Identifying Categories of Open Educational Resource Users

The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement has been successful in developing a large, global community of practitioners, in releasing high-quality learning material and influencing policy. It now stands at the cusp of mainstream adoption, which will require reaching different audiences than previously. In this article, the findings of the OER ResearchHub are used to identify three categories of OER users: OER active, OER facilitator, and OER consumer. These groups have different requirements of OER and thus varying strategies would be required to meet their needs if mainstream adoption was to be realized.