scholarly journals Personal Spaces in Public Repositories as a Facilitator for Open Educational Resource Usage

Author(s):  
Anat Cohen ◽  
Sorel Reisman ◽  
Barbra Bied Sperling

Learning object repositories are a shared, open and public space; however, the possibility and ability of personal expression in an open, global, public space is crucial. The aim of this study is to explore personal spaces in a big learning object repository as a facilitator for adoption of Open Educational Resources (OERs) into teaching practices and to gain more insight into different types of OER user behaviors by analyzing the users' behaviors in the Bookmark Collection of MERLOT (a personal space, formerly known as Personal Collection), along with other community activities in that repository: writing comments and peer reviews, as well as sharing learning materials, learning exercises, and contents that were built with the content builder. In addition, using a data mining methodology, most active Bookmark Collection contributors (N=507) were classified into clusters of users with the same patterns of activity. Three clusters resulted, which gave insights into different types of contributor behavior.  Furthermore, it was found that personal spaces are applicable for a variety of uses with diverse goals. Members create personal spaces for their own use, while allowing others to view and copy; or for other users. Personal space encourages the reuse of learning materials and enables the construction of unique learning processes that suit the learner's needs. They may offer the possibility of personalizing public repositories and promoting the reuse of OERs.

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
V Makarau ◽  
P Languju ◽  
R La Putju ◽  
P Egam

The increasing numbers of people and buildings that continue to grow and tend to be uncontrolled in the settlement causing some negative impacts one of them is the consistency of land allotment. This has resulted in some impacts such as ineffective utilities and environmental infrastructures, no mitigation system, and the unavailability of space for public spaces and other supporting facilities that supposed to be available within a settlement. Kampung Arab is one of a densely populated settlements located in the middle of business center area of Manado City, occupies the Mahakam riverbank. The limited space available in Kampung Arab has caused the settlements tend to be slummed and doesn’t have public open space as one of the residential support facilities. In addition, this settlement expands riverbanks so the functions of riverbanks become disturbed, and these settlements are often at risk of flooding. The purpose of this research is to analyze the function of Mahakam riverbanks against flood risk and to analyze the possibility of public space and pedestrian ways availability at the location of Mahakam riverbanks around the Kampung Arab settlement. The research method is qualitative descriptive method. Primary data were obtained through field observation, documentation, and interviews. The research is located in Kampung Arab settlement which occupies the banks of Mahakam River. Further analysis is done: 1) analysis of existing settlement of Kampung Arab to the Mahakam River related to: building’s orientation, river border, activity and behavior of society 2] analysis of public open space availability and its former elements, 3] analysis of settlement utility system and at the final stage conducted an analysis related to community activities and behavior. Expected results through this research are: improving function and quality of Mahakam River, restoring the function of riverbanks and public open space availability as social interaction space.


Author(s):  
Amy E. Nivette ◽  
Renee Zahnow ◽  
Raul Aguilar ◽  
Andri Ahven ◽  
Shai Amram ◽  
...  

AbstractThe stay-at-home restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 led to unparalleled sudden change in daily life, but it is unclear how they affected urban crime globally. We collected data on daily counts of crime in 27 cities across 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We conducted interrupted time series analyses to assess the impact of stay-at-home restrictions on different types of crime in each city. Our findings show that the stay-at-home policies were associated with a considerable drop in urban crime, but with substantial variation across cities and types of crime. Meta-regression results showed that more stringent restrictions over movement in public space were predictive of larger declines in crime.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Feldman-Maggor ◽  
Amira Rom ◽  
Inbal Tuvi-Arad

This study examines chemistry lecturers' considerations for using open educational resources (OER) in their teaching. Recent technological developments provide innovative approaches for teaching chemistry and visualizing chemical phenomena. End users' improved ability to upload information online enables integration of various pedagogical models and learning theories. These improvements strengthen the need for up-to-date evaluation tools for educational websites. Building on existing taxonomies, a set of new criteria for the evaluation of online learning materials was developed and used to analyze 100 websites directed towards teaching chemistry. In addition, a questionnaire was circulated among 100 chemistry lecturers from various higher education institutions in Israel, 66 of whom responded. Subsequently, interviews were conducted with 17 of the questionnaire respondents. Our findings demonstrate that most of the chemistry lecturers who were interviewed integrate innovative learning materials such as simulations, videos and exercises found online in their teaching, but do not use web 2.0 that enables content sharing and collaborative learning. With respect to the selection of web-based learning materials, we found that the lecturers interviewed tended to select OER intuitively, mainly considering the reliability of information, pedagogical issues and the visual contribution, while paying less attention to collaborative learning and content sharing.


Author(s):  
Do Duy Thinh ◽  
Nguyen Van Xuan ◽  
Nguyen Ngoc Long Giang

Urban open spaces (e.g. urban parks) play a pivotal role in improving the quality of life of city dwellers through accommodating various physical and social activities, while further creating social coherence for sustainable development. Due to the shortage of open green spaces in the city, caused by rapid urbanization in developing countries, some big, long-standing urban public spaces such as district parks have been retained, and improved to serve as the main public space for local people. However, such spaces commonly provide outdated, low quality facilities that discourage people from using the park. To satisfy users’ needs, local governments have launched campaigns to improve parks based on the ideas of domestic or foreign designers. The purpose of this research is to explore different behaviors of residents in an open space in Da Nang (Vietnam) which can support the future development and improvement of local open space in accordance with environmental behavior theory. User behaviors were identified and categorized based on their activities in the open space, collected using the place-centered behavior mapping method. Results of the statistical analysis revealed that this open space could be divided into three types, each of which had four dimensions: public facilities setting; openness; accessibility; and recreational facilities. The findings showed some aspects that need to be considered during the development process of open space as follows: 1) increasing the quantity and quality of public amenities; 2) separating accessible space and/or buffer space from already used space inside the park, particularly in the entrance zone; 3) providing space adjacent to the lake; and 4) removing obstacles (e.g. walls around the park) to give a clearer view from inside the park to the streets outside and vice versa. Also, the calculation model of evidence-based designs provides input data for re-planning or creating public space/parks to help designers, planners and authorities improve or design better open spaces in the future.


2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-87
Author(s):  
Marjan Krašna ◽  
Tomaž Bratina

Today's student population is rightfully categorized as digital natives. From the beginning of their education, they used ICT. The technological gadgets, internet, and social networks are like a glove to them. Such generation of students require more than just textbooks. In the 2013 University of Maribor establish a task force for e-learning materials development. The goal was to identify the optimal technological, didactical and financial approach to the long process of e-learning materials development. Members of the task force have many workshops presenting different views, acquired experiences from their previous projects, technological constraints, prediction, etc. During these workshops it was decided it would be the best to prepare different types of e-learning materials and test them by the students. From their feedbacks we could set the guidelines for large scale production. At the Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and Faculty of Education students needs to acquire also the digital competences to become successful teachers. For special didactics study programs different types of e-learning materials were produced with different technological approach. The concept was to upgrade the previous deliverables (PowerPoint slides) and narrate them. Narrated slides would enable students to refresh their lectures and should be used as blended e-learning materials. Narrations were prepared in different format: textual narration, voice narration and video narration. But later it was decided that these types are not enough and a mix of narratives (integrated multimedia learning materials) could be used on individual slides depending on the content of the slide. Students first receive the lecture in the classroom and in the same week they need to study associated e-learning materials and write their review of corresponding e-learning materials. In their review students were required to log the required time for studying the e-learning materials; benefits and drawbacks; potential improvement of e-learning materials; and open text of impression of using e-learning materials. Effectiveness and outcomes were tested with the electronic quizzes. Students were highly motivated with these new types of learning materials and provide us valuable feedback. Most efficient were text narrated learning materials, but the favourite was integrated multimedia learning materials. Video and audio narrations take them more time to study since they were constrained with the speed of speech of the recorded lecturer. Key words: design, distance education, e-learning, learning materials, verification and validation.


Open Praxis ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Rolfe

For those receiving funding from the UK HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resource Programme (2009–2012), the sustainability of project outputs was one of a number of essential goals. Our approach for the hosting and distribution of health and life science open educational resources (OER) was based on the utilisation of the WordPress.org blogging platform and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to curate content and widen discovery.This paper outlines the approaches taken and tools used at the time, and reflects upon the effectiveness of web strategies several years post-funding. The paper concludes that using WordPress.org as a platform for sharing and curating OER, and the adoption of a pragmatic approach to SEO, offers cheap and simple ways for small-scale open education projects to be effective and sustainable.


Author(s):  
Luis Martin-Fernandez ◽  
Margarita Martinez-Nuñez ◽  
Oriol Borras-Gene ◽  
Angel Fidalgo-Blanco

The confluence of thousands of students in a MOOC is an opportunity to manage all the knowledge generated through the creation of open educational resources (OER), especially when a connectivist approach is applied and the MOOC makes use of virtual learning communities. The challenge is transferring the flow of knowledge, activity, and interactions of the course to the community and making that transference sustainable and ongoing over time. For this purpose, the use of elements of gamification to train and retain the knowledge creators of the community along with the use of social networking platforms is proposed. This chapter analyses several editions of a MOOC and the opportunity offered by the use of different types of learning (formal, non-formal, and informal) that occur in them, thus characterizing patterns to train the open content and knowledge generation through gamification. From the results, indicators for managing successful and sustainable knowledge communities are proposed along with indicators for persistence and interaction between participants.


This chapter will give an overview of different types of corpora and explain their differences. It will provide readers with different examples of computer corpora that are available to users and for which language analysis can be used. Based on differences of existing corpora, the chapter will show in which way users (language teachers) can use these corpora for creating teaching materials for their students. It will explain why certain types of corpora can be and are open educational resources that provide teachers with a large number of language examples. Additionally, the chapter will examine open source technology (e.g., available tools and programs for creating computer corpora).


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 209-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Van Allen ◽  
Stacy Katz

Purpose Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning materials openly licensed so that others may retain, reuse, revise, remix or redistribute (the 5Rs) these materials. This paper aims to raise awareness of OER by providing a rationale for using these learning materials and a strategy for educators to get started with OER during the collective crisis and beyond. Design/methodology/approach Using a broad research base and anecdotes from personal experience, the authors make the case that OER improves student access to learning materials and improves the learning experience in both PK-12 and higher education contexts. Findings The authors define and describe the benefits of OER to provide practical suggestions educators can implement during the pandemic and beyond. Practical implications To support educators in finding and using OER, this paper highlights repositories that include a breadth of various learning materials across subject areas and educational contexts. The authors provide specific suggestions for finding, personalizing and contextualizing OER. Originality/value This work not only provides an overview of OER with particular considerations for educators during the COVID-19 pandemic but also makes the case that OER should be integrated into classrooms beyond the pandemic.


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