Its penetration is also focused more on the availability and use of external OERs than the development of self-authored OERs from Nigerian authors. The researchers find it interesting that members of the Association of University Librarians of Nigeria were involved at the validation meeting of OER policy and the implementation strategy committee level; yet at the individual institutions, librarians were exempted during the implementation of the OER projects in some institutions. This infers a disconnect of librarians with the key roles of open access advocacy that they should be championing.

Academic librarians in Nigeria have not taken a strategic leadership position in the management of OERs from the top to the bottom. Although, it can be argued that most librarians are still grappling with the concept of OERs and may lack the capacity. The library associations at local, national, and regional levels must intensify their OER capacity development initiatives. There is a need to approach the OER capacity-building initiative from a more structured and informed perspective; an adaptation of the SPARC capacity-building model can be looked into. Moreover, there is also the need to start having a cultural shift towards the inclusion of other assessment criteria for promotion and tenure aside from core traditional research and teaching outputs for academic librarians in most universities. This will encourage more librarians to be abreast and take up initiatives like the open access movement.

Despite these inherent issues, an interesting perspective noted from the findings of the study is that in Nigeria, institution mandate drives the implementation of projects like the OER project. However, for the management and sustainability of these projects in the institutions, there must be some form of healthy competition or assessment metrics as in the case of the use of external OER databases for accreditation and the case of the NUC OER ranking exercise. Thus, there is a need to holistically look at the management of OERs from an organic angle using the social value benefits.

Subsequently, the researchers are recommending that the NUC include institutional-based OER projects similar to MIT’s OpenCourseWare project and the University of Edinburg OER project as part of accreditation scoring and institutional ranking metrics. Stakeholders like the TETFUND can provide funding support. In addition, the institutions can collaborate with development partners working on quality education for all (SDG 4). These funding models will go a long way in ensuring the sustainability of these initiatives.

7 Research Limitations

The researchers collected data on all forms of OER initiatives (online and offline) managed by the academic libraries in the institution under study. However, a possible limitation can be the omission of OER projects managed outside the libraries, which the researchers may have missed since the focus was only on OERs available on the websites and information from the e-resources librarians. Further research can investigate the availability of OERs managed by other units like the Centres of Open Distance Learning in the universities.