Hands up who wants to hear what’s going on at LARK 2024? Well, once more we have the privilege to hear from some of our special guest speakers about their research journey, they will be sharing at our LARK Symposium and implications for our profession. This time in our second LARK 2024 sneak peek blog, Danny Kingsley, Kay Steel, Sarah Barkla and Richard White shed some light into how they developed their research question looking at OER use in universities. How the research question evolves is just one exciting element of this study which provides valuable reflections into not only research in practice but broader implications for open educational practice and impacts on teaching and learning in higher education.
Helen Weston also gives some background for her project, which investigates gamification to support a love of reading.
We look forward to hearing more about these important studies at LARK 2024. Be inspired, be there!
Paul Jewell
Looking but not finding
By Dr Danny Kingsley, Dr Kay Steel, Sarah Barkla & Richard White
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul
This quotation describes the experience we have had as we attempted some research into open educational resources (OERs). We began with the question of whether open monographs were being used for the purposes of learning and teaching. This arose through Danny Kingsley’s previous role* working as a Community Manager for OAPEN – the global library of open access books – and the Directory of Open Access Books.
As with any research question, the first decision was how to approach it. The research group is comprised of people working in university libraries across Australia and New Zealand, and we were hoping to develop and share a research method. The plan was to test it against our own region, with the intention that the method could be replicated in other regions across the globe for comparison. Lofty plans indeed.
One option was to look at university reading lists. However, given the complexities of how these lists are managed across institutions and the multiple platforms in place, it was not clear if we would be able to structure the questions for a survey to send out to universities that would give us meaningful responses. Surveys also require an ethics process which, while important, does take time.
We were sure someone had already looked into this question of understanding usage of open access books for teaching. But our (admittedly light-touch) literature search did not surface any study that had looked at this particular issue. While this meant we were on our own, the team had a secret weapon.
Danny’s role in OAPEN allowed access to some back-end data about usage at institutional level. The OAPEN library metadata can be ingested into university catalogues, and ExLibris, which owns one of the popular library management systems, provides monthly reports to OAPEN on usage by institution. OAPEN also collects institutional-level information about downloads at the book and chapter level, and this information is available to any supporter institution through the OAPEN Dashboard.
The first thing we noticed when we compared the ExLibris information against the OAPEN Dashboard for a given institution was the significant difference in numbers between them. The smaller (by a factor of 10) number of accesses from the library catalogue compared to those in the general IP address range raises serious questions about how our communities are discovering information. But we digress.
What the high levels of usage across institutions indicated were that these monographs and book chapters are definitely well-used in our region. But our question was whether they were being used for the purposes of teaching and learning. This is quite challenging to determine. We began by looking for usage patterns in the Dashboard information – anything that might indicate that there is a correlation with the teaching or exam periods of a given institution. While we could see some promising patterns in individual institutions, we were unable to identify a consistent pattern across institutions. Remember, we were trying to determine what kinds of questions would be useful to ask of institutions in a survey.
But we noticed a *different* pattern. In one institution the pattern of usage across the year did seem to indicate the materials were being used for teaching and learning. But when we looked at the specific titles, a large number were clearly related to the same topic. A search into the courses at the institution identified a likely candidate course.
So this opened up a completely new question for us: Is the usage of this open material from OAPEN due to a single individual being a champion for it, or is there a policy or support in place that is systematically encouraging this use?
What did we find? Well that’s what our talk: “How do we know if policies and initiatives encouraging OERs work? A proof of concept study” at the LARK symposium 2024 is about. Come along!
(*For full disclosure, Danny remains associated with OAPEN as an unpaid Ambassador.)
The role of gamification in motivating reading for enjoyment in Year 7 girls
Dr Helen Weston
We are hearing from the PIRLS 2021 report and Australia Reads that reading for enjoyment amongst Australian school students is declining. What is more challenging for me to understand, is the rate that female students, traditionally associated with being voracious readers, are dropping.
I had a reading initiative established in my school, Loreto College Coorparoo, however, students still seemed to be putting up walls that prevented them from engaging in the joy of reading and experiencing all the benefits we know come from reading for enjoyment.
Not long after beginning the reading initiative, we call Atomic Reading, I was fortunate to be accepted into the Global Action Research Collaborative program supported by the International Coalition of Girls Schools. I set out to investigate why girls were losing motivation to read and what could be done to increase their interest.
My session at LARK will share the research findings that emerged from the Action Research approach to exploring the role of gamification in a reading initiative for an all-girls secondary school in Brisbane.
0 Comments