A model of the interplay between academic agency, institutional structure and open culture in the contribution and non contribution of Open Educational

resources.By

Glenda Cox

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Context: OER in South Africa

• University of the Western Cape were the first to launch an OER directory.

• SA Department of Higher Education and Training included a section on the value of OER in their 2012 Draft policy Framework for the Provision of Distance Education in SA Universities.

• UCT OpenContent launched in Feb 2010 • UNISA has recently launched “UNISA Open”

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OER from UCT: OpenContent

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Brazil:1564

USA: 21 437

+185 000 visits184 countries

Australia: 1892

Philippines: 2134

India: 6010

Germany: 1632UK: 5980

South Africa 91 281

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Why am I doing this?

• My day-to-day work• The basic rational of this study is that if academics

do not contribute and continue to contribute resources as part of their academic practice all Open Initiatives at UCT will fail, “without academic buy in OER has no future” ( Browne et al. 2010:5). Rolfe (2012) concludes that “central to sustainability is the community and growth of a critical mass of interested individuals” (p.7)

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Purpose of this research

• Participation, both globally and locally is a voluntary process.

• Why are academics contributing or not? At UCT roughly 320 contributors so far ( out of 1000 permanent staff and many more on contract and part time)

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Goals

• Explain what impacts on individual choices in the “socio-cultural system” in other words in the context and also the broader realm of ideas

• Aim to explain the interplay between the various complex and transforming components

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Research questions• What is the relationship between academic agency{Individual

choices}, the institutional system {context}and open culture {ideas}and how does this impact on contribution and non-contribution of OER by academics in a Higher Education Institution?

• Sub questions: • 1. Why do academics choose to, or not to, contribute OER?

• 2. What aspects of institutional structure impact upon OER contribution and non contribution?

• 3. How does Open culture influence academics contribution to OER?

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Literature focused on sharing and concerns about sharing

• Studies mostly in US, Europe, UK• A handful from Africa

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Suggested ‘motivators’ from literature

• Can be grouped under three main headings:• Altruistic: Altruistic motivations are inspired by the premise that

everyone has a right to education and therefore learning should be available to all, built on a belief in sharing and culture of collaboration.

• Reputational: In the case of reputational or commercial motivations the argument here is around raising the visibility of the institution thereby enhancing its branding. This can also be on an individual level

• Transformational: Transformational motivations concern a fundamental change in the way education at institutions have functioned

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Key Concerns from literature

Sustainability

Systemic organisations issues: Time, copyright infringement, lack of

promotion and recognition

Pedagogy: Some disciplines and materials not suited and OER are

not interactive

Quality: View that some materials are of poor

quality

Personal concerns: students won’t come

to lectures

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Key concerns

Cultural

Philosophy of openness.

Altruism

Sustainability

Structural

Technical-affordances of the

internet

Financial-models

Legal-alternate copyright licensing

Individual

Pedagogy

Quality

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Identifying the GAPS

• Few empirically based, but many based on surveys & not detailed interviews

• Very few studies in AfricaEmpirical

• Some partial attempts to describe

• Not compelling or sufficiently explanatory

Theoretical

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Identifying the GAPS

• Rolfe (2012) suggests that the interviews are a better method of collecting data [than the survey] because if the “richness of opinion”

• Ngimwa (2010) has written a report on OER readiness in Africa and says:“the question of human factors affecting this adoption still remains a big issue”

• Percy (2011) suggests a qualitative study were academics are also asked the underlying feelings and attitudes towards OER and how these are affected by culture and politics.

Empirical

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Identifying the GAPS

• McAndrew (2006) used Activity Theory as a lens to investigate how the various aspects in the adaptation of OER influence an entire system.

• Hodgkinson-Williams and Paskevicius (2012) also used AT in order to understand the role of postgraduate students in adapting academics teaching materials as OER. These authors have used AT to make useful causal arguments around the university system as well as to explain individual actions.

Theoretical

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Filling the Gaps

• This research will build on the pioneering work of these authors who used AT to explain the impact of OER. This research will potentially fill this theoretical gap where up to this point in time only a few attempts have been made to move beyond describing the results of interviews and surveys to explaining why academics share OER or choose not to share OER

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Theory• What do I need? A theoretical framework that:• enables a fine-grained analysis of the individual as well as the

institutional and cultural systems within which they are located • will be able to provide descriptive and analytical tools to

enable the description and exploration of barriers and enablers and how these impact upon teaching projects of the individual academics

• is dialectical in its approach and able to move between the individual and the social setting

• it needs to enable an explanation of change and transformation.

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Starting point: Activity Theory

• Activity Theory enables the researcher to investigate activity within a social setting. This social setting is also referred to as the activity system. Engeström (1987) formulated a model of the structure of this system which includes the subject, object, tools, division of labour, community, rules.

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Pilot study (conducted 2011)

• 3 academics who have contributed• 3 academics who have NOT contributed• to assess the usefulness and applicability of

Activity Theory to frame and describe the barriers and enablers across various contexts within the University (UCT) system.

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Barriers to sharing from Pilot

• The main barriers to contribution seem to be around – the rules of the institution around promotion and

what is valued by the institution. – rules around the quality of teaching materials and

their readiness which seem unclear and are tacit– some concerns about the pedagogical use and

value of OER.

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Enablers: New findings from pilot• In this pilot study it seems that the altruistic belief that

sharing has value (Sclater 2010a) is combined with another enabler such as increased visibility.

• Other enablers of sharing includes;– the importance of the stage in career in a faculty like commerce

where commercialisation is a key barrier to sharing;– the content of the resource itself is suited to sharing, this enabler

can also be a barrier, in other words some content is simply not suited to sharing;

– the technical ability of the lecturers who are able to record and upload their own lectures without any support from the institution is an enabler.

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Subjects’ role/Agency

• It is not clear from this initial pilot study whether the role of the individual academic in exercising their free will is important

• The three academics who are sharing were also faced with constraints that they managed to overcome because of their belief in sharing and the value they place on OER.

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Theory (repeated slide)• What do I need? A theoretical framework that:• enables a fine-grained analysis of the individual × as well as the

institutional and cultural systems within which they are located.

• will be able to provide descriptive and analytical tools to enable the description and exploration of barriers and enablers and how these impact upon teaching projects of the individual academics (did not test this).

• Is dialectical in its approach and able to move between the individual and the social setting. x

• And lastly it needs to enable an explanation of change and transformation.(Did not test this)

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Gap: explaining agency

• It seemed from the pilot that my explanation of why academics were adding resources was limited.

• I would like to explore “agency” and I feel that the well established social realism of Margaret Archer could potentially fill this gap

• Archer also theorises the relationship between structure and agency

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Archer: Agency

• An individual’s sense of self comes from what really matters to them, what we choose to invest in. Individuals can exercise free will however there are ‘degrees of freedom’ that are constrained by the social structure (Archer 1982:464).

Agency of lecturers

UltimateConcerns

Projects Practices

...Individuals develop and define their ultimate concerns, those internal goods that they care about most (Archer 2007:42)

...develop course (s) of action to realise that concern by elaborating a project...

Translated into a set of practices

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Engeström and Archer• AT: Structure and culture

• Archer: Agency and interplay between structure and agency

• The two theories overlap in some ways as they are both “materialist and realist, and all focus on tool and artefact-mediated human labour as the basis of social reproduction and change and as the basis for development of knowledge” (Wheelehan 2007:5).

• Wheelehan (2007) suggest the two theories should be blended in order to take into account both the individual agency and the broader workplace context and the presence of unequal power relationships in the socio-cultural context (p.5)

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Use both Activity theory and Archer

Structure

Activity system

Open CultureOpen

Culture

Open Culture

Open Culture

Tools

DOLCommunity

Object Outcome

Rules

Subject/ agent

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Research design• The bulk of the data will come from interview

transcriptions and will be qualitative. • Some quantitative (analysis of codes and artefacts)• I am using a case study approach. The aim of these cases is

: “to catch the complexity of (each) single case” (Stake 1995: xi). The study will not attempt to claim findings generalisable across all HE institutions however it hopes that the deep mining nature of the data will reveal the agental, social and cultural influences on OER contribution and non-contribution that have previously been unexplored.

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Sampling• 14 academics from UCT. • Purposive sampling, a non-representative subset of some

larger population, (Cohen, Manion and Morrison 2007:114) will be used to identify these 14 individuals.

• Purposive sampling allows the researcher to “Handpick the cases on the basis of their (researchers) judgement of their typicality or possession of the particular characteristics being sought” (Cohen, Manion and Morrison 2007:115).

• The academics will each be interviewed twice with a gap of approximately one year between interviews.

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Method

• Maxwell’s Qualitative Research Design (2005, 2011) (critical realist)

• Interviews will be transcribed and then coded according to the activity theory framework which will position the barriers and enablers onto nodes in the activity theory triangle (Rules, Community, Division of Labour, Tools).

• Interview questions informed by Archer’s (2003, 2007) work on agents and their ultimate concerns, projects and practice.

• Coding is the main categorising mechanism in qualitative research. Coding gives the researcher a mechanism to “fracture” (Strauss 1987, p.29) the data and rearrange it.

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Interviews (focus 1)

• First round complete- busy with findings• Focus 1 includes open ended questions asking:

acedemics why they are sharing or not sharing?

• Also questions around themes that have emerged in the literature

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Factors impacting OER

Cultural

Philosophy of openness.

Altruism

Structural

Technical-affordances of the

internet

Financial-models

Legal-alternate copyright licensing

Agentiall

Pedagogy

Quality

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Findings: Complex interplay between factors impacting OER

Cultural

Philosophy of openness.

Altruism

Structural

Technical-affordances of the

internet

Financial-models

Legal-alternate copyright licensing

Agential

Pedagogy

Quality

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Interviews (Focus 2)

• Set of questions around life concerns, projects and practices

• Can you describe your life projects or key goals that you would like to achieve over the next few years?

• whether or no they saw ( or had seen) anything in their backgrounds which was helpful or obstructive in relation to the realising of concerns? Etc…

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Individual action on OER sharing

Agential

Pedagogy

Quality

• Understand life concerns and life histories in order to understand the concerns academics have

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Stop here….

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Archer (2003)

• Archer maintains that individuals have ‘internal conversations’ where they reflect on social situations in light of their concerns and ask themselves “what should I do?”

• Archer has identified four forms of internal conversation which govern agents’ responses to social conditioning

• These conversations she argues are the link between society and the individual, structure and agency.

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Four forms of internal conversation

• Communicative: maintain structure • Autonomous: ambitious and seek to change

structures to fit their concerns• Meta- reflexives: idealists who help others

and will ignore or subvert any constraints or enablers in the structure ( Context)

• Fractured: not able to have internal conversations

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Meta-reflexives

• Usually academics ( but will have to show that)

• They reflect on the process of reflecting• High ideals and serve others• Subvert constraints and enablements in their

environments in order to achieve their concerns

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Findings: reward and policy

• Would some kind of reward enable you to add teaching materials as OER?

• Would a University policy enable you to share?

• Both aspects in the literature

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Reward or PolicyReward an enabler Policy an enabler

Yes No Yes No

Group 1 5 2 4 3

Group 2 2 5 1 6

Total 7 7 5 9

whether or no they saw ( or had seen) anything in their backgrounds which was helpful or obstructive in relation to the realising of concerns

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Possible explanation

• For these meta-reflexives incentives do not work.

• They are not sharing because they have chosen not to…

• Their life concerns and projects are not about sharing so for some of these academics incentives will not change their practice.

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Culture, Structure and Agency

Why are some academics influenced by structure and culture?

Why are some not?What are these academics concerned about and can

we model a framework to encourage them to share?

How to explain sharing and not sharing?

Agents at the heart of sharing ( not extrinsic awards)