The open educational resources initiative has been underway for over a decade now and higher education institutions are slowly adopting open educational resources (OER).The use and creation of OER are important aspects of adoption and both are needed for the benefits of OER to be fully realized. Based on the results of a survey developed to measure the readiness of faculty and staff to adopt OER, this paper focuses on the measurement of OER use and creation, and identifies factors to increase both. The survey was administered in September 2012 to faculty and staff of Athabasca University,Canada's open university. The results offer a snapshot of OER use and creation at one university. The survey tool could provide a mechanism to compare and contrast OER adoption with other higher education institutions. Forty-three percent of those in the sample are using OER and 31% are creating OER. This ratio of use to creation is introduced as a possible metric to measure adoption.
Abstract-While today's learning management systems (LMSs) provide lot of support for teachers to assist them in holding online courses, they typically do not consider students' individual differences in the composition and structure of courses. In this paper, we introduce a mechanism for extending LMSs' functionality to provide learners with courses that fit their individual learning styles, using adaptive sorting and adaptive annotation in order to highlight the learning objects (LOs) that support students' learning process the best. The mechanism enables teachers to add adaptivity to their already existing courses, using a flexible course structure in order to avoid limiting the richness of the learning resources and materials. Besides being flexible to teachers' needs, the adaptive mechanism aims at asking teachers for as little as possible additional effort when using it, requiring teachers only to choose the corresponding type of LO when creating an LO in the authoring tool of the LMS. *
Maintaining academic integrity is a growing concern for higher education, increasingly so due to the pivot to remote learning in 2020 caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We canvassed students, faculty, and tutors at an online Canadian university about their perspectives on academic integrity and misconduct. The survey asked how the university could improve policies concerning issues of academic integrity, how faculty and tutors handled cases of misconduct, about satisfaction with how academic violations were treated, and about the role of students, faculty, and tutors in encouraging academic integrity. As well, we collected suggestions from respondents for reducing cheating, addressing academic misconduct, and general ideas about academic integrity. The distinction between misconduct and integrity was not always clear in their comments. We received responses from 228 students and 73 faculty and tutors, generating hundreds of comments. In this paper we focus only on the answers to open-ended questions. Using content analysis, we categorized the replies into similar threads. After multiple iterations of analysis, we extracted three general recommendation groupings: Policy and Procedures, Compliance and Commitment, and Resources. Based on respondents’ views, we propose a balanced approach to supporting academic integrity. Although we conducted the study pre-COVID-19, the recommendations apply to current and future academic integrity practices in our context and beyond.
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