Search results for "Open Education"

The importance of OER in engineering education

2017

The problem of education is a very important one and occupies an increasingly wider register among educational specialists, who see these changes directly related to current generations of students. It speaks increasingly more and more about the desire of young people to learn when they want, how they want and how much they want, in their own way, without any constraints imposed by fixed educational program, established by teachers, according to their idea how to go on an educational route. In this context, open education provides crucial support of any person who is interested, and covered a complete and appropriate educational needs, in connection with time and availability of the person.…

Why open educational resources repositories fail : the contribution of quality approaches to the success of repositories

2016

Over the last two decades, millions of Open Educational Resources (OER) have become freely available for teachers and learners online. These resources are usually accessible through Learning Object Repositories (LORs), which are databases with a user interface. LORs are rarely used to their full potential and often considered as ‘failures’. Previous studies have shown that quality has a critical role in the success of information systems such as LORs. However there are no common guidelines for quality assurance approaches for LORs, nor are there studies into the contribution made by different LOR quality assurance approaches to the success of a repository. Measuring quality and success have…

DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING A BIG OPEN ONLINE COURSE BY USING A 3D VIRTUAL IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENT – LESSONS LEARNED

2017

Open Education (OE) is a distance learning approach that was strategically chosen by the European Commission (EC) to encourage cost-effective training, upskilling and reskilling of large population groups and workforce with speed and flexibility. Institutions and businesses design and offer Open Online Courses (OOCs) to address skill gaps, organizational and societal needs. OOCs and especially Massive OOCs (MOOCs) are suffering from high rates of attrition, which is attributed to various factors such as learner isolation and lack of motivation to complete the course. Recommendations to address the retention gap in MOOCs include adopting a participation-driven approach, using game design tec…

Globally distributed knowledge sharing in social software environments : barriers and interventions

2014

Positive Computing as Paradigm to Overcome Barriers to Global Co-authoring of Open Educational Resources

2018

The adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) can support collaboration and knowledge sharing. One of the main areas of the usage OER is the internationalization, i.e., the use in a global context. However, the globally distributed co-creation of digital materials is still low. Therefore, we identify essential barriers, in particular for co-authoring of OER in global environments. We use a design science research method to introduce a barrier framework for co-authoring OER in global settings and propose a wellbeing-based system design constructed from the barrier framework for OER co-authoring tool. We describe how positive computing concepts can be used to overcome barriers, emphasizing…

Design principles for collaboration platforms for open education

2015

Increasing the current low uptake of Open Education Resources (OER) is a key challenge for researchers and practitioners in the field. User studies have shown that collaboration is a main success factor for successful open educational activities. However, effective collaboration in open educational contexts requires well planned processes and platforms supporting collaboration, in particular in physically distributed settings. We have been investigating the value of such platforms, their main features and user requirements to enable collaboration from immature ideas to completed resources. We used quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect insights from potential users of such…

Enhancing the experience of online users of open education

2014

The limited adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) has kicked off the launch of several projects to search for possible solutions. One of these projects is “Open Educational Ideas and Innovations” (OEI2). The goal of this project is to find alternatives for increasing the uptake of OER and facilitating the collaborative development of OER. To enhance the experience of the users of open education, we interviewed twelve educators and researchers from different higher education institutions across Europe focusing on gathering insights about idea sharing experiences. In this paper, we present our key findings based on these interviews and outline some recommendations for our next open edu…

Understanding Social OER Environments—A Quantitative Study on Factors Influencing the Motivation to Share and Collaborate

2014

Social software environments are increasingly used for open education: teachers and learners share and collaborate in these environments. While there are various possibilities for the inclusion of such social functionalities for OER, many organizational, individual and technological challenges can hinder the motivation of teachers to share and collaborate in these environments. Current research cannot explain what barriers teachers face in social OER environments and how those challenges influence their motivation to engage in such environments. An exploratory factor analysis was used in the context of schools and higher education institutions to investigate the possible barriers to engagin…