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Choices and Consequences in Transitioning from Closed to Open Resources and Courses
No full textThis presentation examines the continuum from closed to open for both open educational resources in general and open courses. The presentation evaluates what instructional choices are needed to increase openness. In this regard the presentation will identify not only how to move resources and courses from closed to open, but also any potential negative impacts those decisions raise
Taking the Quantum Leap: Arts-Based Learning as a Gateway into Exploring Transition for Senior Nursing Students
No full textIn a senior-baccalaureate nursing program, a student’s journey of transition to becoming a
Registered Nurse is fraught with institutional and relational tensions. In a fourth-year
capstone theory course focused on issues and trends in nursing leadership, we explored
these tensions through arts-based learning activities. Through the theoretical lens of
Janzen’s (2013) Quantum Perspective of Learning, reflective narratives illuminated student
experiences of the transition and into the unknown. Our goal to inspire, to nurture, and to
empower students to take their own quantum leaps took them into finite career spaces and
the infinite spaces in-between and beyond
Everything is Shareable: Why Open Educational Resources are Critical to Lifelong Learning and the Sharing Economy
No full textThis presentation is from a workshop on open educational resources (OER). This workshop was part of the Code4Lib Alberta Conference, on November 24, 2016. It provides an overview of OER in the context of the open education movement while emphasizing practical considerations when using/creating OER. The audience participated in an OER search activity and added their findings to the live slide deck
Alberta OER Toolkits
No full textThis presentation provides an overview of two online toolkits created for the Alberta Open Educational Resources Initiative. The Champion's Toolkit provides strategies for promoting OER at educational institutions. The Starter Kit outlines considerations when adopting or creating OER such as intended audience, copyright, and accessibility and usability. The presentation was given at the OER In and Across Disciplines Conference at Mount Royal University, on Nov 9, 2016
Some LIS Faculty Indicate Reservations about Open Access [Evidence Summary]
No full textA Review of:
Peekhaus, W., & Proferes, N. (2015). How library and information science faculty perceive and engage with open access. Journal of Information Science, 41(5), 640-661. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0165551515587855
Objective – To examine the awareness of, attitudes toward, and engagement with open access (OA) publishing, based on rank and tenure status among library and information science (LIS) faculty in North America.
Design – Web-based survey distributed via email.
Setting – Accredited library and information science (LIS) programs in North America.
Subjects – 276 professors and professors emeriti.
Methods – Researchers collected email addresses for 1,017 tenure-track, tenured, and emeriti professors from the public websites of the LIS programs. Researchers sent an email invitation to participate in the survey by accessing a URL, with the survey itself delivered using Qualtrics software. The survey included 51 total questions, some with additional sub-questions, and most items used Likert-type rating scale. The researchers analysed the data using SPSS software, and indicated using chi-square tests to measure significance, with a stated intent to get beyond the descriptive statistics commonly seen in other publications.
Main Results – This study’s results draw on 276 completed responses, for a response rate of 27%. Researchers reported that 53% of respondents had some experience with publishing in a peer-reviewed OA format. When asked whether they agreed that scholarly articles should be free to access for everyone, pre-tenure assistant professors were most likely to agree (74%), followed by tenured associate professors (62%), full professors (59%) and then emeriti professors (8%). However, they found less likelihood that associate professors would have actually published in an OA format, highlighting a “disconnect between beliefs about accessibility of research and actual practice with open access” (p. 646). Researchers also discovered a connection between faculty awareness of institutional and disciplinary repositories and faculty publishing in OA journals, though a relatively low number (35%) had deposited their output in a repository within the previous year. That increases to 50% of respondents when timeframe is ignored.
Faculty who had never published in OA journals ranked several barriers to doing so, barriers common across disciplinary boundaries. These include objections to paying OA fees; perceptions of slow time to publish, low research impact, and venue prestige when compared to traditional subscription journals; an inability to identify an appropriate OA journal; and an inability to pay OA fees. However, the researchers note that a majority of these respondents who had never published in an OA format would do so if these barriers were removed. Those participants who had some previous experience with OA were more likely to have positive perceptions of OA journal quality and impact, as well as the overall publishing experience, as compared to publishing in traditional journals.
As in other disciplines, LIS faculty are conscious of the connection between OA and tenure and promotion processes. For example, this study reveals that non-tenured faculty are more likely to agree that publishing in OA venues may affect their career progress. Researchers report uncertainty about OA even among tenured LIS faculty. Of all respondents, only 34% agreed that a tenure or promotion committee might consider an OA publication on par with a traditional publication, while 44% of respondents were of the opinion that an OA publication would be treated less favourably than a traditional journal. A mere 1% of respondents believed that an OA publication would be treated more favourably within the tenure and promotion process. Despite this unfavourable perception of OA, the researchers report that 38% of respondents planned to publish in an OA journal regardless of whether their tenure and promotion committees might treat that OA publication unfavourably.
Conclusion – The researchers report a connection between publishing in an OA journal and academic rank, with full professors more likely to publish OA or to have previous experience in publishing in an OA journal as compared to assistant professor colleagues, who perceive publishing in OA as a potential impediment to career progress. The researchers note that there is significant opportunity for LIS faculty involved in tenure and promotion committees to consider and clarify how OA publications are treated, and the impact of OA publishing with regard to career progress. Moreover, given the levels of uncertainty and equivocacy among faculty respondents as a whole regarding certain aspects of OA, the perceptions around quality and rigour, there is room for further research into LIS professors’ perceptions and attitudes toward open access, and how these change over time
Exploring Undergraduate Perceptions of Meaning Making and Social Media in their Learning
Get PDFThose concerned with teaching and learning in higher education and the Net generation’s perspectives on and uses of technology must address calls to move beyond the digital native debate (Bennett & Maton, 2010; Kennedy, Judd, Dalgarno, & Waycott, 2010) by asking students directly what they see as a meaningful part of their learning. This study aims to move beyond the digital native debate by developing research-informed understandings of the ways in which Net generation students may perceive technologies, specifically social media, to be a meaningful part of their undergraduate learning. The research questions guiding this study include: (RQ1) In what ways do undergraduate learners from different disciplines view social media to be a meaningful part of their university learning? (RQ2) What characteristics of social media do undergraduate learners see as contributing to their meaning making during their university learning? This study uses a social constructivist approach, thereby employing two main premises: learners actively construct their own knowledge, and social interactions are an important part of knowledge construction (Woolfolk, Winne, Perry, & Shapka, 2010, pp. 343-344). The research design is a mixed methods research (MMR) methodology, a methodological approach where a combination of methods is intentionally used to best address the research questions (Creswell, 2008; Creswell, 2015). This study’s MMR design involved a first phase qualitative component of intensive, semi-structured interviews with 30 undergraduate students enrolled in full-time studies at the University of Alberta, a large, Canadian, research-intensive university – with ten students from each of the three disciplinary areas of 1) humanities and social sciences, 2) health sciences, and 3) natural sciences and engineering, analyzed using a generic qualitative approach (Merriam, 2009) incorporating constructivist grounded theory techniques (Charmaz, 2014). The second phase quantitative component was comprised of undergraduate students across disciplines with survey responses (N = 679) regarding their perspectives on and uses of social media technology in their university learning. This phase included two pilot surveys conducted before the final survey was distributed to ensure the reliability and validity of the instrument developed. Survey responses were collected electronically via SurveyMonkey, and analyzed via descriptive statistics. The findings in this study shed new insights into student perspectives and uses of social media, and the variety of ways in which undergraduates intentionally chose (or, chose not) to incorporate social media into their university learning in meaningful ways. The interviews provide a detailed picture of undergraduate perspectives regarding the specific ways in which social media can help and hinder learning, comprising what students consider as a double-edged sword. Student perspectives and descriptions formed key recurring themes, which emerged into several core characteristics of social media, as well as core categories of meaning making in undergraduate university learning. Within the qualitative interviews and the open-ended survey results, there is an overarching theme of social media as a double-edged sword that both informs and distracts, having the potential to both help and hinder learning. Together, the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that several contextual relationships exist, including an important relationship between the particular ways of meaning making identified and the specific social media technologies undergraduates use for their university learning. For those concerned with social media in higher education, these results show how factors such as age and digital native claims should not be seen as primary, deterministic elements of technology use. Rather than taking an approach founded upon technological determinism, the idea of a generational zeitgeist should be considered, where learning context and social media affordances become key
Critical reading in higher education: Academic goals and social engagement
Get PDFDiscovery SnapshotCritical reading is a foundational skill for success in academic and professional endeavours. By defining critical reading as having two aspects, reading for academic purposes and reading for
social engagement, our work opens the door to more intentional teaching of critical reading and its
assessment in our students’ work.
Instructors within any discipline can cultivate critical reading in their students. Our book, Critical
Reading in Higher Education: Academic Goals and Social Engagement (Indiana University Press,
2015), provides not only the results from our cross-course study in foundation General Education
courses, but ideas for cultivating critical reading across the curriculum as well as considerations for success in collaborative Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) studies