User:Dan Dubien

My profile
I am an instructional designer currently pursuing a PhD in Education at the College of Education, Health and Human Development at the University of Canterbury. I am working under the supervision of Distinguished Professor Niki Davis, Associate Professor Annelies Kamp, and Associate Professor Cheryl Brown.

My message to the OERu members
Dear members of the OERu community,

I am conducting a case study to examine the practices involved in open education at the OERu with a focus on instructional design. The case study includes an ethnographic study to examine the organisational culture and processes involved in the implementation of open educational practices. This project is being carried out as part of my PhD in Education.

So far, I’ve completed a pilot study where I interviewed people with experience working with the OERu. I have also contributed to and observed the OERu’s Quality Review Project meetings as the members have been discussing and developing a Quality Assurance framework and accompanying user's guide for supporting the development of courses for the OERu. Now, with your permission and hopefully your collaboration, I’d like to expand my study. I intend to examine the application of instructional design by the OERu’s members and observe how the OERu collaborates across institutions in the WikiEducator platform and other communication platforms. This work would involve analyzing public documents, discussions, and videos on the platform.

Any suggestions you may have regarding the research are welcome. In alignment with the OERu’s commitment to openness, the results of this study will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) or Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA). Please see the link below which contains a letter that I and my supervisors signed as a commitment to publishing findings about the OERu as Free Cultural Works. Updates about the progress of this research will be posted on the OERu’s website, at a location that I will share with you once I start posting.

Letter committing to Cultural Free Works

A more detailed information sheet explaining my measures for protecting participant confidentiality among other research plans will be made available upon request.

If you have any questions about this research, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thank you for considering this request.

Yours sincerely, Dan Dubien

Presentations on my research at FLANZ
I will be giving two presentations based on my research and early findings at the 2018 conference of the Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand. The titles and abstracts of the presentations are presented below. Following the conference, I will be providing an update on audience feedback and a link - once it is available - to the conference proceedings which will include my full submissions.

If you have any questions about this work, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely, Dan Dubien

Course development by the OERu: A case study using Davis’ Arena of change with technology in education
Demand for higher education is increasing globally and is necessary because of the growing need for knowledge-based workers. One solution is open educational resources (OERs) which are openly licensed instructional materials. OERs are abundant but not widely used. Uptake could increase with open educational practices (OEPs) which are tools, policies, instructional and technological training, quality assurance frameworks and other actions, resources, and infrastructure which facilitate the use of OERs.

The problem is that OEPs are not common in higher education. Where they do occur, there are issues with their implementation. One organization promoting OEPs and OERs is the OERu and its international network of tertiary institutions. This research examines how the OERu develops a course as an OER while implementing OEPs.

Qualitative research for this study includes participant-observation of an OERu working group, interviews with OERu partner staff, and document analysis (i.e. drafts of online course content). Davis’ Arena of change with technology in education is a theoretical framework that is used to map the OERu’s practices within a global organizing framework to better inform partners about the complex changing educational systems within which they are embedded. The findings include the types of relationships involved in course development at the OERu and the kinds of OEPs it implements. The findings aim to support the OERu and its partners to fulfil their vision of providing affordable access to education.

Development and use of a quality assurance framework for OER while practicing open philanthropy
Global demand for higher education is increasing and the Open Education Resource universitas (OERu) aims to help by increasing access to credited tertiary education. One of the OERu’s working groups – the Quality Review team (QR team) is working towards this goal. This study examines the QR team’s product and process. The focus in on the product: a quality assurance (QA) framework that the QR team is building for evaluating the OERu’s courses. This framework builds on traditional ones by adding open education elements. The process is open philanthropy: a practice of granting access to anyone to meetings and working documents for consultation or for providing contributions. Publications produced by the QR team are licensed openly so that others may use them as they see fit.

Data collection methods include participant-observation of the QR team’s meetings; interviews with professionals in higher education; discourse analysis of online discussions; and document analysis (e.g. examination of quality assurance frameworks). Analysis of the process of developing the QA framework makes use of Davis’ (2018) Arena of change with technology in education. This framework assists in comprehensively describing the complex relationships within a system involved in an innovation. The QA framework for open education is intended to support course developers in maximising the affordances of OER and OEP for the benefit of students.