Category: General

One of the final design decisions I made for my DLRCP was to include a sustainability plan as an appendix. My literature review and research into OER identified three areas of importance that were applicable to my project: discoverability, reusability, and sustainability. Throughout my research paper, I explored each of these three areas in depth. In my recommendations, my wireframe mockups worked well to suggest ways to address both discoverability and reusability. However, sustainability was more difficult to address though a mockup. Recommendations for sustainability would require organizational decision making and long-term planning (Tlili et al., 2020). During my research I came across Desrochers (2019) “OER field guide for sustainability planning” and this gave me the idea to include a sustainability plan.

Creating a sustainability plan as an appendix gave me more room to include ideas and details without interrupting the flow of the research paper. Initially, I had included a bullet-point list of questions in my sustainability recommendations. However, as I continued to read and learn about sustainability, the list of questions grew. Sustainability is more than just financial and legal considerations (Tlili et al., 2020). As Stacey and Wiley (2020) point out, there are social considerations to address, and many more questions to ask:

Who creates all these OER? What is their motivation? Who manages the resulting OER? How are they curated? How will these OER be updated and improved, and by whom? What would motivate a person or organization to make a long-term commitment to updating and improving OER? (para. 5).

I followed the framework in Desrochers (2019) field guide to create a set of questions which were organized into three domains: infrastructure, resources, and culture. These questions, along with links to additional resources and case studies, made up the sustainability plan I included in my research paper. I wonder what the impact of including this component in my paper will be. Ideally, as my sponsor organization takes the next step in this project, we will meet and work together to begin answering these questions, as well as adding new questions that arise along the way.

 

References

Desrochers, D. M. (2019). OER field guide for sustainability planning. Retrieved from https://oer.suny.edu/oer-sustainability/

Stacey, P. & Wiley, D. (2020, November 16–20). Building a Social Framework for Sustaining Open Educational Resources [Conference presentation]. OE Global 2020.

Tlili, A., Nascimbeni, F., Burgos, D., Zhang, X., Huang, R., & Chang, T. W. (2020). The evolution of sustainability models for Open Educational Resources: Insights from the literature and experts. Interactive Learning Environments. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1839507

As a Digital Learning Research Consulting Project (DLRCP), deciding how to represent the consulting part of my research presented an interesting challenge. A wanted my research to be more than just theoretical and include a tangible component that I created as part of the project. Given the goal to eventually design an OER repository, this tangible component would ideally be a prototype for the final repository. Action research involving software development commonly begins with a full specification prototype or working software model (Baskerville & Wood-Harper, 1998). However, within the limited scope and timeframe for my project, it wasn’t feasible to build a working software model for the repository itself. Instead, I chose to create a set of wireframe mockups for the user interface of the proposed repository.

Figure 1. Wireframe of the repository front page.

Wireframe mockups represented a way to provide visual recommendations based on my research. Without creating a working software prototype, I was still able to suggest the layout and functionality of the proposed repository based on the findings from my interviews and content analysis. For example, in my research I found that supporting a Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998) should be an initial primary focus for the repository. By designing mockups, I was able to suggest interface elements in the wireframes that supported these findings, such as community discussion forums and recent activity feeds (see Figure 1). I chose to include the wireframes inline with my recommendations, rather than in an appendix, because they were much more relevant when paired with the text that explained them. In designing the wireframes, I found it challenging to decide just how many wireframes to create or how detailed they should be. In the end, I decided that four wireframes using simple grayscale graphics would be enough to support my recommendations without detracting from the written work. I wonder, when the actual software development phase begins, if these wireframes will be sufficient, and how much they will reflect the final interface in the eventual OER repository.

 

References

Baskerville, R., & Wood-Harper, A. T. (1998). Diversity in information systems action research methods. European Journal of Information Systems, 7(2), 90–107. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000298

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems Thinker, 9(5), 2-3. Retrieved from https://thesystemsthinker.com/communities-of-practice-learning-as-a-social-system/

One of the early design decisions I made during my research project was to include a content analysis along with interviews as part of my research methods. Interviews would provide great first-hand insights from teachers using Free Learning, however, I also wanted to take a broad look at OER repositories to see how they’re designed. Rather than performing a document analysis of existing research papers, I chose to use a content analysis approach to enable me to visit OER repositories and analyze their functionality. This enabled me to look across a range of websites and develop a coding system, which led to identifying common themes among the various repositories (Schreier, 2015). These themes complemented the themes that emerged from my interviews, which then informed the recommendations I developed.

Table 1. Example of tabular data from my content analysis.

Conducting the content analysis proved to be challenging because it was not something I had done previously in the program. I followed Schreier’s (2015) approach to coding to create a spreadsheet, which I used to identify functionality that was present or absent in each OER repository. I found the paper by Santos-Hermosa, Ferran-Ferrer, and Abadal (2017) to be a great help when choosing how to present my findings. Their paper included a wide-scale content analysis of over 100 repositories, which identified a number of different themes and metrics. Although on a much larger scale than my own content analysis, their paper presented its findings in easy-to-understand tables, grouped by theme. I used a similar approach to present the findings for my own content analysis, which enabled me to support the themes I had identified with tabular data (see Table 1). In the end, I analyzed 14 repositories during my content analysis. With more time and a larger scope, it would have been interesting to analyze more repositories and perhaps use alternate selection criteria, knowing what I now know about the importance that pedagogy and communities of practice have in my final recommendations.

 

References

Santos-Hermosa, G., Ferran-Ferrer, N. & Abadal, E. (2017). Repositories of Open Educational Resources: An assessment of reuse and educational aspects. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(5), 84–120. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3063

Schreier, M. (2015). Qualitative Content Analysis. In Flick, U. (Ed.). (2013). The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis. Sage publishing.https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526416070

This research project provided my first opportunity, within the course of the MALAT program, to collect and analyze primary data. Since the course blanket ethics for the DLRCP allowed for up to 10 interviews, I knew early on in my planning process that I wanted to seize this exciting opportunity to talk to teachers first-hand and hear about their experiences with Free Learning. This meant that including interviews as part of my research methods was one of my first design decisions. However, how those interviews would work and what questions I would ask were areas that required further investigation.

Through research into qualitative methods and interview design, I decided that semi-structured interviews would be a good fit for this project. “The semi-structured interview is a popular data collection method” which is “both versatile and flexible” (Kallio, Pietiläm, Johnson, & Kangasniemi, 2016, p. 2955). It would enable my interview conversations to flow organically (Carruthers, 1990), and opened opportunities to ask for clarification or further information during the interview (Rubin & Rubin, 2005). Initially, through a conversation with my academic supervisor, I discovered that my challenge would be to narrow my questions down. I had created over twenty five questions during the draft of my interview questions, and I learned that to keep my interview flexible, I would need to narrow these down to about five questions. Do do this, I used sticky notes and wrote my questions down, then moved them around until I created groups of questions. I kept several of my original questions as prompts, but narrowed the final questions down to the following list:

• Tell me about how you first heard about Free Learning and became involved with it. What attracted you to use it?
• Walk me through your experience getting up and running with Free Learning.
• Can you describe any challenges you faced, or continue to face, using Free Learning.
• Tell me about the types of resources you used to create your Free Learning map.
• Based on your experiences, what do you envision would help other teachers to get started using Free Learning?
• Considering the topics we’ve discussed, are there any other thoughts you would like to share?

The last question, although not initially part of my five, was recommended by my academic supervisor and helped to broaden the interviews to include any additional thoughts or experiences from the participants. Before my interviews I worried that these questions would be too broad, and didn’t intersect with OER enough. However, these questions ended up being highly effective in revealing themes and ideas that I had not initially considered, and I truly enjoyed the experience of listening to the personal stories that interviewees shared during our conversations.

 

References

Carruthers, J. (1990). A Rationale for the Use of Semi‐structured Interviews. Journal of Educational Administration, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.1108/09578239010006046

Kallio, H., Pietilä, A. M., Johnson, M., & Kangasniemi, M. (2016). Systematic methodological review: developing a framework for a qualitative semi-structured interview guide. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 72(12), 2954–2965. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13031

Rubin H. J. & Rubin I. S. (2005). Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing the Data, 2nd edn. SAGE, Thousand Oaks, CA.