Student perceptions of the creation and reuse of open educational resources: A case study of the development-oriented student organisation

Authors : Michael Paskevicius, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams

This case study explores students’ perceptions of the creation and reuse of digital teaching and learning resources in their work as tutors as part of a volunteer community development organisation at a large South African University.

Through a series of semi-structured interviews, student-tutors reflect on their use and reuse of digital educational resources, and identify the challenges they experience in curating, adapting, and reusing educational resources for use in their teaching activities.

The data is analysed qualitatively within the framework of an activity system (Engeström, 1987) to surface the primary systemic tensions that student-tutors face in the reuse of resources found online as well as open educational resources (OER).

This study found that student-tutors sourced and used educational materials from the Internet, largely irrespective of their licensing conditions, while also creating and remixing a substantial number of educational materials to make them suitable for use in their context.

We conclude that greater awareness of the availability of OER and explicit open licencing for works sourced and created within community development organisations could enhance sharing, collaboration, and help sustain high impact resources.

URL : Student perceptions of the creation and reuse of open educational resources: A case study of the development-oriented student organisation

Alternative location : http://www.jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/253

A Comparison of Open Access in Exercise Science Journals: 2010 to 2012

The aim of this study was to complete an audit on the number of open access journals within the discipline of Exercise Science. Publishing in open access journals results in wide dissemination of material in a very short period of time compared with the more traditional way of publishing in a subscription journal. The 2010 ERA journal list, category Human Movement and Sport Science, was initially utilised and then compared with the openness of the same journals in 2012.

In this study journals were audited for their degree of open access, open licensing and open format. Open access relates to the free online availability of research results and hence research publications and in the discipline of exercise science relates to the concept of an idealised level playing field.

Open licensing relates to the ability of the consumers to replicate and share those publications freely whilst open format relates to the use of open and transferrable format types. Open access increased (p=0.014) as did our measurement of open licensing (p=0.000) and open formats (p=0.021) between the 2010 and 2012 reviews of the journals in 1106 For code.

This study reveals an increase in the number of Exercise Science journals that have full or partial open access over the two year period and suggests that authors are increasingly adopting peer reviewed open access journal publications. It is evident from this study that the impact of open access journals be assessed and further research into the feasibility of such a rating is imperative.

URL : http://bentham-open.com/contents/pdf/TOSSJ/TOSSJ-6-1.pdf