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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.
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.
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.
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.
Obwohl kulturbezogene Fragestellungen eine zentrale Rolle für die erfolgreiche Implementierung von Anwendungssystemen und IKT spielen, erfolgen kulturbezogene Untersuchungen in der Disziplin oft zu unkritisch: Kulturelle Kontexte werden in der Literatur häufig nicht klar abgegrenzt, und verwendete Begriffe werden nicht oder nur unzureichend definiert. Darüber hinaus werden kulturbezogene Untersuchungen, die eigentlich Besonderheiten abgegrenzter Gesellschaften (z. B. Kundensegmente) aufdecken sollen, oft ohne weitere Prüfung auf der Ebene von Nationalkultur untersucht. Die Problematik eines zu unkritischen und bisweilen sogar unangemessenen Umgangs mit kulturbezogenen Fragestellungen ist nicht auf die Wirtschaftsinformatik begrenzt sondern zieht sich durch nahezu alle Disziplinen, die "Kultur" als eine unter vielen Einflussgrößen betrachten. In dieser Arbeit wird ein praktischer Ansatz entwickelt, mit dessen Hilfe nicht nur der eigene kulturbezogene Forschungskontext abgegrenzt werden, sondern darüber hinaus auch noch herausgefunden werden kann, ob bereits verfügbare Forschungsansätze ggf. auf den eigenen Kontext passen könnten. Als Ergebnisse der Arbeit wurde ein Schritt-für-Schritt Leitfaden erstellt und eine Vergleichsbasis geschaffen, die auf einer in ihrem Umfang bislang einzigartigen Sammlung bereits verfügbarer Kulturbeschreibungsansätze beruht.
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.
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.
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.
Education is widely seen as an important means of addressing both national and international problems, such as political or religious extremism, poverty, and hunger. If publicly available educational resources (OERs) shall help overcoming the educational gap, localization is one of the major issues we need to deal with. Educators as well as learners need to be supported to determine adaptation needs. This paper provides a list of possible in-fluence factors on educational scenarios which are defined as context metadata. In the given form, the list needs to be understood as an addendum for the paper entitled ‘Open Educational Resources: Education for the World?’ from Thomas richter and Maggie McPherson; It is being published in the volume 3, issue 2 of the Journal Distance Education in 2012.
In this paper, we present a solution how to test cultural influences on E-Learning in a global context. Based on a metadata approach, we show how specifically cultural influence factors can be determined to transfer and adapt learning environments. We present a method how those influence factors can be validated for both, to improve the dynamical meta-data specification and to be used in the development of (international) E-Learning scenarios.
In an explorative study, we investigated on German schoolteachers how they use, reuse, produce and manage Open Educational Resources. The main questions in this research have been, what their motivators and barriers are in their use of Open Educational Resources, what others can learn from their Open Educational Practices, and what we can do to raise the dissemination level of OER in schools.
Eine internationale Verbreitung von OER ist u. a. davon abhängig, ob bereitstehende Inhalte an den jeweiligen Kontext angepasst werden können. Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit studierendenspezifischen, kulturell motivierten Einflussfaktoren auf Lernsituationen, die neben u. a. inhaltlichen, technischen, didaktischen und rechtlichen Fragen für eine erfolgreiche Wiederverwendung von bereits etablierten Lernressourcen prüfend berücksichtigt werden sollten.
Adaptability as a Special Demand on Open Educational Resources: The Cultural Context of e-Learning
(2011)
Producing and providing Open Educational Resources (OERs) is driven by the concepts of openness and sharing. Although there already are a lot of free high-quality resources available, practitioners often rather rewrite learning resources than creatively embed (and thus, reuse) existing OERs. In this paper, we analyse the reasons for this in two different educational contexts. As a result of this analysis, we found that the uncertainty on possible adaptation needs is one of the major barriers. In order to overcome this barrier and make different learning contexts comparable, we analysed the context of learners and in particular, in the research project ‘Learning Culture’, we investigated the field of culturally motivated expectations and attitudes of learners. This paper shows the results of this research project and discusses which cultural issues should be taken into consideration when OERs are to be adapted from one to another cultural context.
In Anlehnung an die von Leidner und Kayworth (2006) durchgeführte Studie zum Umgang mit Kultur in der angelsächsischen Wissenschaftsdisziplin „Information Systems“ wurde eine entsprechende Literaturstudie für die gestaltungsorientierte Wirtschaftsinformatik des deutschen Sprachraums durchgeführt. In der Studie wurde in den Hauptorganen der Disziplin untersucht, in welcher Häufigkeit kulturelle Einflüsse auf Informationstechnologie thematisiert wurden, wie diese Einflüsse aufgearbeitet wurden und welche Referenzmodel-le/Referenzliteratur verwendet wurden. Nach einer kurzen Darstellung der gewählten Vorgehensweise werden die Ergebnisse und Beschränkungen der Studie präsentiert.
This paper addresses special skills, learners in Internet-based learning scenarios need. In self-directed learning scenarios, as most Internet-based learning scenarios are designed, learners bear the responsibility for their learning progress. To ease this task, institutions could prime the learners for the situation which may be quite different to their previous learning experiences. Basing on a Delphi-study, conducted with experts from the e-Learning sector in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the basic requirements have been determined.
The roadmap for quality and innovation through open educational practices has been conceived as a number of steps, a conceptual document, which can be used by organisations, leaners or professionals in order to improve their open educational practices. After the development of the core concept of the OPAL project, the guidelines for OEP, it became clear that these guidelines, would have to play an important part on the roadmap exercise, because they represent the very essence of how to foster and stimulate open educational practices. The roadmap therefore is meant to be an instrument, a tool which helps the different stakeholders to use the guidelines for their own context and purpose.
In an explorative study, we investigated on German schoolteachers how they use, reuse, produce and manage Open Educational Resources. The main questions in this research have been, what their motivators and barriers are in their use of Open Educational Resources, what others can learn from their Open Educational Practices, and what we can do to raise the dissemination level of OER in schools.
