Towards a sustainable open educational resources development model : tapping into the cognitive surplus of student-generated content

Open Educational Resources (OER) have created opportunities for learners around the world. Previous research investigated different OER development models for higher educational institutions and other educational communities. However, maintaining sustainability remains the main challenge of OER projects, as there is a high demand on raising awareness of the value of OER in higher education, as well as the need for expanding a participation base in the OER development process and improving the quality of OER. As a response to these challenges, the research documented in this thesis presents a new OER development model that establishes communities of practices around OER in higher educational institutions, where the knowledge production that takes place inside classrooms provides sustainable resources for the OER development process. OER literature also shows initiatives on engaging students in the OER development process, however, there is a lack of rigor research that shows the principles of engaging students in this process. Hence, this study is focused on identifying the design principles of the sustainable OER development model that engages students in generating OER. The model was designed to establish communities of practice of students and teachers to work collaboratively in generating learning resources. In the context of computing and information technology studies for undergraduate learning environments, students generate a surplus of projects in different study units with some projects repurposed, however, a surplus of projects that are generated on every academic semester are rarely tapped into. This abundance of knowledge production is described as ‘cognitive surplus’ and tapping into it can maximise the value of these projects. Therefore, the proposed OER development model taps into the cognitive surplus of student-generated content, where instead of generating summaries and portfolios, students create learning resources based on the unit topics using content authoring software tools. In this model, teachers work as facilitators and co-creators, providing evaluation of learning resources in order to be published as OER. To engage students in generating learning resources for OER, the learning assessment approach was taken from assessing student projects on reproducing information to a new level where students engaged in structuring, designing, collecting and evaluating content for generating learning resources which was then shared online as OER. These activities maximised students’ responsibilities, because sharing work online motivated them to improve the quality of the learning content. To be able to design a new OER development model, there was a need to understand the characteristics of the learning environment, including students, teachers and the learning material. In addition, developing a pedagogically informed approach to adopt the OER development model in learning environments, which can help with improving students’ learning performance and advance the teaching practices through open educational practices (OEP), was also required.Therefore, to fulfil these requirements, this thesis elaborates on the literature review of the related areas of the OER development model and provides analysis of the emerging concepts and related theories. The thesis also presents and reflects on the stages of model development, refinements and evaluation over the lifetime of the study, and provides practical evidence on the potential sustainability of the model in real-life learning environments