scholarly journals Open science practices in higher education: Discussion of survey results from research and teaching staff in Germany

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-323
Author(s):  
Tamara Heck ◽  
Isabella Peters ◽  
Athanasios Mazarakis ◽  
Ansgar Scherp ◽  
Ina Blümel

Aspects of open science and scholarly practices are often discussed with a focus on research and research dissemination processes. There is currently less discussion on open science and its influence on learning and teaching in higher education, and reversely. This paper discusses open science in relation to educational practices and resources and reports on a study to investigate current educational practices from the perspective of open science. We argue that offering students opportunities via open educational practices raises their awareness of future open science goals and teaches them the skills needed to reach those goals. We present online survey results from 210 participants with teaching responsibility at higher education institutions in Germany. While some of them try to establish more open learning and teaching settings, most respondents apply rather traditional ways of learning and teaching. 60% do not use open educational resources – many have not even heard of them – nor do they make their courses open for an online audience. Participants’ priority lies in resource accuracy and quality and we still see a gap between the benefit of open practices and their practicability and applicability. The paper contributes to the general discussion of open practices in higher education by looking at open science practices and their adaptation to the learning and teaching environment. It formulates recommendations for improvements of open practice support and infrastructure.

2011 ◽  
pp. 256-269
Author(s):  
Mark Sheehan

In summer 2001, the editors of this book conducted an online survey to gather opinions about what a portal is perceived to be in the context of higher education. Survey participants are listed in the Acknowledgments section of this book. The survey results were presented in a poster session at the EDUCAUSE 2001 conference and are summarized in Table 1 of the Introduction to this book. This appendix presents a more detailed analysis of the survey, including several items that were not included in the summary in the Introduction. The survey was made up of 18 statements to which respondents were asked to react, and six questions that respondents were asked to answer. Analysis of the survey results must be tempered by the fact that survey respondents were self-selecting. Most presumably had some interest in portals, and therefore likely had some familiarity with them. While survey respondents were in no sense hand-picked, they were at the same time not entirely randomly selected.


Author(s):  
Angelica Risquez ◽  
Claire McAvinia ◽  
Yvonne Desmond ◽  
Catherine Bruen ◽  
Deirdre Ryan ◽  
...  

This paper reports on the research findings from a national project examining the issues in creating, sharing, using, and reusing open educational resources (OER) in the context of the development of open education in Ireland. One important aspect of the research was to investigate the potential for using existing institutional research repository infrastructure for the purpose of ingesting, managing, and discovering OER produced by academics. This approach would imply a move from previous strategy around a centralised repository at the national level to a devolved model that relies on institutional research repositories. The opportunities and potential barriers to the adoption of this approach were explored through an online survey and focus groups with academics from a range of higher education institutions (HEIs). Also, a focus group of institutional repository managers was convened to discuss the potential of the institutional repositories with those leading their development. Analysis of the data indicates that the devolved approach to institutions would be possible if the right supports and protocols were put in place. It was acknowledged that research repositories could potentially also serve as repositories of teaching materials, fostering parity of esteem between teaching and research. However, a range of important challenges were present, and alternative solutions emerged, which are discussed in the context of the present and future of online OER repositories.


2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-39
Author(s):  
Stephen Mallinder ◽  
Debbie Flint

Wider social, cultural and technological changes are precipitating transformations in higher education. There is increasing need for universities and specialist colleges to operate effectively in a global online environment. The development of accessible and re-usable online teaching and learning materials has provided challenges to staff and institutions. This article explores aspects of the UK Open Educational Resources Programme and, in particular, the Art Design and Media Open Educational Resources (ADM-OER) Project which has sought to examine the processes, challenges and opportunities open educational resources (OERs) present to these ‘creative’ disciplines. Part of the project has explored art, design and media tutors’ perceptions of the shift to ‘teaching in public’ and we share some preliminary findings.


Author(s):  
Catherine Cronin

<p class="3">Open educational practices (OEP) is a broad descriptor of practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of open educational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies and open sharing of teaching practices. As compared with OER, there has been little empirical research on individual educators’ use of OEP for teaching in higher education. This research study addresses that gap, exploring the digital and pedagogical strategies of a diverse group of university educators, focusing on whether, why, and how they use OEP for teaching. The study was conducted at one Irish university; semi-structured interviews were carried out with educators across multiple disciplines. Only a minority of educators used OEP. Using constructivist grounded theory, a model of the concept “Using OEP for teaching” was constructed showing four dimensions shared by open educators: balancing privacy and openness, developing digital literacies, valuing social learning, and challenging traditional teaching role expectations. The use of OEP by educators is complex, personal, and contextual; it is also continually negotiated. These findings suggest that research-informed policies and collaborative and critical approaches to openness are required to support staff, students, and learning in an increasingly complex higher education environment.</p>


Author(s):  
Юлия Масалова ◽  
Yuliya Masalova

The purpose of the work is to evaluate the potential of a high school teacher; the subject of study is employment potential and competitiveness of the university faculty member; research methods include analysis of statistical data and online-survey. The article presents the results of the research potential of the university teaching staff in the conditions of ongoing reforms in higher education and in connection with changing requirements to higher education institutions forfaculty members. It was determined that faculty members demonstrate high loyalty and commitment, but average engagement. It was revealed that the institution creates proper conditions for development and self-realization, creativity and communication. It was confirmed that university professors have a high scientific and innovative potential and willingness to conduct research. The conclusion is that the employment potential of university staff is not used to the full. It was determined that the majority of the teaching staff appreciates personal competitiveness. And only one out of five is aware of the need to develop their personal competitiveness in line with the new requirements. The results of the study may be useful for university governance within the management of human resources quality.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-455
Author(s):  
emre ipekçi çetin

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused restrictions and shutdowns affecting all industries worldwide. The scope of the steps taken to prevent the spread of the pandemic, universities in Turkey also began to provide distance education in March 2020. This process has provided an important experience in which the education system is questioned on the basis of educational infrastructure, lecturers and students. The experience of a nationwide transformation in such a short period of time in the education system is considered to be unique. In this study, it is aimed to create a decision support document by compiling this valuable experience and suggestions for further improvement of the higher education system. In this context, the opinions and recommendations of teaching staff regarding the distance education process were taken with the help of surveys which were responded by 744 lecturers from 84 universities of Turkey. As a result of the study, it was seen that factors such as the type of university, distance education experience, and age make a difference in the views of the lecturers towards distance education. In addition, the determinations and suggestions of the instructors that they stated by openended expressions were compiled under main headings. This process experienced offers an important opportunity to question the current educational structure and to improve it further. As also stated in the survey results, it is predicted that the weight of distance education in higher education will also increase at post-pandemic term. Therefore, it is thought that the necessary steps should be taken in the light of the experiences in order to make the next process more efficient


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-325
Author(s):  
Sabina Schaffner

Abstract This paper discusses the potential of language centres in higher education as laboratories for innovation. Despite their hybrid character as central service providers that are also defined by their teaching, their positioning at the academic periphery, and the lack of a mandate to do academic research, language centres still have an obligation to conduct research as a means of promoting innovation. The design-based research (DBR) approach in learning and teaching, in which teaching stakeholders examine learning processes in real situation, offers a suitable opportunity for language centres to overcome the restrictions placed upon them. DBR can be done using existing resources and the innovation potential of a language centre’s teaching staff. The leadership and management of the language centre must be made responsible for providing and/or enabling the necessary structural, material, and cultural conditions for such research. This paper discusses the DBR approach at language centres in higher education and its impact on leadership. It then gives two examples of the successful implementation of DBR at the Language Center of UZH and ETH Zurich.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 9129
Author(s):  
Xiangling Zhang ◽  
Ahmed Tlili ◽  
Ronghuai Huang ◽  
Tingwen Chang ◽  
Daniel Burgos ◽  
...  

Open Educational Resources (OER) have been researched for a long time in the open education field. Researchers are now shifting their focus from resources to practices for delivering open education, an area called Open Educational Practices (OEP). However, there is little information in the related literature regarding the design of an OEP-based course or the impact of these types of courses. Therefore, this study designs a new OEP-based course at a public university for teaching family education during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also investigates its impact on learning motivation and teachers’ perceptions. In this context, a practical pilot experiment using both qualitative and quantitative methods was conducted. Specifically, 36 learners participated in this experiment. The obtained findings highlight: (1) an innovative design framework for OEP-based courses that teachers can refer to in their contexts; (2) that learners had a high motivation level in terms of knowledge achievements, individual connection and engagement when taking the OEP-based course; and (3) several advantages and challenges of the OEP-based course from the teacher’s and learners’ perspectives. For instance, the teacher reported the fear of losing control over the learning process when applying OEP. The findings of this paper can help researchers and educators in adopting OEP in higher education especially in times of crises, as well as increase the sustainability of OEP, hence contributing to open education development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (20) ◽  
pp. 5637 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Nascimbeni ◽  
Daniel Burgos

The goal of this paper is to advance the understanding of the way university educators currently adopt open educational practices (OEP) by analyzing the relation between the use of open educational resources (OER) and the implementation of open teaching practices. The results are based on data collected through an online survey among 724 university educators. Depending on the actual use of OER and open teaching practices by the survey respondents, we have categorized them along a scale that goes from “novice” to “expert”, and we analyzed the data to evaluate their use of OER and their adoption of open teaching practices, looking for relationships between the two phenomena. The main finding of this paper, which confirms the latest research findings from the open education community, is that a strong relationship exists between the two dimensions: The more an educator uses OER, the more he will probably adopt open teaching practices, and vice versa. These results are discussed with a view to use this virtuous circle between the use of open content and adoption of open teaching as a way to build generalized open education capacity among universities’ teaching staff.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-66
Author(s):  
Gail Wilson ◽  
◽  
Paula Myatt ◽  
Jonathan Purdy ◽  
◽  
...  

This research examines the design and delivery of a new Foundations of University Teaching Practice (FUTP) program delivered through asynchronous online modules. The freedom to choose defines the new momentum of openness in distance and open learning. University teaching staff expect quality resources to support their professional development within the reality of limited time for learning and a desire for increased accessibility. Openness and increased access bring both opportunities and challenges. This paper uses mixed methods to examine the FUTP from the perspectives of both the designers and the academic staff who participated in the program. Using personal reflections, focus groups, a survey, and interviews, we explore those opportunities and challenges within the context of the design and delivery of the program and report on the findings. Our research confirmed the value of openness and increased access to professional learning in higher education


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