Questions of quality in repositories of open educational resources: a literature review

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials which are freely available and openly licensed. Repositories of OER (ROER) are platforms that host and facilitate access to these resources. ROER should not just be designed to store this content – in keeping with the aims of the OER movement, they should support educators in embracing open educational practices (OEP) such as searching for and retrieving content that they will reuse, adapt or modify as needed, without economic barriers or copyright restrictions. This paper reviews key literature on OER and ROER, in order to understand the roles ROER are said or supposed to fulfil in relation to furthering the aims of the OER movement. Four themes which should shape repository design are identified, and the following 10 quality indicators (QI) for ROER effectiveness are discussed: featured resources; user evaluation tools; peer review; authorship of the resources; keywords of the resources; use of standardised metadata; multilingualism of the repositories; inclusion of social media tools; specification of the creative commons license; availability of the source code or original files. These QI form the basis of a method for the evaluation of ROER initiatives which, in concert with considerations of achievability and long-term sustainability, should assist in enhancement and development. Keywords: open educational resources; open access; open educational practice; repositories; quality assuranc

Geographies of Access: Mapping the Online Attention to Digital Humanities Articles in Academic Journals

This poster aims to provide some answers in order to provide recommendations and best practices that might help democratise and increase the international access to peer-reviewed digital humanities research

Online attention to digital humanities publications

e suggest altmetrics services like the Altmetric Explorer can be an efficient method to obtain bibliographic datasets and track scholarly outputs being mentioned online in the sources curated by these services. Our dataset reflects that outputs with “digital humanities” in their metadata were not published in fully-fledged Open Access journals. The role of SSRN and arXiv as open repositories was found to be relatively significant, but the licensing of the outputs available through them was not always immediately clearly displayed. Our working definition of "Open Access" requires outputs to be open for human and machine access through CC-BY or at least CC-BY-SA. The absence of clear licensing information at output level is perceived to be problematic, as is the lack of any outputs clearly and visibly licensed with CC-BY. The fact the 3 most-mentioned outputs in the dataset were available without a paywall might signal towards the potential of Open Access for greater public impact. ‘Free access’ outputs in paywalled journals did not reflect higher mentions nor citations than their paywalled or non-paywalled counterparts. Though the dataset reflects a predictable dominance of authors based in the USA, the dataset points towards a growing presence of international digital humanities researchers

Online Attention to Digital Humanities Publications (#DH2014 poster)

 This is the source dataset for Priego, Ernesto; Havemann, Leo; Atenas, Javiera (2014): Online Attention for Digital Humanities Publications (#DH2014 poster). figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1094345 This dataset is based on an original report obtained with the Altmetric Explorer on April 23 2014. More recent reports are likely to vary. The original Altmetric Explorer data export was refined, modified and edited by Ernesto Priego, Leo Havemann and Javiera Atenas. This version might not reflect the latest versions used by the authors, and further refining might be required. This poster was presented in the Digital Humanities 2014 conference, Lausanne, Switzerland, July the 10th 2014, 2:00pm - 3:30pm. If you use, share or refer to this data please use the citation information above. This dataset is shared under a CC-BY license.   &nbsp

Local multiresolution order in community detection

Community detection algorithms attempt to find the best clusters of nodes in an arbitrary complex network. Multi-scale ("multiresolution") community detection extends the problem to identify the best network scale(s) for these clusters. The latter task is generally accomplished by analyzing community stability simultaneously for all clusters in the network. In the current work, we extend this general approach to define local multiresolution methods, which enable the extraction of well-defined local communities even if the global community structure is vaguely defined in an average sense. Toward this end, we propose measures analogous to variation of information and normalized mutual information that are used to quantitatively identify the best resolution(s) at the community level based on correlations between clusters in independently-solved systems. We demonstrate our method on two constructed networks as well as a real network and draw inferences about local community strength. Our approach is independent of the applied community detection algorithm save for the inherent requirement that the method be able to identify communities across different network scales, with appropriate changes to account for how different resolutions are evaluated or defined in a particular community detection method. It should, in principle, easily adapt to alternative community comparison measures.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure

Researching the registry: establishing an open education policy dataset

Much discussion of open education policy has occurred at the supranational level and in some cases, nations and subnational governments have taken up the challenge of incorporating open resources and practices into policymaking. What is less clear, and less straightforward to investigate is the extent to which individual institutions are developing policy to support openness. This session reports on work in progress towards the author's current study of OE policymaking in higher education institutions. In order to sketch some key features of the OE policy landscape for this wider study, it is necessary to collect and examine a wide range of existing institutional policy documents. The OER Policy Registry is an existing dataset, previously maintained by Creative Commons, which has been imported into the OER World Map (oerworldmap.org) in 2018. At the time of writing the registry contains 148 policies, or more accurately, records of policies indicating the source organisation and link and some metadata regarding type. It is not yet clear whether the current metadata held and/or schema are well-suited to the use cases of potential visitors to the registry. Furthermore, it is not yet clear that all records represent an actual 'policy', and if not, what other designations will be most appropriate. Therefore, prior to conducting research based on the registry as dataset, there is a need to audit the contents of the registry to understand what exactly it contains and establish inclusion and exclusion criteria for this aspect of the study, as well as helping to enhance the use of metadata to describe the current collection and future entries. This session will tell part of the author's research story, of identifying and describing an OE policy dataset, and initial findings from the investigation

Knowledge Integration and Diffusion: Measures and Mapping of Diversity and Coherence

I present a framework based on the concepts of diversity and coherence for the analysis of knowledge integration and diffusion. Visualisations that help understand insights gained are also introduced. The key novelty offered by this framework compared to previous approaches is the inclusion of cognitive distance (or proximity) between the categories that characterise the body of knowledge under study. I briefly discuss the different methods to map the cognitive dimension

Collaboration in sensor network research: an in-depth longitudinal analysis of assortative mixing patterns

Many investigations of scientific collaboration are based on statistical analyses of large networks constructed from bibliographic repositories. These investigations often rely on a wealth of bibliographic data, but very little or no other information about the individuals in the network, and thus, fail to illustrate the broader social and academic landscape in which collaboration takes place. In this article, we perform an in-depth longitudinal analysis of a relatively small network of scientific collaboration (N = 291) constructed from the bibliographic record of a research center involved in the development and application of sensor network and wireless technologies. We perform a preliminary analysis of selected structural properties of the network, computing its range, configuration and topology. We then support our preliminary statistical analysis with an in-depth temporal investigation of the assortative mixing of selected node characteristics, unveiling the researchers' propensity to collaborate preferentially with others with a similar academic profile. Our qualitative analysis of mixing patterns offers clues as to the nature of the scientific community being modeled in relation to its organizational, disciplinary, institutional, and international arrangements of collaboration.Comment: Scientometrics (In press

Education in the Open Government Partnership commitments

The improvement of education is a recurring objective within the commitments of the countries that participate in the Open Government Partnership (OGP). There are several national commitments related to the opening of Data, Information and Education Materials as teaching and learning tools within the national plans for Open Governance. In this context, we examine how these elements are related to the OGP commitments of countries at the international level and to propose strategies for the implementation of concrete policies that support these commitments with respect to education and to citizenship education. To achieve this objective, we will present the results of an exhaustive study on the models of education and civic education of different national OGP commitments, and based on the results of this study, we will present a diagnosis regarding how really open and sustainable these are. The results of this study allow us to present a series of strategies to promote open education (understood as those practices based on content released under open licenses that allow universal and democratic access to quality educational materials) as a tool to promote educational development amongst OGP member countries. The strategies to be presented include the effective promotion of the use of open government data as learning and teaching tools, citizen education focused on promoting understanding of access to public information, promoting the creation and development of initiatives national and international programs that promote sustainable open education in public education systems, and finally, the proposal of open education policy development models that allow the commitments made by governments and ministries to have a practical application. As summary: our goal is to provide to the Open Education Community practical tools that allow supporting the different countries of the region in the adoption of open education by generating policies that encourage open educational practices