Intellectual Outputs

Output Identification

O1

Output Title

Survey of the state-of-the-play on the use and policy making documents on OERs at European HEIs during the COVID-19 crisis

Organisation

University of Osijek

Output Description

IO 1 is connected with the Phase 1: Assessment of organisational practices in DE in the time of crisis, and in particular use of OERs at partners and some selected European universities which were and are part of the network built during previous Erasmus+ projects (EINFOSE and ILO). Since the 2012 Paris Declaration on OER only a small number of countries have developed national policies for OERs. However, the interest in OER with or without policy implications has grown, as reflected in the literature on the subject (for example, JISC, 2011; Masterman et al, 2015; Krelja Kureljovic, 2016; Sembiring, 2016; Unesco’s Understanding the Impact of OER: Achievements and Challenges, 2019; UNESCO Recommendation on OERs, 2019; EC Digital Education Action Plan, 2021-2017, 2020). Moreover, it should be mentioned that he number of conferences and seminars organised on the production, use and evaluation of OERs grows every year. However, it is still difficult to locate OERs at European HEIs, although some countries have started national repositories of these.
Our aim with this intellectual task is to investigate the ways and strategies which HEIs adopted in relation to innovation objectives in making OERs better used in time of crisis and otherwise. We would like to see how DE is organized, in particular related to OERs, and to investigate the level of their novelty as relates to content, pedagogical issues, and use of advanced ICT which were put in action during COVID-19 crisis even at these HEIs which didn't use OERs very much. We also aim at analyse the types of institutional support, organisational layout, financial incentives and evaluation procedures which enhance the institution's innovation potential. Last but not least, we would like to analyse European HEIs policies for prioritising training of staff and developing support structures to facilitate the inclusion of innovation in a coherent teaching and learning approach at European HEIs, and how national policies, if at all, reflected the needs during COVID-19 crisis. Core activities in this IO are: a) the development of the methodology itself, and its adaptation to the research context; b) the collection and analysis of the collected data.
Our target groups are European HEIs which have stated to use of OERs as part of their attempts to design, adopt, support and manage these forms of DE and which reported higher use of DE during the COVID-19 crisis.
As an element of innovation we aim to offer a dataset which will refer to the methodology for collecting and analysing data in order to encourage sharing the data about digital teaching and learning practices at European HEIs during COVID-19 crisis and beyond the time of this particular crisis situation.
From the point of view of the expected impact, we believe that the collected and analysed data will be useful for the aims of other IOs during the whole project. As a published document, the project’s methodological framework could serve other researchers and decision makers, and contribute to the availability of reliable data related to the state-of-the-play in the use of OERs at European HEIs during the time of COVID-19 crisis and otherwise.
We believe that the results of our research can be generalized and transferred to other contexts or settings. External validity in this quantitative and qualitative based IO could provide partners and other interested parties with evidence enabling the study's findings to be applicable to other contexts, situations, and times, e.g. when researching the state-of-the-play in the adoption and usage of other forms of digital teaching and learning, as well as for longitudinal studies. At the same time, methodology developed and used has a strong relationship with a general transferability methodology in order to facilitate its usage outside the project. The results of this phase will be a comprehensive report based on the conducted research and an online database with all relevant data obtained in the research, openly available. We also plan to publish the analysed research data and present them at international and national conferences to make the project’s results available and useful to other interested parties, e.g. in neighbouring disciplines.

Tasks

The team will prepare a draft of the methodological approach, and its adaptation to the research context. The other partners and associate partners will be engaged in collecting and analysing of the collected data, and dissemination of the results. The teams from U of Osijek and SRCE will prepare the draft of the final results which will be discussed among all partners and associated partners. The report and research papers will be jointly prepared by delegated researchers from each partner, published in form of research papers and presented at national and international conferences.

Start Date

03-05-2021 (dd-mm-yyyy)

End Date

31-12-2021

Report

IO1_DECriS_Report.pdf