Volume 18, Number 5
Rory McGreal
Co-Editor, Athabasca University
This summer issue of IRRODL begins with articles on open education and ends with a field note on the Khan Academy's OER in Chinese. There are several papers on different aspects of distance education and these are followed by three articles on MOOCs.
This issue begins with Cronin's paper on openness and praxis in higher education. She shares with us an Irish perspective on Open Educational Practices (OEP) and how open pedagogical strategies are perceived and practised (or not) at one university.
Santos-Hermosa, Ferran-Ferrer, and Abadal provide us with an overview of OER repositories in their paper. Using a content analysis approach on 110 repositories, they address indicators of educational needs and the reuse of OER.
Student and faculty perceptions are the focus of Watson, Domizi, and Clouser's paper. Their findings support the view both students and faculty value OER, not simply because they are cost-free, but also because of their quality and impact on course structure.
Student perceptions are also the subject of Lee and Martin's study on factors that motivate students to participate in discussions. Not surprisingly, students noted that their principal motivation was to get a higher mark. Other findings included a student preference for small groups.
Corlett and Martindale investigate the online training of healthcare professionals in Eritrea. They argue that despite the technical problems and poor connectivity, self-growth engendered by online courses has had a positive influence on health services in this African country.
Mnkandla and Minaar explore the use of social media in e-learning using a meta-synthesis approach. They have crafted a framework on themes that could be useful to others who wish to adopt social media in their e-learning programmes.
Poor instruction is the subject of Lange, Costley, and Han's study of students' responses to extraneous load. Although high levels of effort by students can help to overcome instructional deficiencies, the authors found that this cannot be used to overcome very poor-quality instruction.
In her contribution, Clifton evaluates the impact of the UK's Open University "learning design" methodology in DE course production. The research specifically examine the barriers and facilitators in the application of this methodology.
Learning analytics is becoming a popular theme in open and distance education research. Amigud, Arnedo-Moreno, Daradoumis, and Guerrero-Roldan investigate how it can be used to preserve the integrity of academics. They have developed a framework that can learn by analysing data and then detect instances of academic misconduct.
Using a design research approach and a case study, Archer and Barnes revisit sensemaking and data visualisation in their investigation into the logic behind dashboard applications. They find the logic to be limited, inflexible, unresponsive, and not scalable. They propose an alternative approach based on an enriched database with data from a variety of sources.
Bozkurt, Özbek, and Zawacki-Richter introduce the first MOOC article of this edition. Their review and content analysis of the research on MOOCs reveal several trends and patterns. Among these are the focus on xMOOCs and articles with a positive outlook. They note that there are few theoretical or conceptual articles.
In their MOOC article, Cho and Byun aim to understand the MOOC experiences of non-anglophones. Using phenomenological methodology in Korea, they interviewed students to determine aspects of the students' lived experience in an English language MOOC.
Tømte, Fevolden, and Aanstad explore how MOOCs are regarded in Norway and other countries. They note that MOOCs are mainly limited to countries, rather than international, and in Norway this limitation can be explained in terms of government initiative and financial support.
The research article section concludes with Yang and Su's focus on learners' willingness to participate in a practice-oriented MOOC. They investigated the relationships between Taiwanese students' perceptions, behavioural intentions and their actual behaviour.
This issue also includes a research note, which is a case study from Rao, Hilton, and Harper on the translation of the Khan Academy's videos into Chinese.
Thanks to all our authors, reviewers and readers, for your patience this year as we are addressing a huge backlog. At least two more issues are planned for this year. We appreciate your ongoing support of the journal. Watch for another large issue next month!
Editorial by AUTHORNAMES is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.