OLnet RQs
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THIS PAGE IS BEING KEPT FOR REFERENCE ARCHIVE, BUT NOT CURRENTLY BEING UPDATED - FOR MORE UP TO DATE INFORMATION ABOUT OLNET SEE HTTP://OLNET.ORG [1] (added by Karen Cropper 15 Oct 2010)
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Olnet research questions
Developing from the ideas below the OLnet meeting on 4th June made a list of research issues in 7 categories.
The following issues were identified from: sharing of existing OLnet research questions, UNESCO research ideas, and feedback from Monterey Hewlett Grantees meeting followed collection of ideas from around the table. The numbering below reflects initial grouping of the ideas into 7 possible clusters:
Web2.0 environments
1. a. Role of Web 2.0 technologies – how they make the community work and help us achieve its aims.
1. b. How to build the social and technical infrastructure for OLnet? – how to track reuse of OER: offer a workspace to users to import and fragment OER to rearrange and mash up. A work space for learning design. This will give us a way to track what happens while being useful to the users to design.
Open Source influences
2. a. Roles of learners and educators connection and comparison with open-source flat structures and how people work.
2. b. Code repository and bug tracking as a way to track OER developments – workflow.
Learning
3. a. What sort of learning (if any) is going on?
3. b. Fusion between learners and educators how do people connect and understand.
3. c. Evidence of people learning – anyone learning. Pre and post test – "does anyone learn from OER?" Causal learning v higher order learning.
Community
4. a. Creation of a sustainable community
4. b. Construct informal learning communities – study intentional informal learning (e.g. allotments).
4. c. Peer review to help people identify and select OER for reuse.
4. d. Go from teachers to learners and employers and other users.
4. e. How do people operate within multiple communities and where does learning fit?
Reuse of OER
5. a. Are OER being reused by teachers – track from demand side but could try sampling teaching to see if there is any evidence of OER in the teaching materials that students see.
5. b. Automated ways to track OER such as watermarks. Persistence and comparison of original with derived.
5. c. See what models for participatory learning mean and how they can be supported through OER operating as mediating artifacts.
5. d. What does a collaborative framework for learners with OER mean?
Collective intelligence
6. How to offer an environment for highly structured collaborative debate between scholars and researchers around the world. Find answers collaboratively and discuss methods to build shared evidence.
Value of design approach
7. What barriers there are to reuse?
7. The value of explicit designs
At the OLnet meeting on 23rd April we discussed identifying 7 (or so) research questions for OERs. As a starting point this page provides some existing candidates.
Research questions from the proposal
• How can we build a robust evidence base to support and enhance the design, evaluation and use of OER?
With three sub-questions:
1. How to improve the process of OER reuse/design, delivery, evaluation and data analysis?
2. How to make the associated design processes and products more easily shared?
3. How to build a socio-technical infrastructure to serve as a collective evolving intelligence for the community?
Research questions from the UNESCO community
See [2]
This provides over a hundred ideas gathered from a discussion in 2006/7 which were then ranked into a (relatively long) short list:
(Bold added by Patrick to show possible key issues for OLnet)
Background research What do we know already? What can we learn from the past and present?
2. Why isn't this [scale of Sourceforge, etc.] happening in the OER movement? What makes content different to software? What is different about the people involved?
5. Understanding the demand for OERs.
10. What is the current level of use of OERs among instructors in higher education?
12. Research the roles of learners and educators in the development and use of OERs with reference to the FLOSS analogy.
19. Establish a database of available OERs, including experts to author and evaluate. 2 votes
21. What evidence do we have that learners actually learn more by using OERs? Why do OERs work better? 2 votes
Economic analyses
25. How can OER development be sustainably financed?
26. Serious research is needed to define economic and business models for OER not just for development but for operational deployment and ongoing evolution.
Creation of OERs... tools, collaboration, best practices
35. How can we start to create our own resources?
49. How can a community of professional peers be created around OER development and reuse - a community of co-producers and users?
This is a very interesting question.
Quality assurance
53. How do we determine Quality assurance criteria and develop minimum academic standards for OER initiatives?
54. Research quality requirements and relevance in different contexts: content, flexibility, multi-media applications, learner level, technology level, etc. Survey question: What would be the categories by which you would rate an OER?
56. A set of "guiding principles" can be developed and shared that provide criteria for authors to use so that quality and interoperability are ensured.
2 votes
Finding OERs... research on tagging, metatdata, search
68. How do educators and learners access, identify and select OERs that meet their needs, and what barriers exist to doing so? 3 votes
Use of OERs... research on effective use of OERs
74. In what ways do they use OERs, what modifications do they make to resources to support these uses, and how effectively do the resources meet user needs?
Localisation
78. There is no comprehensive and appropriate mechanism for contextualizing (modifying) these resources.
Scenarios research
80. Evaluate the role of Web 2 technologies, social software, etc. - scenario planning, futures research - conceptual modelling, scenario planning and foresighting techniques.
87. On what do we focus on when we design the ecology of open education resources? Consider human activities related to the use of OERs (self study, learning how to improve living conditions in a community, to get a qualification for a job, seeking to enrich learners' experiences...). Learning design patterns research. 2 votes
Policy
90. Policy/ethics/licensing research (see Adelphi Charter and creativecommons.org).
91. Social/anthropological research on the values and aspirations of target communities. Are we really improving quality of life in their terms?
91. Policy support and integration of OERs therein – helping policy/decision makers adopt OERs as a sustainable part of their public education mandate (rather than relying on donor funding).
95. How are we as OERs communities going to challenge the present status quo scenario where money is poured into the developing nations to pay for the expertise of expatriates re: ICT projects that are designed symptomatically rather than inclusively as Peter and Kim are suggesting?
97. Assess pedagogical challenges & legal difficulties associated with the mix and match problem between different copyleft licenses.
98. Best Practice Case Studies - This is an action research focusing on documentation of best practices of integrating OER by educators
Interventions... research on
100. How are open education resource initiatives structured and what are the key decisions required for implementation?
105. For each intervention, at various stages, ask: what worked, what did not work, how do we improve the process, what new features are needed in OERs, localisation questions, anthropological perspective, learner support, people and roles...?
Issues listed in recent paper
- What are the most effective ways to develop OER?
- What intellectual properties arise from OER initiatives?
- What are the barriers and enables to the development and use of OER?
- What models are different initiatives adopting in terms of the production of OER?
- What are sustainable business models for OER?
- What accessibility and inclusion issues are arising in associated with OER?
- What new pedagogical models are needed to support the use of OER across both formal and informal learning contexts?
- What methods are appropriate to evaluate the effectiveness of OER and how can transfer of good practice be best achieved?
Four Challenges from the same paper
1. Despite the rhetoric around the potential application of technologies in education, their impact on practice has been limited.
2. Teachers seem to lack the design skills needed to exploit the potential of technologies within their teaching.
3. There is an abundance of free resources (learning objects and Open Educational Resources) now available, but the majority of teachers do not use them.
4. Research into the use of technologies in education and into OER, on the whole, does not inform practice and vice versa.
