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Open Educational Resources in the Context of School Education: Barriers and possible solutions
(2014)
Due to the increasing professional mobility of their parents, pupils often find themselves in new and unfamiliar learning scenarios in foreign contexts and countries. Besides having to leave their familiar environments, these pupils additionally may face language barriers, different curricula, and have to cope with foreign cultures. Printed textbooks, which are the most commonly used educational resources in schools, provide little support for these pupils to manage the new challenges. Teachers are the professionals designated to provide the necessary support. However, they often may not fully appreciate the pupils’ individual challenges. Possible solutions could be the provision of alternative learning contents in the pupils’ native languages and an international open exchange of knowledge and experiences amongst schoolteachers. These issues are addressed by the Open Discovery Space platform. In order to empower this platform to provide the best possible support to teachers, we explored barriers to adoption of Open Educational Practices in the context of school education and asked for manageable solutions. The investigation took place in an action research scenario. After an introduction of the ODS project, we will present the identified barriers and recommendations for solutions to overcome these, and the mechanisms which we are going to implement in the ODS platform in order to provide the best possible support to the community.
Managing the needs of learners is crucial in order to support their motivation and keep dropout rates on a low level. With the constantly growing level of internationalization in classrooms, the variety of different context-specific requirements from learners increase; without a profound understanding of the learners’ contexts, successfully maintaining a culture-sensitive and learner-focussed education is impossible. A solution to reach this understanding is the open exchange of experiences and knowledge amongst educators of the different contexts. In this paper, we will briefly introduce the two European projects “Open Discovery Space” (ODS) and “Inspiring Science Education” (ISE), which have the aim to foster the establishment and improvement of Open Educational Practices in the context of school education. The purpose of this paper is to attract and invite potential partners to affiliate with, contribute to, and profit from the projects.
This study presents the findings of a quantitative study on the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) in Higher Education and Adult Learning Institutions. The study is based on the results of an online survey targeted at four educational roles: educational policy makers; institutional policy makers/managers; educational professionals; and learners. The report encompasses five chapters and four annexes. Chapter I presents the survey and Chapter II discloses the main research questions and models. Chapter III characterises the universe of respondents. Chapter IV advances with a detailed survey analysis including an overview of key statistical data. Finally, Chapter V provides an exploratory in-depth analysis of some key issues: representations, attitudes and uses of OEP. The table of contents and the complete list of diagrams and tables can be found at the end of the report.
The aim of our research is finding measures to preserve the learners’ initial motivation in educational settings. For that we need to avoid conflicting situations that possibly could jeopardize their joy of learning.
In our thematically comprehensive Learning Culture Survey, we investigate the cultural biasing of students’ attitudes, behaviours, and expectations towards education. Particularly in times of massive international migration and growing numbers of refugees, the relevance to deeply understand cultural aspects in education increases. Just with this understanding, we can raise the awareness towards more cultural tolerance across all involved stakeholder groups and thus, foster the development of more culture-sensitive educational approaches. In this paper we focus on the most relevant aspect of motivation and comparatively discuss our study conducted in Germany and South Korea.
Mit unserer Forschung wollen wir Maßnahmen finden, die dazu beitragen, die anfängliche
Bildungsmaßnahmen zu
Motivation von Lernern bewahren. Zu diesem Zweck
in müssen Konfliktsituationen möglichst vermieden werden, wenn sie das Potential haben, ihnen die Freude am Lernen zu verderben. In unserem thematisch breitgefächerten Learning Culture Survey (Untersuchung von Lernkultur), untersuchen wir bei Lernern das Vorhandensein und den Einfluss kulturspezifischer Prägungen auf deren Verhaltensweisen, Gewohnheiten und Erwartungen bzgl. Bildung. Besonders in Zeiten massiver internationaler Migration und steigender Zahlen von Flüchtlingen wächst der Bedarf nach entsprechender Forschung stetig an. Nur wenn wir die Zusammenhänge zwischen Lernen und Kultur ausreichend verstehen, sind wir in der Lage, auf allen Ebenen die Entwicklung des erforderlichen Bewusstseins bzgl. kultursensibler Bildungsansätze zu fördern. In diesem Beitrag konzentrieren wir uns auf den sehr wichtigen Aspekt Motivation und diskutieren die Ergebnisse, die wir in unserer vergleichenden Studie in Deutschland und Südkorea erzielt haben.
The aim of design science research (DSR) in information systems is the user-centred creation of IT-artifacts with regard to specific social environments. For culture research in the field, which is necessary for a proper localization of IT-artifacts, models and research approaches from social sciences usually are adopted. Descriptive dimension-based culture models most commonly are applied for this purpose, which assume culture being a national phenomenon and tend to reduce it to basic values. Such models are useful for investigations in behavioural culture research because it aims to isolate, describe and explain culture-specific attitudes and characteristics within a selected society. In contrast, with the necessity to deduce concrete decisions for artifact-design, research results from DSR need to go beyond this aim. As hypothesis, this contribution generally questions the applicability of such generic culture dimensions’ models for DSR and focuses on their theoretical foundation, which goes back to Hofstede’s conceptual Onion Model of Culture. The herein applied literature-based analysis confirms the hypothesis. Consequently, an alternative conceptual culture model is being introduced and discussed as theoretical foundation for culture research in DSR.
Despite the opportunities and benefits of OER, research and practice has shown how the OER repositories have a hard time in reaching an active user-base. The opportunities of experience exchange and simple feedback mechanisms of social software have been realized for improving the situation and many are basing or transforming their OER offerings towards socially powered environments. Research on social software has shown how knowledge-sharing barriers in online environments are highly culture and context-specific and require proper investigation. It is crucial to study what challenges might arise in such environments and how to overcome them, ensuring a successful uptake. A large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation was initiated in the school context to determine which barriers teachers and learners perceive as critical. The study highlights barriers on cultural distance, showing how those are predicted by nationality and age of the respondents. The paper concludes with recommendations for overcoming those barriers.
With a focus on Technology Enhanced Learning, this paper investigates if and to which extent a culture shift can be expected alongside with the adoption of currently emerging Web 3.0 technologies. Instead of just offering new opportunities for the field to improve education, such a culture shift could lead to unexpected general consequences not just for Technology Enhanced Learning but the whole educational sector. Understanding the dimension of expectable changes enables us to prevent conflicts and pointedly support culture-related change processes. After an introduction of the Revised Onion Model of Culture, which, later on, serves as theoretical foundation, expectable changes in the design of learning scenarios are analysed, distinguishing the stakeholder groups “learners” and “educators”. Eventually, the found changes are analysed to which extent a general culture shift is to be expected in order to understand the transferability and limitations of future research results in the field.
Job-related migration has been fostered across Europe balancing unemployment in one country with demands for employees in others. However, the numbers of early school leavers and university dropouts significantly increased in the hosting countries. We propose a higher measure of cultural sensitivity in education in order to prevent frustration. The Learning Culture Survey investigates learners’ expectations towards and perceptions of education on international level with the aim to make culture in the context of education better understandable. After a brief introduction, we subsume the steps taken during the past seven years and found results. Subsequently, we introduce a method for the determination of conflict potential, which bases on the understanding of culture as the level to which people within a society accept deviations from the usual. We close with demonstrating the usefulness of the data and insights from our Learning Culture Survey in the context of practical scenarios.
In this paper, we introduce the international program erp4students as general example on how to successfully prepare university students for the world of works without having to give up the basic principle in higher education, i.e., to exclusively provide sustainable education. We start with introducing the basic concept and design of the program and provide information regarding the demographic development over the past decade and implemented quality assurance mechanisms. Subsequently, the scope and design of and hitherto achieved insights from the Learning Culture Survey are outlined. On the basis of found results, we finally discuss how erp4students can deal with possible culture-specific issues that latest might emerge when the program gets available for learners in the Asian context.
MOOCs in POM Education
(2016)
Basic demand from enterprises towards academic education: provide students not only methodological/theoretical knowledge, but also prepare them for the future tasks in the world of works! This contradicts academia’s focus on sustainably teaching basic principles. With the extra-curricular international online program erp4students, we successfully managed to bridge this "conflict-of-interest”.
Quality Management in Education: Business Process Modelling in Interdisciplinary Environments
(2015)
The central concept behind Open Educational Resources (OER) is opening up the access to educational resources for stakeholders who are not the usual target user group. This concept must be perceived as innovative because it describes a general economic and social paradigm shift: Education, which formerly was limited to a specific group of learners, now, is promoted as a public good. However, despite very good intentions, internationally agreed quality standards, and the availability of the required technological infrastructure, the critical threshold is not yet met. Due to several reasons, the usefulness of OER is often limited to the originally targeted context. Questions arise if the existing quality standards for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) actually meet the specific requirements within the OER value chain, if the existing quality standards are applicable to OER in a meaningful way, and under which conditions related standards generally could support the exploitation of OER. We analyze quality standards for TEL and contrast the life cycle model of commercial learning resources against the life cycle model of OER. We investigate special demands on quality from the context of OER and, taking the former results into account, derive emergent quality criteria for OER. The paper concludes with recommendations for the design of OER and a future standard development.
The Whole Is More than the Sum of Its Parts - On Culture in Education and Educational Culture
(2015)
The Learning Culture Survey investigates learners’ expectations towards and perceptions of education on international level with the aim to make culture in the context of education better understandable and support educators to prevent and solve intercultural conflicts in education. So far, we found that culture-related expectations differ between educational settings, depend on the age of the learners, and that a nationally homogenous educational culture is rather an exception than the rule. The results of our recently completed longitudinal study provided evidence that educational culture on the institutional level actually is persistent, at least over a term of four years. After a brief introduction of the general background, we will subsume the steps taken during the past seven years and achieved general insights regarding educational culture. Last, we will introduce a method for the determination of conflict potential, which bases on the understanding of culture as the level to w hich people within a society accept deviations from the usual. We close with demonstrating the method’s functionality on examples from the Learning Culture Survey.
Many e-Learning-basedoffers, such as international programs and MOOCs have long since overcome the concept of national education and are designed to attract learners distributed throughout the world. In order to cope with the differences between learners, related offers often include opportunities to support the particular learning styles and learning pace beyond the advantages, which the technology itself naturally provides. Examples arethe individual configuration of the learning platformand display of contents and the provision of stylistically diverse and supplementary learning material. Such measures are relatively easy to implement andonce established, do not generate further expenses. Just, is it appropriate to lay the full responsibility for designing a comfortable (and supportive) learning environment into the hands of the learners and do they get along with such a responsibility? We asked university students from three continents regarding their expectations towards instructor-support and found major differences.
After an introduction, we discuss the conflicts that occurred in a highly experimental course setting, in which we implemented a student-centered course in urban higher education with a constructivist, blended-learning design. We analyse to which extent the cultural country profiles from our Learning Culture Survey suffice to prevent intercultural conflicts in education and provide support for the design of respective interventions.
The Learning Culture Survey: An international research project on cultural learning attitudes
(2014)
Dieses Dokument beinhaltet die englische Version des standardisierten Fragebogens für das fortlaufende, internationale Forschungvorhaben "Learning Culture Survey". Die Bereitstellung des Fragebogens in dieser Form dient lediglich der Möglichkeit zur Prüfung und zur Kenntnisnahme. Der Entsprechend dem Forschungsdesign ist der Fragebogen in seiner Onlineversion zu verwenden.
Culture, at least to some extent, is related to particular (individual and collective) experiences. In terms of education, this means that a learner, who experienced particular services in his/her past, might perceive such services as usual for educational culture and thus, expect them to be delivered in any kind of learning scenario. In German universities, education is meant to be a full-time job and usually is designed to provide a broad basis of theoretical and methodological knowledge. Achieving methodological competences is a core goal of German academic education: Once a student leaves the university, he/she is expected to decide about appropriate methods for any kind of problem (in the field of study and beyond) and how to modify the known methods in case of need. In contrast, in professional training, the learners have to study in extra-occupational situations (time is a serious issue) and might expect training that pointedly prepares them for very specific tasks. We assumed that scenarios of professional training have their own educational cultures. When designing learning contents and learning scenarios for professional training, it might be essential for the learning success to meet the learners’ expectations and contextual peculiarities.
We found remarkable differences between the results of the investigated enterprises, but even more significant diversity between the results of the German enterprises and the priory investigated German universities. As a general conclusion we can assume that generalizing research results that were solely achieved from national university students might lead to an inappropriate design of learning scenarios for particular professional contexts. Professional training for a particular enterprise should be developed according to its specific educational culture.
Open educational resources (OERs) provide opportunities as enablers of societal development, but they also create new challenges. From the perspective of content providers and educational institutions, particularly, cultural and context-related challenges emerge. Even though barriers regarding large-scale adoption of OERs are widely discussed, empirical evidence for determining challenges in relation to particular contexts is still rare. Such context-specific barriers generally can jeopardize the acceptance of OERs and, in particular, social OER environments. We conducted a large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation in the school context to determine how teachers and learners perceive cultural distance as a barrier against the use of social OER environments. The findings indicate how nationality and age of the respondents are strong predictors of cultural distance barrier. The study concludes with identification of context-sensitive interventions for overcoming the related bar riers. These consequences are vital for OER initiatives and educational institutions for aligning their efforts on OER.
