EXPLORING THE PEDAGOGICAL IMPACT OF INTEGRATING OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN A COLLEGE COURSE: A DESIGN-BASED RESEARCH STUDY
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2020
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Abstract
The purpose of this design-based research study was to design an integrative open educational resources (OER) intervention in a college course, in order to promote open educational practices (OEP). Specifically, this dissertation study aimed to generate design principles that support the integration of OER into a college course in ways that will manifest in OEP, and thereby to inform the design and development of an integrative OER intervention. The research questions that guided this dissertation study investigated two areas: the design principles that support the integration of OER into a college course to manifest in open teaching and learning practices; and how are these OER design principles operationalized and implemented in the course to engage students in the use and creation of OER content. To achieve the goals of the study, a mixed-method case-study approach was used to gather and analyze the qualitative and quantitative data. To develop, design, and evaluate the design principles and OER intervention in an authentic context, three phases of the Integrative Learning Design Framework model were used: Informed Exploration, Enactment, and Local Impact Evaluation. Each phase used its own particular questions and research methods to carry out the investigation. In addition, the result of each phase provided input to the development of the subsequent phase. The Informed Exploration Phase constructed a pre-dissertation study that entailed rigorous and iterative in-depth exploration of state-of-the-art knowledge and theoretical understanding of OER adoptions and applications, along with conducting rigorous research studies to explore potential problems in OER from different perspectives. The Informed Exploration Phase resulted in defining and determining the problem statement and the initial theoretical conjectures that provided input to the next phases. The Enactment Phase and the Local Impact Evaluation Phase are the actual dissertation study. The Enactment phase included two micro-cycles of iterative development of the design principles and the prototype of the OER intervention. The Enactment Phase resulted in developing the design principles that describe the integration of OER use and creation into a college course; the development of the components of the OER intervention prototype; and designing the OER intervention prototype in EDIT 730. The Local Impact Evaluation phase aimed to evaluate the implementation of the OER design principles and OER intervention prototype in the selected course. The Local Impact Evaluation Phase resulted in refined design principles that can be used by faculty in higher education institutions as heuristic guidelines or best practices for integrating OER beyond providing access to open content. Furthermore, the outcomes of the OER intervention and the new OER design principles that were extrapolated from the findings of this dissertation study were identified. The data showed that integrating OER into this learner-centered course did not contribute to change in the current pedagogy of the course, but it did contribute to change in the main assignments' instructions and guidelines in terms of the way the students conducted their assignments. The results of this study provide best practices of the potential of embedding the 5Rs in a course curriculum. The findings suggest that commentary activities helped students provide comments to the original authors that confirm the theoretical assumption of students’ contribution to continuous improvement of OER content. One of the more significant findings to emerge from this dissertation study as a result of integrating the 5Rs into the course instructions of the main assignments is threading across assignments. Threading across assignments is a constructive process of building knowledge across assignments within a course and across assignments for an entire academic program. The findings suggest that the idea of threading across assignments could influence the pedagogy of courses and support students in practicing the 5Rs and in building on their assignments and projects across all classes. Moreover, this study found that integrating OER into a course encourages both instructors and students to reflect on the course curriculum, in order to improve the instructional materials and learning strategies of the course. The study resulted in nine refined design principles: (1) To support the use and creation of OER, OER should be integrated into a course that is designed based on a learner-centered pedagogical model using the principles of a constructivist approach to teaching and learning. (2) OER should be embedded as a main component of the pedagogy of the course. (3) OER integration into a course should support the use and creation of open content under an open license using effective OER databases. (4) In any course version, an in-person session should be used early in the course to introduce the OER term, related attributes, its operationalization, the benefits from engaging in OER use and creation, and threading across assignments. (5) The main goal of integrating OER into a college course should be to educate learners about the term OER and related concepts in order to promote the usage and creation of OER by the learners. (6) Students should have the option to share their assignments under an open license and to select the appropriate license. (7) The instructor should provide a collection of OER content as a starting point for embedding the 5Rs practices in a course curriculum. (8) OER content that is shared openly online should be reusable and end in a meaningful purpose for learning. (9) Creating OER content is more effective through collaborative work between both faculty and students.