Research on the OERu's approach to open education and its organizational culture

[Dan Dubien]

Dear members of the OERu community,

(Note that this message is also posted on the Groups and Community pages.)

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 an 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.

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. I will be posting updates about the progress of this research.

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