My introduction as a researcher
Dear members of the OERu community,
I am a doctoral student at the College of Education, University of Canterbury under the supervision of Distinguished Professor Niki Davis and Associate Professor Annelies Kamp. I am conducting a case study to examine the practices involved in open education at the OERu with a focus on instructional design. The case study includes an ethnographic study to examine the organisational culture and processes involved in the implementation of open educational practices. This project is being carried out as part of my PhD in Education.
So far, I’ve completed a pilot study where I interviewed people with experience working with the OERu. Now, with your permission and hopefully your collaboration, I’d like to expand my study. I intend to examine the application of instructional design by the OERu’s members and observe how the OERu collaborates across institutions in the WikiEducator platform. This work would involve analysing public documents and videos on the platform. I would also like to join one or two teams that are developing a course where I would be a participant-observer. Acting in a similar role, I intend to contribute to and observe the OERu’s Quality Review Project. Any suggestions you may have regarding the research are welcome. In alignment with the OERu’s commitment to openness, the results of this study will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) or Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA). Please see the link below which contains a letter that I and my supervisors signed as a commitment to publishing findings about the OERu as Free Cultural Works. Updates about the progress of this research will be posted on the OERu’s website, at a location that I will share with you once I start posting.
Letter committing to Cultural Free Works [[1]]
A more detailed information sheet explaining my measures for protecting participant confidentiality among other research plans will be made available upon request.
If you have any questions about this research, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Thank you for considering this request.
Yours sincerely, Danielle Dubien
