scholarly journals Human-Centered Design as an Approach to Create Open Educational Resources

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
pp. 7397
Author(s):  
Carles Garcia-Lopez ◽  
Enric Mor ◽  
Susanna Tesconi
Keyword(s):  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Human Centered Design ◽  
Lifelong Learners ◽  
Content Organization ◽  
Future Work

Open educational resources (OER) play an important role in teaching and learning, especially in lifelong learning. Educational resources should be created in a way that addresses lifelong learners’ needs. Human-centered design (HCD) is a design perspective and an iterative process that involves users in all phases of the process. Thus, an HCD approach can provide relevant advantages when creating OER for lifelong learning. This work presents the Design Toolkit as a case study of digital open educational contents for design education that has been created following an HCD process. The orientation of the Design Toolkit is to provide users OER in a tool format rather than in a traditional manner. The main goal of this research is to contribute to the understanding of how HCD impacts OER creation. The research focuses on teachers, assessing the Design Toolkit content organization and analyzing teacher adoption and usage of the resources. The HCD approach fosters teachers’ satisfaction, promotes OER adoption and provides new design requirements for a future iteration of the HCD process. The results show that designing OER involving users through an HCD approach sets the focus adequately on their needs and limitations. Teachers feel satisfied with the Design Toolkit, fostering the adoption of OER in different educational contexts. Finally, users’ involvement in the whole HCD process points out design and educational requirements for future work.

scholarly journals TrueLearn: A Family of Bayesian Algorithms to Match Lifelong Learners to Open Educational Resources

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (01) ◽  
pp. 565-573
Author(s):  
Sahan Bulathwela ◽  
Maria Perez-Ortiz ◽  
Emine Yilmaz ◽  
John Shawe-Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Recommendation System ◽  
Background Knowledge ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Computer Assisted Learning ◽  
Lifelong Learners ◽  
Knowledge States ◽  
Wide Range

The recent advances in computer-assisted learning systems and the availability of open educational resources today promise a pathway to providing cost-efficient high-quality education to large masses of learners. One of the most ambitious use cases of computer-assisted learning is to build a lifelong learning recommendation system. Unlike short-term courses, lifelong learning presents unique challenges, requiring sophisticated recommendation models that account for a wide range of factors such as background knowledge of learners or novelty of the material while effectively maintaining knowledge states of masses of learners for significantly longer periods of time (ideally, a lifetime). This work presents the foundations towards building a dynamic, scalable and transparent recommendation system for education, modelling learner's knowledge from implicit data in the form of engagement with open educational resources. We i) use a text ontology based on Wikipedia to automatically extract knowledge components of educational resources and, ii) propose a set of online Bayesian strategies inspired by the well-known areas of item response theory and knowledge tracing. Our proposal, TrueLearn, focuses on recommendations for which the learner has enough background knowledge (so they are able to understand and learn from the material), and the material has enough novelty that would help the learner improve their knowledge about the subject and keep them engaged. We further construct a large open educational video lectures dataset and test the performance of the proposed algorithms, which show clear promise towards building an effective educational recommendation system.

scholarly journals A case study investigation of academic library support for open educational resources in Scottish universities

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-693
Author(s):  
Seth D. Thompson ◽  
Adrienne Muir
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Libraries ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Higher Education Institutions ◽  
Academic Library ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Institutional Commitment ◽  
Case Study Methodology

The aim of the research was to investigate why and how Scottish university libraries support open educational resources and to assess their ability to provide support services for their development and use within higher education institutions. There has been little research on the role of academic libraries in supporting open educational resources in Scotland and previous research found that there is a lack of awareness of them in Scottish higher education institutions and few have open educational resources policies. The case study methodology therefore involved two Scottish academic libraries providing open educational resources services. The libraries’ motivation includes supporting teaching and learning and the development of educator digital skills and copyright knowledge. However, there are a number of barriers limiting the services the libraries are able to provide, particularly lack of human resources. The research confirmed the findings of previous research on the importance of institutional commitment, incentives for educator engagement, and understanding of copyright and licensing issues by educators and library staff.

scholarly journals Challenges for implementing open educational resources by teachers in higher education

2018 ◽  
Vol 325 ◽  
pp. 479-490
Author(s):  
Roza Dumbraveanu
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Digital Divide ◽  
Educational Philosophy ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Teaching Experience ◽  
Fair Use ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
European Universities ◽  
Teachers Training

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are facing a number of problems during the last decades: the need to update the curricula to make it compatible with the similar ones from other national and European universities; demand to update the content and the pedagogical approach due to knowledge, technological and research development. Open Educational Resources (OER) might be a sound strategy for institutions to meet these challenges. At the same time OER are themselves one of the challenges that the teachers are faced with. OER could be implemented in courses in different ways, depending on the types of OER and the educational philosophy adopted by the teachers. The paper describes some challenges for implementing Open Educational Resources by teachers in Higher Education in Moldova: the level of awareness on availability and usage of OER; fair use matters; quality assurance of resources; pedagogical approaches for implementing OER into teaching and learning. The paper also grasps the issues of the digital divide that emerge when investigating these challenges. The judgment is based on the literature analysis and on the author’s teaching experience within courses for initial and continuous professional teachers’ training.

Beyond Textbooks

2019 ◽  
pp. 182-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley S. J. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Online Courses ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Academic Needs ◽  
Online Instructors ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Good Starting Point ◽  
Reference Tool

Textbooks can serve as a good starting point for learning concepts or serve as a reinforcing reference tool for students. However, to address the various academic needs of students, as well as to affirm the richness and depth of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions in online courses, online instructors should complement and supplement textbooks with other resources in various formats. Education has a growing need for digital resources, starting with digital textbooks, and expanding to other kinds of educational resources. Open educational resources, in particular, provide cost-effective and flexible tools for teaching and learning.

The UNESCO OER Community 2005-2009

2012 ◽  
pp. 16-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan D’Antoni
Keyword(s):  
Educational Planning ◽  
International Community ◽  
Open Educational Resources ◽  
International Organization ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
The Internet ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Personal Reflection

This is the story of an international community convened to raise awareness of the growing Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. The experience of the international OER Community underlines the potential of the Internet to link people in an inclusive manner to promote collaboration – individuals who would never normally be able to meet and hold focussed discussions over a sustained period. Launched by an international organization, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), and supported the primary champion of the OER movement, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the OER community was exemplary in its interaction, action, and longevity. From 2005, the members of the community have come together from time to time to discuss OER in what can be described as a series of virtual seminars. At two points they put forward their opinion of the priorities to advance the OER movement. Now, with support from the UNESCO Chair in OER at Canada’s Athabasca University, they are about to be invited to make another contribution. This is both the story of a community as a case study, and a personal reflection.

Online Learning and Lifelong Learning

2011 ◽  
pp. 51-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn Finger
Keyword(s):  
Online Learning ◽  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Rural And Remote ◽  
Remote Communities ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Technological Improvements

This chapter explores ways in which new and emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) might transform the learning experience through online delivery. After presenting a conceptualisation of ICT use by educators in terms of inaction, investigation, application, integration, and transformation, two diverse learning settings are examined to develop insights into the implications of online learning for lifelong learning—namely, the delivery of educational services to preschool children (aged 4 years old) through to Year 10 students (aged 15 years old) in rural and remote communities in Australia, and the dimensions required for designing online learning for adult learners in higher education. Through the presentation of a case study of a School of Distance Education in Australia, which reflects technological improvements using telephone teaching, and the affordances of improved connectivity, the case study demonstrates that this has enabled the use of more constructivist approaches to teaching and learning to transform the delivery of education to rural and remote students. Subsequently, this chapter provides a synthesis of the literature relating to the critical factors influencing learner satisfaction in online learning.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document