Enhancing curriculum design and delivery with OER

This paper reports on the key findings from the EVOL-OER project which aims to develop a deeper understanding of the reuse of open educational resources (OERs) by academics in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This paper builds on the JISC OER Impact study by exploring and expanding on the Ratified quadrant of the study’s landscape of reuse framework (White & Manton, 2011). This paper puts forward a different four-quadrant diagram called ‘OER-enhanced curriculum’ to illustrate different approaches adopted by academics to embedding OER into curriculum design and delivery. Key issues in relation to motivation and challenges in reusing OER are discussed

Perspectives on Open and Distance Learning: Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice

Open Educational Resources (OER) – that is, teaching, learning and research materials that their owners make free to others to use, revise and share – offer a powerful means of expanding the reach and effectiveness of worldwide education. Those resources can be full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, software, and other materials and techniques used to promote and support universal access to knowledge. This book, initiated by the UNESCO/COL Chair in OER, is one in a series of publications by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) examining OER. It describes the movement in detail, providing readers with insight into OER’s significant benefits, its theory and practice, and its achievements and challenges. The 16 chapters, written by some of the leading international experts on the subject, are organised into four parts by theme: OER in Academia – describes how OER are widening the international community of scholars, following MIT’s lead in sharing its resources and looking to the model set by the OpenCourseWare Consortium OER in Practice – presents case studies and descriptions of OER initiatives underway on three continents Diffusion of OER – discusses various approaches to releasing and “opening” content, from building communities of users that support lifelong learning to harnessing new mobile technologies that enhance OER access on the Internet Producing, Sharing and Using OER – examines the pedagogical, organisational, personal and technical issues that producing organisations and institutions need to address in designing, sharing and using OER Instructional designers, curriculum developers, educational technologists, teachers, researchers, students, others involved in creating, studying or using OER: all will find this timely resource informative and inspiring.Sponsors, whose grants have helped in the realization of this book, include: the Ministry of Advanced Education and Technology of Alberta, Canada; the Canadian Foundation for Innovation; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University

Offshore education : offshore education in the wider context of internationalisation and ICT: experiences and examples from Dutch higher education

This report presents a study on offshore education conducted by a consortium of Dutch higher education researchers and commissioned by the Digital University (DU). The study explored the extent to which Dutch higher education institutions are involved in offering their educational services abroad (offshore education). After thoroughly embedding offshore education in the wider contexts of internationalisation and ICT policies, the study particularly explores the practical experiences with a number of real-life offshore activities of Dutch higher education. As a warm-up to this report, a few interesting cases are briefly touched upon below

How to design for persistence and retention in MOOCs?

Design of educational interventions is typically carried out following a design cycle involving phases of investigation, conceptualization, prototyping, implementation, execution and evaluation. This cycle can be applied at different levels of granularity e.g. learning activity, module, course or programme. In this paper we consider an aspect of learner behavior that can be critical to the success of many MOOCs i.e. their persistence to study, and the related theme of learner retention. We reflect on the impact that consideration of these can have on design decisions at different stages in the design cycle with the aim of en-hancing MOOC design in relation to learner persistence and retention, with particular attention to the European context

Propuesta de un modelo de análisis redinformétrico multinivel para el estudio sistémico de las universidades españolas (2010)

La universidad, en tanto que institución milenaria, tiene una influencia y peso en la sociedad actual incuestionable. Una influencia tanto activa (en su vertiente formadora de futuros profesionales y ciudadanos, y de generación de nuevo conocimiento e investigación) como pasiva (debido a sus enormes necesidades de financiación). Este peso e influencia de las universidades en la sociedad marcan la necesidad de establecer mecanismos y procedimientos para analizar su rendimiento, eficiencia y eficacia como institución, así como de instrumentos para visualizar adecuadamente este rendimiento, todo ello en el contexto de una sociedad marcada por la gestión y transferencia masiva de información a través de las redes de comunicación. Se vislumbran por tanto 3 líneas de investigación complementarias: el análisis de la universidad, su rendimiento (explicitado por el rastro digital que ésta genera y las técnicas existentes para cuantificarlo), y la visualización de este rendimiento, donde la técnica de ranking es la más extendida dado el impacto que su formato genera en los usuarios. Además, la naturaleza sistémica de la universidad determina, complica y acota cada una de estas áreas. La presente tesis doctoral pretende por tanto explorar las capacidades que la cibermetría (renombrada en este trabajo como redinformetría) proporciona para analizar, desde un punto de vista sistémico, las universidades del sistema español, con el propósito de obtener nuevo conocimiento acerca del rendimiento de éstas que permita la construcción futura de rankings sistémicos de universidades. Para ello, en primer lugar se ofrece un estado de la cuestión enfocado en las 3 principales líneas de trabajo (universidad, ranking y cibermetría), con el objetivo de ofrecer un marco de trabajo exhaustivo y crítico. Tras la parte introductoria, se propone un modelo de análisis redinformétrico multinivel de universidades que facilite la obtención de información estructurada, y que permita su posterior utilización en el diseño y elaboración de rankings web de universidades. Este modelo de análisis se basa en el establecimiento de 3 niveles (institucional, externo y satélite) y dos subniveles (contorno e interno). Los resultados obtenidos muestran que el modelo de análisis propuesto, basado en niveles (institucional, externo y satélite) y subniveles (contorno y unidad) es sencillo, independiente de técnica y proporciona información estructurada que permite un análisis completo de cada institución.Orduña Malea, E. (2012). Propuesta de un modelo de análisis redinformétrico multinivel para el estudio sistémico de las universidades españolas (2010) [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/14420Palanci

Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South

Education in the Global South faces several key interrelated challenges, for which Open Educational Resources (OER) are seen to be part of the solution. These challenges include: unequal access to education; variable quality of educational resources, teaching, and student performance; and increasing cost and concern about the sustainability of education. The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project seeks to build on and contribute to the body of research on how OER can help to improve access, enhance quality and reduce the cost of education in the Global South. This volume examines aspects of educator and student adoption of OER and engagement in Open Educational Practices (OEP) in secondary and tertiary education as well as teacher professional development in 21 countries in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. The ROER4D studies and syntheses presented here aim to help inform Open Education advocacy, policy, practice and research in developing countries

Rethinking the law school

Law, by its very nature, tends to think locally, not globally. This book has a broader scope in terms of the range of nations and offers a succinct journey through law schools on different continents and subject matters. It covers education, research, impact and societal outreach, and governance. It illustrates that law schools throughout the world have much in common in terms of values, duties, challenges, ambitions and hopes. It provides insights into these aspirations, whilst presenting a thought provoking discussion for a more global agenda on the future of law schools. Written from the perspective of a former dean, the book offers a unique understanding of the challenges facing legal education and research

A new paradigm for open data-driven language learning systems design in higher education

This doctoral thesis presents three studies in collaboration with the open source FLAX project (Flexible Language Acquisition flax.nzdl.org). This research makes an original contribution to the fields of language education and educational technology by mobilising knowledge from computer science, corpus linguistics and open education, and proposes a new paradigm for open data-driven language learning systems design in higher education. Furthermore, the research presented in this thesis uncovers and engages with an infrastructure of open educational practices (OEP) that push at the parameters of policy for the reuse of open access research and pedagogic content in the design, development, distribution, adoption and evaluation of data-driven language learning systems. Study 1 employs automated content analysis to mine the concept of open educational systems and practices from qualitative reflections spanning 2012-2019 with stakeholders from an on-going multi-site design-based research study with the FLAX project. Design considerations are presented for remixing domain-specific open access content for academic English language provision across formal and non-formal higher education contexts. Primary stakeholders in this ongoing research collaboration include the following: knowledge organisations – libraries and archives including the British Library and the Oxford Text Archive, universities in collaboration with Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers; an interdisciplinary team of researchers; and knowledge users in formal higher education – English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners. Themes arising from the qualitative dataset point to affordances as well as barriers with the adoption of open policies and practices for remixing open access content for data-driven language learning applications in higher education against the backdrop of different business models and cultural practices present within participating knowledge organisations. Study 2 presents a data-driven experiment in non-formal higher education by triangulating user query system log data with learner participant data from surveys (N=174) on the interface designs and usability of an automated open source digital library scheme, FLAX. Text and data mining approaches (TDM) common to natural language processing (NLP) were applied to pedagogical English language corpora, derived from the content of two MOOCs, (Harvard University with edX, and the University of London with Coursera), and one networked course (Harvard Law School with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society), which were then linked to external open resources (e.g. Wikipedia, the FLAX Learning Collocations system, WordNet), so that learners could employ the information discovery techniques (e.g. searching and browsing) that they have become accustomed to using through search engines (e.g. Google, Bing) for discovering and learning the domain-specific language features of their interests. Findings indicate a positive user experience with interfaces that include advanced affordances for course content browse, search and retrieval that transcend the MOOC platform and Learning Management System (LMS) standard. Further survey questions derived from an open education research bank from the Hewlett Foundation are reused in this study and presented against a larger dataset from the Hewlett Foundation (N=1921) on motivations for the uptake of open educational resources. Study 3 presents a data-driven experiment in formal higher education from the legal English field to measure quantitatively the usefulness and effectiveness of employing the open Law Collections in FLAX in the teaching of legal English at the University of Murcia in Spain. Informants were divided into an experimental and a control group and were asked to write an essay on a given set of legal English topics, defined by the subject instructor as part of their final assessment. The experimental group only consulted the FLAX English Common Law MOOC collection as the single source of information to draft their essays, and the control group used any information source available from the Internet to draft their essays. Findings from an analysis of the two learner corpora of essays indicate that members of the experimental group appear to have acquired the specialised terminology of the area better than those in the control group, as attested by the higher term average obtained by the texts in the FLAX-based corpus (56.5) as opposed to the non-FLAX-based text collection, at 13.73 points below