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Virtual Canuck
Written by terrya
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A problem with educational research publishing is that most of the most highly rated peer-reviewed journals are closed access, and though most are accessible to me through our library, I try as much as possible not to contribute to journals that are not available as open access. Especially in education, there are too many potential readers in schools, universities in developing countries and ordinary Canadians who just don’t have access to expensive closed publications. Thus, I strongly support the recent boycott of Elsevier (largest journal publisher in the world) but I extend a personal boycott it to all closed research publications (with the occasional exception).
However a year ago, I had an idea to research the impact of what for us in education was a new and i think very promising research methodology known as design-based research (DBR). The DBR model matches researchers with teachers in real educational contexts, to develop interventions (pedagogical technical, administrative etc.) and then test them in real contexts using a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques and then extracting broader design principles explaining how and why the intervention works or fails to improve teaching or learning.

I was fortunate enough to recruit Atahabasca University doctoral student Julie Shattuck and together we analysed the 5 most widely cited DBR articles over each of the ten years since the methodology was first promoted. You are welcome to read the results published this week

Terry Anderson and Julie Shattuck (2012) Design-Based Research : A Decade of Progress in Education Research? Educational Researcher, 41: 16-25,http://edr.sagepub.com/content/41/1/16.full

Once the article was written we were faced with the question of where to publish. I thought the article would have considerable interest -especially in the US, as this is where the majority of cited DBR articles were published. Thus, I wanted to go beyond the open and distance education audience that I normally write for. I immediately thought of Educational Researcher. This is arguably and usually cited as the most widely read and prestigious peer reviewed journal in the educational world (ISO Impact factor of 3.774), so I really didn’t think we would get accepted.
However, although Educational Researcher is published by Sage (a commercial publisher) it is sponsored by The American Educational Research Association (world’s largest professional educational group) and is distributed in paper to all its members and most importantly freely in PDF format on the web. So the prospect of a very large audience in a very prestigious journal and close to open access publication was irresistible.

The submission process was very picky and exacting, with editors demanding very strict adherence to APA format, page length etc. before they would even send it to review. Not to my surprise, two months later, it was returned with requests for revisions which I must say all reasonable and likely to improve the paper. However, the returned manuscript must go through a second review, so we didn’t get our hopes up. Then last summer, to our surprise, a very quick second review and minor suggestions for revisions and we were accepted!! 5 months later everyone is able to read the article online and I await my paper copy in the mail!
So thanks to Julie, the reviewers and editors at Educational Research and celebration time!!

Design Based Research, My Work, Open Scholarship,

One Small Step for Athabasca

Written by terrya
3 Comments

I participated in an interesting meeting of the Athabasca University Academic Council (our senate equivalent) this morning and the most contentious item concerned our option for ‘challenge for credit” alternative, that is offered in most of our undergraduate programs.
By way of background, Athabasca undergrad programs are offered as continuous enrollment and mostly self study programs that follow the old correspondence model. We offer support from an individual tutor, a study guide (that roughly serves as an interpretation of the study materials), a FEW interactive options (little used) via Moodle and a course pack that typically consists of a reading package and a text or two.  Students are given 6 months (can be extended with $$$ to a year), as much access (phone and email) as they want to an assigned  tutor, tutor marked assignments and an invigilated exam. We have recently been offering ‘optional’ networking and support via our elgg based social networking system (the Athabasca Landing) but the take up by tutors, faculty and students has (to date) been modest.
Credit for challenge (as opposed to seat time or completion of course activities), is an old idea first institutionalized by the University of London in the 19th century. Read More

Distance Education, My Work, OERs, Open Scholarship,

The Publish or Perish Book

Written by terrya
The Publish or Perish Book

Well, after surviving end of term marking, coupled with two online keynotes and a real f2F one at Canadian MoodelMoot I’ve finally found some time to skim through two books that arrived on my desk that I want to share with you.

Product DetailsThe first is The Publish or Perish Book (P 0r P) by Anne-Wil Harzing. Harzing is one my heroes because she created and released  PorP Open Access program that uses Google Scholar to evaluate journals, articles, and authors based upon the number of citations of the work, collection or journal in other scholarly works.Read More

Distance Education, IRRODL, My Work, Open Scholarship

Lisbon 2011

Written by terrya
5 Comments

Wow, its back to the future for me this week. I haven’t been doing face-2-face lectures for years, but this week is campus all over again.

I was honoured to be asked to do a week long PhD seminar at the Universidade Nova de Lisbo here in Lisbon Portugal. The seminar has attracted students and staff from Nova and a few other universities and especially the Univesidade Aberta – Portugese Open University .  The seminars are being web cast and sent out via H323 video conferencing, with a twitter feed (mostly in Portugese), all of which have worked flawlessly, so nothing shabby about the technology here!.

Nova University is relatively new to online learning, with no tradition of distance education (that being the almost exclusive domain in the past to The Open University). But as everywhere, they are interested and expanding access through this technology. The lectures were fun in that was able to recycle some of my earlier powerpoints, but was able to expand and hone all of them for a new audience and to dust off some of my earlier work and thinking.  I do five sessions:

I’ve also had some great meetings with my host Patrica Fidalgo, who is a PhD student at Nova and who we met at last summer’s TEKRI doctoral seminar at Athabasca University. This very successful seminar at Nova shows the value of one PhD student making things happen in her own school. Maybe you should think about attending this year’s week long seminar on social networking at Athabasca in Edmonton???

I’ve spent a few hours seeing the city and its many historical sights, and looking forward to a day off on Saturday before hoping the flight to Estonia.

Até mais tarde!

Terry

Distance Education, My Work, Open Scholarship

Quality of Open Educational Resources

Written by terrya
5 Comments

Tony Bates opened the preverbial can of worms, when he dared to talk about the good, bad and ugly of OER’s in a recent post. We’ve found trying to orchestrate debates on this topic, that anyone willing to say anything against OERs must either be employed by a commercial publisher or someone who hates both Motherhood and orphaned fawns.  But Tony took a good crack at it, and my colleague Rory McGreal couldn’t help responding.  I mostly agree with Rory’s points, probably because as the new UNESCO chair in Open Educational Resources, he has been preaching that gospel at me for a long time. But I wanted to add a few comments of my own.Read More

Open Scholarship

AuPress to expand open access online learning publications

Written by terrya
AuPress to expand open access online learning publications

au press

I am a big supporter of Open Access presses – largely because they serve potential readers without means or capacity to purchase books and as importantly, because they increase the readership and dissemination of ideas.

Athabasca University Press (AUPress) was Canada’s first open access, scholarly press, and provides all of its books for free download in PDF format and of course sells paper copies. These paper copies are offered for sale from the AUPress site, on Amazon and in epub format via sonybookstore. The download statistics for books and individual chapters are impressive and paper sales are about the same as scholarly publications from commercial or non open access scholarly publications.

For example my own edited book “Theory and Practice of Online Learning has been downloaded well over 90,000 times, read online by a large number of google book readers of the 20% offered at this site for free, and sales of over 1300 books. AUPress does pay royalties (about the same % of sales as commercial publishers). Interestingly I also got a small check from Copywrite Canada, from Universities who are paying for including chapters in reading packages- even though the students could download them for free!

I had a meeting with AUPress staff yesterday and we discussed ramping up production and promotion of the Issues in Distance Education series for which I serve as series editor. The series currently has 5 titles and 2 more “in press’.

If any readers are interested in producing a volume for this series, I hope you will contact me or the Press for author’s guidelines and further details. Like all AUPress books, each volume must survive two rigourous peer reviews. We are developing new guidelines for editors of edited volumes. The current practice is to accept publications only after the complete draft manuscript is submitted. This is problematic when an editor is trying to solicit chapter contributions and has no guarantee that the Press will accept the completed volume. However, an editor can communicate that the volume is being readied and hopefully published in open access format by AUPress, but there is no guarantee that any individual chapter or the whole book will survive the review process. The upside of this process is that a completed chapter or a book, can likely find an outlet someplace, even if fails AUPress’s review.

So please forward this post to any potential DE, online learning or even blended learning author wannabes and check out, download, or if you can afford it, order an AUPress book!

Design Based Research, Distance Education, My Work, Open Scholarship

Open Access Week

Written by terrya

Here at Athabasca University, we are lining up a series of free, noon-hour webcasting events to celebrate, educate and extend interest and participation in scholarly Open Access activities. This the second annual celebration is in conjunction with the International Open Access week

The times, details and access methods for Athabasca’s sessions are detailed at openaccess.athabascau.ca

The sessions are listed below:

Monday, October 18, 2010
Using Open Production of Course Content to make a Difference.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Open Opportunity through Open Scholarship and Open Publication

Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Open Educational Resources and Copyright

Thursday, October 21, 2010
Managing and Learning in MOOCs (massive open online courses)

Friday, October 22, 2010
Panel on Open Library, Scholarship and Learning at Athabasca University

I hope you will be able to join us for one or more of these sessions.

Terry

My Work, Open Scholarship

Slides from Open Access Publishing Seminar

Written by terrya
I’m attending the 26th annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning here in Madison. This is my 3rd time at this conference and it is a large, mostly practionaire orientated conference on e-learning. I’m looking forward to Etienne Wenger’s keynote tomorrow and have marked most of the soical media sessions to attend.
This morning’s keynote by Michael Allen, I found to be a bit “ho-hum” – mostly story telling about the past and the way that e-learning needs to be ‘fun’. Nothing to disagree with, just not much new and certainly no research data to back up claims and stories.
Yesterday I chaired a symposium with 3 authors of Distance Education books that have been published as open access resources through Athabasca University press. The symposium covered some of the research and ideas behind open access publishing and then featured an opportunity by each of the 4 authors to talk about the distance education books that they edited. These books are part of the Issues in Distance Education Series that I edit and all can be downloaded as chapters or full text from AUPress.
I was especially pleased to hear George Veletsianos talk about his experiences editing Emerging technologies in Distance Education and his concerns and hopes for publishing in Open Access outlets. He shared with me the story of discussing a list of “acceptable” journals to publish in. The list of journals hadn’t changed in 7 years, thus excluding all of the open access journals that have almost all appeared since that time. Sigh…”
…
The slides from our presentation are embedded below:
View more presentations from terrya.
Distance Education, Open Scholarship

The Power of Pull

Written by terrya
3 Comments

John Hagel and John Seely Brown have come out with yet another in their blockbuster best seller series on innovation, that I found quite enlightening. The book (with 3rd author Lang Davison) is titled The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. The text is one of this here is how to safe the world and revolutionize your business genre, that I don’t usually find has much value beyond hyperbole. But I liked this book.

The Power of Pull is the capacity for new social and networking technologies to provide the engines by which whole industries, social movements or governments can envision and implement radically different ways of caring out their business or mission. Given the need for change on many fronts (think climate change, end of oil, access to quality postsecondary education etc. etc.) there is certainly opportunity and need for many ‘game-changing’ activities. Pull (as opposed to push products, ideas, or ideologies) is the capacity to find and access people, attract relevant people and resources and pull from ourselves and these aggregations radically improved solutions to existing challenges.  It all sounds very Utopian, right up there with How to Win Friends and Influence People. But the difference between Norman Vincent Peel, and Hagel and Seely is that these guys have the Net and understand its potential to empower change.Read More

Distance Education, My Work, Open Scholarship

Ongoing Saga of an Open Access Book

Written by terrya
2 Comments

Readers of this blog will remember that I published the results from the first year of sales and downloads of the book I edited, the Theory and Practice of Online Learning, 2nd Edition published by Athabasca University Press. In summary during  the first year, AU Press sold 404 copies and supported the delivery of 2,457 copies of the complete text and many more individual chapters, (but that is another story).

The 2nd edition followed the success of the 1st edition, except we quickly sold the 400 paper copies we printed of edition 1 (save those collector items!) and so we were unable to really quantify the effect on sales of open publication. My friend and colleague Rory McGreal has been examining sales ranking from Amazon Press comparing open and closed access publications from University Presses and so far has found no significant difference, but this is challenging since most purchases of the tomes from academic presses come from libraries- not from Amazon. Nonetheless, his early data is showing that releasing your work as Open Access does NOT negatively impact sales.

Since the publication of the second edition a new player is on the block – Google Books. My friends at AU press emailed me today some interesting data on page views and click through to  “buy the book”. First let me encourage you to make the statistics I present below hopeless outdated by going to the site for the Google Books Theory and Practice of Online Learning clicking through to AU Press, and purchasing multiple copies of the book 🙂

Google Book stats for the 12 months of 2009 report that 6,814 people viewed the book, saw 105,679 page views and 148 clicked through to “buy the book”. Now of course we don’t know how many of those folks actually typed in their Visa number, but the click through of 2.17 % of viewers compares favorably with the 1.5% I reported last year who purchased after reading or downloading electronic copies from the AU Press site.

This data indicates to me that – Google Books is great (at least for academics). I use the service OFTEN myself and when I see that 6,814 people took the time to read at least part of the content, I am very pleased. It also seems to indicate (warning very small data set) that the limited views provided by Google Books, haven’t hurt commercial sales and MAY have increased them.  I also hear from the popular press that Google’s proposed settlement with the publishers is bogged down with the lawyers, but there MAY be financial returns from Google to AU Press and myself from these viewing. More gravy!

So, three suggestions for readers:

1. Go to AuPress and download a few books (not just mine),  they are all available for free download and likely look great on an IPad, but alas as a Canadian, Apple has blessed us with another delay in delivery of delivery of this latest reader.

2. Purchase copies of those works you want to hold, give to your students or if you just want to show support for the press and its authors.

2. Consider publishing with AUPress or another Open Access publisher if you really care about letting everyone benefit from your scholarship.

My Work, Open Scholarship