Category: Fieldwork
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OER, At-Risk and Non-Traditional Students
Just over 10 years ago a US Department of Education report noted that at the turn of the millenium “…73% of all undergraduates were in some way non-traditional.” (Choy, 2002, 1) Moreover, as the report goes on to describe, this type of student faces specific issues and barriers to successfully…
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Open educational resources: A bridge to formal education?
The relationship between open educational resources and formal education is complex and multifaceted. In the early days of OER, detractors of the OER movement cautioned that universities could suffer financially from releasing free content – a vision of OER as in competition with formal education. To date, OER Research Hub (OERRH) research…
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Can OER break down barriers to participation in education?
Are open education models leading to more equitable access to education? The OER Research Hub (OERRH) has spent the past few months gathering evidence around this question in connection with OERRH hypothesis C – ‘Open education models lead to more equitable access to education, serving a broader base of learners than traditional…
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'Through a glass darkly' Part 3: OER, critical reflection and educators' improved practice – some early evidence
Do OER prompt critical reflection by educators who use them, resulting in improved practice? Part 3 of my blog series on reflection moves from abstract theorisation to concrete evidence around OER Research Hub (OERRH) hypothesis E, which raises this very question. JISC (2013) suggest that the use of OER ‘encourages open educational…
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Snapshot: OER Policy
OER Policies are typically established in order to drive change, and there are now clear examples of where policy is being used as an instrument to drive OER. The Creative Commons OER Policy Registry lists 40 policies which reflect the ways in which policies supportive of OER and open access have…
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SPARCing debate on Open Access
As part of our field work in Washington DC last month I met with Heather Joseph who is Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a membership organization of academic and research libraries. Their mission is to make libraries and the information they hold more equitable…
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"O" is for… Open?
…Or could it be “Orioles”?! Seriously though, besides checking out my first baseball game, the time in Baltimore to date has been a great opportunity for follow-up research and has generated some interesting data about Bridge to Success post-project. Whilst my colleague Rob has been working largely in the DC…
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Educating in Beta
Current activity within open education can be characterised as having reached a beta phase of maturity. In much the same way that software progresses through a release life cycle, beta is the penultimate testing phase, after the initial alpha-testing phase, whereby the software is adopted beyond its original developer community.…