New Member Research Special V (27 Sept 2022)

Mark the date and join us for our next new member research special!

We’re delighted that on Tuesday 27 September at 15.00 BST we’ll be joined by four of our fabulous new GO-GN’ers, Ramireddy, Mara, Kathryn and Melissa, who’ll be sharing more on their research. Find out more about their presentations below.

Schedule:

• 15.00 Welcome
• 15.05 Ramireddy Pusapati (Dravidian University) Open Courseware Initiatives for Engineering Curriculum
• 15.30 Mara Bordignon (Western University, Ontario) Interrogating Open Education Policy Discourse through a Critical Research Lens
• 16.00 Kathryn Johnson (Athabasca University) IRRODL Overview & Comparative Openness of Eight Universities in Canada and the United States
• 16.25 Melissa Ashman (Athabasca University) From perceptions of open pedagogy to the intersection with social justice

Join the call via Zoom!

Open Courseware Initiatives for Engineering Curriculum (Ramireddy Pusapati with Kishore Avineni, Dravidian University)

Open Courseware is the repository of the study and learning materials in digital form in the web which is open for every user i.e. Open Access. These repositories envisage to store, index, preserve, distribute and share the digital learning resources with any time access offering interoperability. What is most significant about the method is that it ensures faster learning at comparatively reduced cost and gives access to more learning resources. The OCW project is rooted in the MIT Faculty’s decision at United States, stated in 1999. In India, a number of institutions are digitizing their course materials and a good number of open courseware have been established e.g. National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), eGyankosh-a National Digital Repository, CEC Learning Object Repository, Indo- German eGurukul on Digital Libraries, NCERT Online Textbooks, UNESCO SALIS e-Learning Portal, etc. This paper presents a scenario of the Open Courseware initiatives in the world as well as in India that can be helpful and necessary to the engineering curriculum.

Interrogating Open Education Policy Discourse through a Critical Research Lens (Mara Bordignon, Western University, Ontario)

Whether academia should be ‘opened’ is a contentious and evolving issue globally. Open education (OE) – as the sharing, use, and reuse of resources, pedagogies, and teaching practices – has gained momentum by challenging, transforming, and even displacing systems which exclude, disenfranchise, and marginalize members of both the public and academic communities. Traditional, dominant systems rooted in the corporatization and monetization of educational processes are problematic because they create barriers that restrict access, agency, ownership, participation, and experience. OE approaches represent a wide range of solutions from free open educational resources to open access of scholarly research. A complex open and closed ecosystem, coupled with flaws and weaknesses in OE practices and approaches themselves, create issues and tensions needing closer interrogation. My study identifies a research gap in how OE is conceptualized within Canadian higher education policy discourse and aims to provide critical insight into power relations, equity, and social justice. 

IRRODL Overview & Comparative Openness of Eight Universities in Canada and the United States (Kathryn Johnson, Athabasca University)

Part 1 of this presentation will share a brief history of The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL) and suggest ways that members of the GO-GN network might benefit from scholarly activities with IRRODL. Part 2 of this presentation will share preliminary finds of a dissertation using historical methodology comparing the open educational characteristics of eight distance universities in Canada and the United States. Six of the universities were established during the early 1970s, at the height of the mass expansion of higher education and the early years of the global proliferation of open universities. Two were established during the 1990s, when virtual universities were emerging.

From perceptions of open pedagogy to the intersection with social justice (Melissa Ashman, Athabasca University)

There seems to be a transformation in teaching and learning that happens when students and faculty engage in open pedagogy. While there is a growing body of research available on the costs, outcomes, uses, and perceptions of open education resources by faculty and students, there is considerably less available with respect to open pedagogy. In the spring and summer of 2021, I conducted surveys of faculty and students in classes using open pedagogy at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in BC, Canada to explore their perceptions towards this practice. In this presentation, I will share some of my research results and how I hope to build on this work for my doctoral dissertation, which will explore the intersection of open pedagogy with social justice in online courses.

Join the call via Zoom!

This post was updated on 23 September 2022.