Exploring educators’ use and acceptance of social networking and gamification features of open repos Members : #OER17

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Thu, Apr 6 2017, 10:30am – 11:30am

Authors: Beatriz De Los Arcos, Bram Faems, Anna Comas-Quinn, Hans De Four, and Hélène Pulker

Room: Seminar 4

Theme: Inst/Org Politics

Type: Presentations

Description

The affordance of social interaction has been a part of open online repositories of teaching and learning resources for nearly two decades. Repositories are built not only to collect and disseminate materials, but enable users to collaborate and review, comment on and rate the content they access (Atenas and Havemann, 2013). However, research indicates that (1) the most common behaviour on open repositories is non-generative use (Pynoo, Tondeur, van Braak, Duyck, Sijnave and Duyck, 2012), and (2) the possibility of social interaction does not necessarily equate with active participation in social interaction (Borthwick, Millard and Howard, 2011).

As part of the European Commission-funded ExplOERer Project, we conducted research with the aim to (a) better understand the role of social networking and gamification features in open repositories, and (b) examine teachers’ acceptance of these features as incentive systems to use and reuse open educational resources (OER).

In this presentation we will report some of the findings from a sizeable survey and focus groups involving users of KlasCement, a large educational portal in Belgium, and Languages Open Resources Online (LORO), a small repository of language teaching materials based at the Department of Languages of The Open University (UK), as we address the following questions:

How do educators perceive the usefulness and ease of use of the repositories?
What purpose do repositories serve in educators’ professional practices?
What are teachers’ attitudes towards the inclusion of specific gamification and social networking features?
What motivates educators to share?

In discussing these results, we will invite attendees to reflect on their own practices and consider the relevance of sharing knowledge as a public good versus self-interest. We will conclude with specific policy and practical recommendations that enable a change in culture around the use of social networking and gamification mechanisms, and contribute to the sustainable development of open repositories.

References:

Atenas, J. & Havemann, L. (2013). Quality assurance in the open: an evaluation of OER repositories. The International Journal for Innovation and Quality in Learning, 1(2): 22-34. Online at http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/17347/

Borthwick, K., Millard, D. & Howard, Y. (2011). Report: HumBox Impact Analysis. Online at http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/sites/microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk.tidsr/files/humboximpactanalysisv2.pdf

Pynoo, B., Tondeur, J., van Braak, J., Duyck, W., Sijnave, B. & Duyck, P. (2012). Teachers’ acceptance and use of an educational portal. Computers & Education, 58(4): 1308-1317.

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