Faculty Publications (Educational Technology)
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Item Educators as Content Creators in a Diverse Digital Media Landscape(Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2021) Paskevicius, MichaelThis paper focuses on the ways educators can work within the guidelines of copyright while using digital media to develop educational content in legal and ethical ways by exploring several key contemporary trends in digital content creation. Educators need not create learning materials from scratch, as the pool of resources available via the internet, from educational publishers, or physically stored within schools serve as resources for the development of contextually relevant learning materials. Educators are increasingly becoming content creators, and with the development of digital literacies to support content creation, they can combine resources from multiple sources to meet the needs of their learners. This may be done to ensure a lesson is current, meet the needs of differentiated instruction and universal design for learning, to design learning materials that are engaging, and those that can be shared widely. In this digital media landscape, it is important for educators to know how to navigate digital media for use in developing curriculum or learning materials. By drawing on the digital literacies associated with copyright and open educational practices, educators can work within the guidelines of fair use, link and embed content, recognize and use openly licensed content, and explore resources from the public domain in legal and technically appropriate ways while developing learning materials. These approaches may impact educators’ design processes, while also demonstrating and modelling to learners the creative ways one can remix and share resources found on the web.Item Practicalities of implementing open pedagogy in higher education(Smart Learning Environments, 2019) Paskevicius, Michael; Irvine, ValerieThis paper presents findings from a study which explored the ways in which post-secondary educators in British Columbia are reforming their teaching and learning practice as result of open education. Using a phenomenological approach with self-identifying open education practitioners we explore how openness is being enacted through learning design. Structuration theory is used as a theoretical lens to explore innovations to pedagogy through three modalities, which include facilities, norms, and interpretive schemes. The analysis identifies how participants in this study draw upon these modalities to support openness in their teaching. The findings suggest that open educational resources and practices can support learner-centered educational designs and should be considered design technologies, those that have the capacity to enhance teaching and learning practice; rather than simply content delivery technologies, those that influence the cost and access to education.Item Framework to understand postgraduate students’ adaption of academics’ teaching materials as OER(Open Educational Resources and Social Networks: Colearning and Professional Development, 2012) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Paskevicius, MichaelThis chapter addresses a way of responding to one of the key challenges of OER contribution, namely academics’ lack of time to re-purpose teaching materials originally intended for campus-based face-to-face lectures as stand-alone Open Educational Resources (OER). It describes how masters’ students, tutors and interns at the University of Cape Town have been engaged to support the innovative practice of adapting academics’ existing teaching materials into OER. COLEARNING OBJECTIVES This paper identifies that there are relatively few studies that have investigated the role of postgraduate students in the OER creation process, even though this process may be happening in practice. Moreover it suggests that there is a lack of information about why postgraduate students are motivated to assist their lecturers to adapt materials as OER. It uses Rogers’ (1983; 1995) Diffusion of Innovation theory and specifically his theory of Perceived Attributes and its extension by Moore and Benbasat (1991) as a framework for understanding these postgraduate students’ willingness to participate in this innovative practice. REUSABILITY This chapter can by be reused by those who are grappling with ways to encourage and support academics to contribute their teaching materials originally used in face-to-face lectures as publicly available OER. It can also be used by those who might want to appoint postgraduates as OER assistants to academics and help them identify the key attributes and factors that seem to influence OER adoption by postgraduate students.Item 365 Days of Openness: The Emergence of OER at the University of Cape town(Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice, 2013) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Paskevicius, Michael; Cox, Glenda; Shaikh, Shihaam; Czerniewicz, Laura; Lee-Pan, SamanthaHistorically, resources such as books, journals, newspapers, audio and video recordings have been fairly well curated in university libraries. However, the same cannot be said for teaching and learning materials, unless they have been included in a textbook or study guide. With the growth in digital media, libraries have been extending their curation of scholarly resources to include electronic journals, digital books and reference guides, broadening access to these beyond the physical walls of the library. While the growth in digital technology has prompted academics to create their own customised and contextually specific digital media for use in their teaching in the form of PowerPoint presentations, manuals, handbooks, guides, media resources and websites, these resources are most often stored on personal hard drives, on departmental servers or within password-protected institutional learning management systems. Access to these digital materials is usually limited to registered students undertaking specific courses within specific institutions and usually only disseminated by individual academics or departments.Item Learners’ Access to Educational Materials in Select Institutions within the Commonwealth(Commonwealth of Learning, 2019) Paskevicius, MichaelThe purpose of this report is to assess students’ access to educational materials in select institutions within Commonwealth countries. The report starts with a review of the existing literature on problems and barriers to students’ access to educational materials, including textbooks. The review is used to develop a research study and appropriate questionnaire tools to undertake a survey of students in select institutions. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are then used to analyse the data. The findings indicate that learners are now engaging with a complex ecosystem of learning materials, both print and digital, in a multitude of differing forms and formats, with various terms of use and durations of sustained access. Furthermore, the results show that learners are not acutely aware of open educational resources (OER) and in some cases conflate OER with online knowledge resources, indicating that much more work needs to be done to educate learners about OER, where to find them, and how they can be used.Item Student perceptions of the creation and reuse of digital educational resources in a community development-oriented organisation(Journal of Learning for Development, 2018) Paskevicius, Michael; Hodgkinson-Williams, CherylThis case study explores students’ perceptions of the creation and reuse of digital teaching and learning resources in their work as tutors as part of a volunteer community development organisation at a large South African University. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, student-tutors reflect on their use and reuse of digital educational resources, and identify the challenges they experience in curating, adapting, and reusing educational resources for use in their teaching activities. The data is analysed qualitatively within the framework of an activity system (Engeström, 1987) to surface the primary systemic tensions that student-tutors face in the reuse of resources found online as well as open educational resources (OER). This study found that student-tutors sourced and used educational materials from the Internet, largely irrespective of their licensing conditions, while also creating and remixing a substantial number of educational materials to make them suitable for use in their context. We conclude that greater awareness of the availability of OER and explicit open licencing for works sourced and created within community development organisations could enhance sharing, collaboration, and help sustain high impact resources.Item Conceptualizing Open Educational Practices through the Lens of Constructive Alignment(Open Praxis, 2017) Paskevicius, MichaelThe act of instruction may be conceptualized as consisting of four elements: learning outcomes, learning resources, teaching and learning activities, and assessments and evaluation. For instructors in higher education, the way they manage the relationships between these elements is what could be considered the core of their instructional practice. For each of the elements, this paper seeks to identify open educational practices, their affordances, and evidence of their utility in supporting the work of teachers in shifting from existing teaching and learning practices to more open educational practices. The literature reviewed and model proposed may provide educational developers or proponents of open education a lens with which to discuss open educational practices with faculty specifically related to their teaching and learning design practices.Item Content is King: An Analysis of How the Twitter Discourse Surrounding Open Education Unfolded From 2009 to 2016(International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2018) Paskevicius, Michael; Veletsianos, George; Kimmons, RoyceInspired by open educational resources, open pedagogy, and open source software, the openness movement in education has different meanings for different people. In this study, we use Twitter data to examine the discourses surrounding openness as well as the people who participate in discourse around openness. By targeting hashtags related to open education, we gathered the most extensive dataset of historical open education tweets to date (n = 178,304 tweets and 23,061 users) and conducted a mixed methods analysis of openness from 2009 to 2016. Findings show that the diversity of participants has varied somewhat over time and that the discourse has predominantly revolved around open resources, although there are signs that an increase in interest around pedagogy, teaching, and learning is emerging.Item Tablets and Trees: Equipping Forestry Students with Mobile Tools for Learning In and Out of Classroom(Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2018) Paskevicius, Michael; Knaack, LieselThis paper presents the case of how a department of applied science went about implementing a tablet initiative in a two-year diploma program. Tablets were a required tool for entry into the program with a goal of reducing textbook purchase costs for students, mirroring industry standard practices in mobile device usage, and enabling collaborative and active learning in the classroom. Based on surveys, interviews, and classroom observations we found that the integration of tablets, when explicitly positioned as a teaching and learning tool supported new forms of peer-to-peer collaboration, encouraged the use of open educational resources, and shifted traditional classroom dynamics reformulating the division of labour between faculty and students. Using activity theory as a lens for the analysis, we examine how the introduction of this tool changes the system of activity and impacts the division of labour, community, and rules both within and beyond the classroom.Item Open Education and Learning Design: Open Pedagogy in Praxis(Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2019) Paskevicius, Michael; Irvine, ValerieBeyond providing alternatives to traditional learning resources, there exists a gap in the literature in understanding how openness is impacting teaching and learning in higher education. This paper explores the ways in which educators describe how open education is impacting their pedagogical designs. Using a phenomenological approach with self-identifying open education practitioners, we explore how open educational practices (OEP) are being actualised in formal higher education in the context of British Columbia (BC), Canada. The findings suggest that OEP represent an emerging form of learning design, which draws from existing models of constructivist and networked pedagogy, while using the affordances of open tools and content to create and share learning in novel ways. Faculty members report finding ways to use open approaches and technologies to support and enable active learning experiences, present and share learners’ work in real-time, support formative feedback, peer review, and, ultimately, promote community-engaged coursework. By designing learning in this way, faculty members offer learners an opportunity to consider and practise developing themselves as public citizens, develop their knowledge and literacies for working appropriately with copyright and controlling access to their online contributions, while presenting options for extending some of those rights to others. Inviting learners to share their work more widely, demonstrates to them that their work has inherent value beyond the course and can be an opportunity for them to engage directly with their community.Item Practicalities of implementing open pedagogy in higher education(Smart Learning Environments, 2019) Paskevicius, Michael; Irvine, ValerieThis paper presents findings from a study which explored the ways in which postsecondary educators in British Columbia are reforming their teaching and learning practice as result of open education. Using a phenomenological approach with selfidentifying open education practitioners we explore how openness is being enacted through learning design. Structuration theory is used as a theoretical lens to explore innovations to pedagogy through three modalities, which include facilities, norms, and interpretive schemes. The analysis identifies how participants in this study draw upon these modalities to support openness in their teaching. The findings suggest that open educational resources and practices can support learner-centered educational designs and should be considered design technologies, those that have the capacity to enhance teaching and learning practice; rather than simply content delivery technologies, those that influence the cost and access to education.Item A global outlook to the interruption of education due to COVID-19 pandemic: Navigating in a time of uncertainty and crisis(Asian Journal of Distance Education, 2020) Bozkurt, Aras; Jung, Insung; Xiao, Junhong; Vladimirschi, Viviane; Schuwer, Robert; Egorov, Gennady; Lambert, Sarah R.; Al-Freih, Maha; Pete, Judith; Olcott, Don Jr; Rodes, Virginia; Aranciaga, Ignacio; Bali, Maha; Alvarez, Abel V. Jr; Roberts, Jennifer; Pazurek, Angelica; Raffaghelli, Juliana Elisa; Panagiotou, Nikos; de Coëtlogon, Perrine; Shahadu, Sadik; Brown, Mark; Asino, Tutaleni I.; Tumwesige, Josephine; Ramírez Reyes, Tzinti; Barrios Ipenza, Emma; Ossiannilsson, Ebba; Bond, Melissa; Belhamel, Kamel; Irvine, Valerie; Sharma, Ramesh C.; Adam, Taskeen; Janssen, Ben; Sklyarova, Tatiana; Olcott, Nicoleta; Ambrosino, Alejandra; Lazou, Chrysoula; Mocquet, Bertrand; Mano, Mattias; Paskevicius, MichaelUncertain times require prompt reflexes to survive and this study is a collaborative reflex to better understand uncertainty and navigate through it. The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic hit hard and interrupted many dimensions of our lives, particularly education. As a response to interruption of education due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this study is a collaborative reaction that narrates the overall view, reflections from the K-12 and higher educational landscape, lessons learned and suggestions from a total of 31 countries across the world with a representation of 62,7% of the whole world population. In addition to the value of each case by country, the synthesis of this research suggests that the current practices can be defined as emergency remote education and this practice is different from planned practices such as distance education, online learning or other derivations. Above all, this study points out how social injustice, inequity and the digital divide have been exacerbated during the pandemic and need unique and targeted measures if they are to be addressed. While there are support communities and mechanisms, parents are overburdened between regular daily/professional duties and emerging educational roles, and all parties are experiencing trauma, psychological pressure and anxiety to various degrees, which necessitates a pedagogy of care, affection and empathy. In terms of educational processes, the interruption of education signifies the importance of openness in education and highlights issues that should be taken into consideration such as using alternative assessment and evaluation methods as well as concerns about surveillance, ethics, and data privacy resulting from nearly exclusive dependency on online solutions.