Open educational resources in distributed learning infrastructures: An international comparative study

Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to support increased higher education access at a lower cost to rural, remote, lower-socio economic students, alongside lifelong learners and time-poor workers who require upskilling (Bossu & Meier, 2018; Orr, Rimini, & van Damme, 2015). The German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has funded the interdisciplinary project ‘Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures – EduArc’ (Learning Lab, 2019), a partnership between the University of Duisburg-Essen, the German Institute for International Educational Research, the Leibnitz Information Centre for Economics and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, in order to explore the development of disseminated learning infrastructures and enable national access to digital education resources. In order to produce infrastructure that is aligned with international developments and trends in higher education digital transformation, nine comparative country studies have been commissioned, alongside Germany, to be undertaken by members of the Centre for Open Education Research (www.uol.de/coer), namely Spain, China, Japan, Korea, Canada, South Africa, Turkey, USA and Australia. The country studies focus on digital transformation across the macro, meso and micro levels, and focus in particular on the infrastructure for disseminating OER in higher education, including repositories and meta-data standards. The studies also focus on national, state and institutional policies; quality assurance mechanisms and key actors; and how change (in terms of funding, managing and promoting infrastructure) is promoted and occurs at all three levels. To date, the macro studies have been completed. In terms of Infrastructure, Spain, China, Japan and Korea have national repositories, including OER, although they are not commonly used in Japanese universities. Canada and USA have decentralised infrastructure, with companies retaining intellectual property rights. All governments have recommendations and funding for digital transformation, however the majority of action is left to individual states and institutions. Spain, Korea and China have national standards for digitalisation, labelling, quality and/or meta-data standards, with the onus on institutions in other countries. The next stage of this research, the meso level, is currently underway

The structure of social networks and its link to higher education students' socio-emotional loneliness during COVID-19

Lonely students typically underperform academically. According to several studies, the COVID-19 pandemic is an important risk factor for increases in loneliness, as the contact restrictions and the switch to mainly online classes potentially burden the students. The previously familiar academic environment (campus), as well as the exchange with peers and lecturers on site, were no longer made available. In our cross-sectional study, we examine factors that could potentially counteract the development of higher education student loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic from a social network perspective. During the semester, N = 283 students from across all institutional faculties of a German comprehensive university took part in an online survey. We surveyed their social and emotional experiences of loneliness, their self-reported digital information-sharing behavior, and their current egocentric networks. Here, we distinguished between close online contacts (i.e., mainly online exchanges) and close offline contacts (i.e., mainly in-person face-to-face exchanges). In addition, we derived the interconnectedness (i.e., the densities of the egocentric networks) and heterogeneity (operationalized with the entropy) of students’ contacts. To obtain the latter, we used a novel two-step method combining t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) and cluster analysis. We explored the associations of the aforementioned predictors (i.e., information-sharing behavior, number of online and offline contacts, as well as interconnectedness and heterogeneity of the close contacts network) on social and emotional loneliness separately using two hierarchical multiple linear regression models. Our results suggest that social loneliness is strongly related to digital information-sharing behavior and the network structure of close contacts. In particular, high information-sharing behavior, high number of close contacts (whether offline or online), a highly interconnected network, and a homogeneous structure of close contacts were associated with low social loneliness. Emotional loneliness, on the other hand, was mainly related to network homogeneity, in the sense that students with homogeneous close contacts networks experienced low emotional loneliness. Overall, our study highlights the central role of students’ close social network on feelings of loneliness in the context of COVID-19 restrictions. Limitations and implications are discussed

A Comparative Study of National Infrastructures for Digital (Open) Educational Resources in Higher Education

This paper reports on the first stage of an international comparative study for the project “Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures–EduArc”, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This study reviews the situation of digital educational resources (or (O)ER) framed within the digital transformation of ten different Higher Education (HE) systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United States). Following a comparative case study approach, we investigated issues related to the existence of policies, quality assurance mechanisms and measures for the promotion of change in supporting infrastructure development for (O)ER at the national level in HE in the different countries. The results of this mainly documentary research highlight differences and similarities, which are largely due to variations in these countries’ political structure organisation. The discussion and conclusion point at the importance of understanding each country’s context and culture, in order to understand the differences between them, as well as the challenges they face

Internationalisation and migrant academics: the hidden narratives of mobility

Internationalisation is a dominant policy discourse in higher education today. It is invariably presented as an ideologically neutral, coherent, disembodied, knowledgedriven policy intervention - an unconditional good. Yet it is a complex assemblage of values linked not only to economic growth and prosperity, but also to global citizenship, transnational identity capital, social cohesion, intercultural competencies and soft power (Clifford and Montgomery 2014; De Wit et al. 2015; Kim 2017; Lomer 2016; Stier 2004). Mobility is the sine qua non of the global academy (Sheller 2014). International movements, flows and networks are perceived as valuable transnational and transferable identity capital and as counterpoints to intellectual parochialism. Fluidity metaphors abound as an antidote to stasis e.g. flows, flux and circulations (Urry 2007). For some, internationalisation is conceptually linked to the political economy of neoliberalism and the spatial extension of the market, risking commodification and commercialisation (Matus and Talburt 2009). Others raise questions about what/whose knowledge is circulating and whether internationalisation is a form of re-colonisation and convergence that seeks to homogenise higher education systems (Stromquist 2007). Internationalisation policies and practices, it seems, are complex entanglements of economic, political, social and affective domains. They are mechanisms for driving the global knowledge 2 economy and the fulfilment of personal aspirations (Hoffman 2009). Academic geographical mobility is often conflated with social mobility and career advancement (Leung 2017). However, Robertson (2010: 646) suggested that ‘the romance of movement and mobility ought to be the first clue that this is something we ought to be particularly curious about.

Facilitating student engagement in higher education through educational technology: A narrative systematic review in the field of education

Developing, sustaining, and improving student engagement is of vital importance to higher education instructors. Educational technology has been linked to student engagement, and preservice and in-service teachers need to develop information communication and technology (ICT) skills and knowledge to apply them in the classroom as well as to develop ICT skills in students. Thus, further investigation of this link in the field of education is needed. This narrative systematic review is a synthesis of 42 peer-reviewed articles from across four international databases, published between 2007-2016 and is a subset of a larger systematic review. The results indicate that the majority of research has been undertaken within undergraduate preservice teacher education, predominantly in the US, Hong Kong, and the UK, with limited attention given to grounding research in theory. This review found educational technology supports student engagement, with behavioral and affective being the most prevalent dimensions. Social networking tools (SNT), knowledge organization and sharing tools, text-based tools, and website creation tools were the most effective at promoting engagement. However, caution is needed when employing SNT and assessment tools, as they were also more likely to lead to disengagement. Further research is needed on how educational technology affects disengagement, how tools are used in online teacher education programs, and how to effectively integrate SNT in education programs