OER adoption: a continuum for practice

Publié le 20 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« Whilst Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for broadening participation in Higher Education, reducing course development and study costs, and building open collaborative partnerships to improve teaching and learning practices, they have yet to gain significant mainstream traction. Research surrounding open education has focused on adoption at the institutional level, identifying key enablers and barriers to practice, but the practicalities of engagement with open resources are not often addressed.

By reviewing existing literature, and studying prior models used to explain OER (re)use, this paper proposes a continuum of use model. The proposed model seeks to acknowledge the complexity of applied knowledge required to fulsomely engage with open education by examining practitioner behaviours and the necessary supporting mechanisms. This conceptual model aims to be of use to both practitioners and also those responsible for designing professional development in an educational setting. Whilst the proposed model is designed for teaching staff use, some discussion is given as to how it could be applied to student learning using open resources as well. »

URL : OER adoption: a continuum for practice

Alternative URL : http://journals.uoc.edu/index.php/rusc/article/view/v11n3-stagg

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OER in practice: Organisational change by bootstrapping

Publié le 20 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« In this paper, we investigate an approach to institutional change that aims to establish open educational practices (OEP) in a university and inculcate the use of open education resources (OER) as part of its curriculum work and teaching practice. Traditional practices that involve delivering knowledge resources for individualised learning within semester-length units of study are becoming increasingly ill-adapted to the demands of a dynamic and global educational landscape. OER offers a sustainable and equitable alternative to such closed arrangements, with the potential to meet the emerging demands of distributed learning settings. Nevertheless, changing educational practice remains a formidable challenge, and adopting OER is a radical break from legacy institutional practices. Our focus in this paper is on the starting point for embedding OER in curriculum work and teaching practice. We investigate change through emergent initiatives rather than a top-down program at La Trobe University in Australia: we ask what connections are necessary to establish open practices in a university. We trace three instances of OEP in one university that together build capacity in OER. We draw on Bardini’s strategy of bootstrapping, as an iterative and co-adaptive learning process that connects good practices in situ with institutional structures in order to build the groundwork for emergent change. These cases demonstrate how disparate innovations can be connected and re-purposed to establish a network of nascent OEP. »

URL : OER in practice: Organisational change by bootstrapping

Alternative URL : http://journals.uoc.edu/index.php/rusc/article/view/v11n3-hannon-huggard-orchard-stone

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The evolution of open access to research and data in Australian higher education

Publié le 20 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« Open access (OA) in the Australian tertiary education sector is evolving rapidly and, in this article, we review developments in two related areas: OA to scholarly research publications and open data. OA can support open educational resource (OER) efforts by providing access to research for learning and teaching, and a range of actors including universities, their peak bodies, public research funding agencies and other organisations and networks that focus explicitly on OA are increasingly active in these areas in diverse ways. OA invites change to the status quo across the higher education sector and current momentum and vibrancy in this area suggests that rapid and significant changes in the OA landscape will continue into the foreseeable future. General practices, policies, infrastructure and cultural changes driven by the evolution of OA in Australian higher education are identified and discussed. The article concludes by raising several key questions for the future of OA research and open data policies and practices in Australia in the context of growing interest in OA internationally. »

URL : The evolution of open access to research and data in Australian higher education

Alternative URL : http://journals.uoc.edu/index.php/rusc/article/view/v11n3-picasso-phelan

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Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda

Publié le 18 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda offers a systematic overview of the major issues, trends, and areas of priority in online distance education research. In each chapter, an international expert or team of experts provides an overview of one timely issue in online distance education, summarizing major research on the topic, discussing theoretical insights that guide the research, posing questions and directions for future research, and discussing the implications for distance education practice as a whole. Intended as a primary reference and guide for distance educators, researchers, and policymakers, Online Distance Education addresses aspects of distance education practice that have often been marginalized, including issues of cost and economics, concerns surrounding social justice, cultural bias, the need for faculty professional development, and the management and growth of learner communities. At once soundly empirical and thoughtfully reflective, yet also forward-looking and open to new approaches to online and distance teaching, this text is a solid resource for researchers in a rapidly expanding discipline. »

URL : Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda

Alternative URL : http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120233

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What Do Researchers Need? Feedback On Use of Online Primary Source Materials

Publié le 16 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« Cultural heritage institutions are increasingly providing online access to primary source materials for researchers. While the intent is to enable round-the-clock access from any location, few studies have examined the extent to which current web delivery is meeting the needs of users. Careful use of limited resources requires intelligent assessment of researcher needs in comparison to the actual online presentation, including access, retrieval and usage options. In the hopes of impacting future delivery methods and access development, this article describes the results of a qualitative study of 11 humanities faculty researchers at the University of Alabama, who describe and rate the importance of various issues encountered when using 29 participant-selected online databases. »

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july14/deridder/07deridder.html

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Degrees of Openness Access : Restrictions in Institutional Repositories

Publié le 16 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« Institutional repositories, green road and backbone of the open access movement, contain a growing number of items that are metadata without full text, metadata with full text only for authorized users, and items that are under embargo or that are restricted to on-campus access. This paper provides a short overview of relevant literature and presents empirical results from a survey of 25 institutional repositories that contain more than 2 million items. The intention is to evaluate their degree of openness with specific attention to different categories of documents (journal articles, books and book chapters, conference communications, electronic theses and dissertations, reports, working papers) and thus to contribute to a better understanding of their features and dynamics. We address the underlying question of whether this lack of openness is temporary due to the transition from traditional scientific communication to open access infrastructures and services, or here to stay, as a basic feature of the new and complex cohabitation of institutional repositories and commercial publishing. »

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july14/prost/07prost.html

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Open access and online journals in orthopaedics : What does the future hold ?

Publié le 11 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« Introduction: Open access journalism has expanded in the last two decades, with increasing titles in all medical specialties, including orthopaedic surgery. No study has evaluated the impact of open access orthopaedic journals or their associated risks and benefits to academic publishing and patient care.
Methods: This study evaluated open access orthopaedic journals utilizing various databases including the Directly of Open Access Journals (www.DOAJ.org), PubMed Central (www.PubMed.org), Google search queries and recent articles, stories, and editorials on the topic of open access journalism. All orthopaedic surgery journals were recorded, as well as associated characteristics including publisher, year of publication, articles and issues per year, impact factor, and potential risk of a “predatory” publisher. Data were summarized and presented.
Results: Our search yielded a total of 42 orthopaedic open access journals in the English language from 30 different publishers. In total, there were nearly 13,000 articles available from these journals available without a license or subscription. Of the 42 journals, 13 (31%) were considered predatory or borderline publishers, and only one had a published impact factor (IF = 0.737). In contrast, 8 of the remaining 29 journals (28%) had a published impact factor with a mean value of 1.788 (range: 0.597-4.302).
Conclusion: Open access publishing is a rising trend in the orthopaedic literature, and allows for free, public and international availability of research findings. Like any new technology, open access is not without its faults, and critics have appropriately raised concerns about academic integrity and profiteering by certain publishers. Researchers and surgeons alike are responsible for maintaining the quality of the orthopaedic literature, by participating in the peer review process and avoiding the temptation to publish quickly. »

URL : http://www.coa.org/docs/2014AnnualMeeting/9FrankoOrrinOpenAccessOrthopaedics.pdf

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Understanding Repository Growth at the University of North Texas: A Case Study

Publié le 11 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« Over the past decade the University of North Texas Libraries (UNTL) has developed a sizable digital library infrastructure for use in carrying out its core mission to the students, faculty, staff and associated communities of the university. This repository of content offers countless research possibilities for end users across the Internet when it is discovered and used in research, scholarship, entertainment, and lifelong learning. The characteristics of the repository itself provide insight into the workings of a modern digital library infrastructure, how it was created, how often it is updated, or how often it is modified. In that vein, the authors created a dataset comprised of information extracted from the UNT Libraries’ archival repository Coda and analyzed this dataset in order to demonstrate the value and insights that can be gained from sharing repository characteristics more broadly. This case study presents the findings from an analysis of this dataset. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.0547

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Wikipedia in the eyes of its beholders: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia readers and readership

Publié le 9 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« Hundreds of scholarly studies have investigated various aspects of the immensely popular Wikipedia. Although a number of literature reviews have provided overviews of this vast body of research, none of them has specifically focused on the readers of Wikipedia and issues concerning its readership. In this systematic literature review, we review 99 studies to synthesize current knowledge regarding the readership of Wikipedia and also provide an analysis of research methods employed. The scholarly research has found that Wikipedia is popular not only for lighter topics such as entertainment, but also for more serious topics such as health information and legal background. Scholars, librarians and students are common users of Wikipedia, and it provides a unique opportunity for educating students in digital literacy. We conclude with a summary of key findings, implications for researchers, and implications for the Wikipedia community. »

URL : http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/978653/

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Why and where Wikipedia is cited in journal articles?

Publié le 9 juillet 2014 par Hans Dillaerts

« The aim of this research was to identify the motivations for citation to Wikipedia in scientific papers. Also, the number of citation to Wikipedia, location of citation, type of citing papers, subject of citing and cited articles were determined and compared in different subject fields. From all English articles indexed in Scopus in 2007 and 2012 that have cited Wikipedia, 602 articles were selected using stratified random sampling. Content analysis and bibliometric methods were used to carry out the research. Results showed that there are 20 motivations for citing Wikipedia and the most frequent of them are providing general information and definition, facts and figures. Citations to Wikipedia often were in the introduction and introductory sections of papers. Computer sciences, internet and chemistry were the most cited subjects. The use of Wikipedia in articles is increasing both in terms of quantity and diversity. However, there are disciplinary differences both in the amount and the nature of use of Wikipedia. »

URL : http://www.jscires.org/text.asp?2013/2/3/231/135415

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