Browsing by Author "Paskevicius, Michael"

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    Learners’ Access to Educational Materials in Select Institutions within the Commonwealth
    (2019-12) Paskevicius, Michael
    The purpose of this report is to assess students’ access to educational materials in select institutions within Commonwealth countries. The report starts with a review of the existing literature on problems and barriers to students’ access to educational materials, including textbooks. The review is used to develop a research study and appropriate questionnaire tools to undertake a survey of students in select institutions. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are then used to analyse the data. The findings indicate that learners are now engaging with a complex ecosystem of learning materials, both print and digital, in a multitude of differing forms and formats, with various terms of use and durations of sustained access. Furthermore, the results show that learners are not acutely aware of open educational resources (OER) and in some cases conflate OER with online knowledge resources, indicating that much more work needs to be done to educate learners about OER, where to find them, and how they can be used. // Keywords: open educational resources, learning materials, access to education
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    Policy and Practice of Artificial Intelligence in Teaching and Learning at Post-secondary Educational Institutions in the Commonwealth
    (2024-05) Paskevicius, Michael
    The report presents the findings of a survey about the use of AI in teaching and learning amongst post-secondary educational institutions in the Commonwealth. It indicates a clear need for policies to guide the acceptable and ethical use of AI among faculty, staff and learners. Furthermore, all stakeholders need training and development to navigate the use of AI in teaching and learning.
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    Student Perceptions of the Creation and Reuse of Digital Educational Resources in a Community Development-Oriented Organisation
    (2018-04) Paskevicius, Michael; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Gaskell, Anne
    This case study explores students’ perceptions of the creation and reuse of digital teaching and learning resources in their work as tutors as part of a volunteer community development organisation at a large South African University. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, student-tutors reflect on their use and reuse of digital educational resources, and identify the challenges they experience in curating, adapting, and reusing educational resources for use in their teaching activities. The data is analysed qualitatively within the framework of an activity system (Engeström, 1987) to surface the primary systemic tensions that student-tutors face in the reuse of resources found online as well as open educational resources (OER). This study found that student-tutors sourced and used educational materials from the Internet, largely irrespective of their licensing conditions, while also creating and remixing a substantial number of educational materials to make them suitable for use in their context. We conclude that greater awareness of the availability of OER and explicit open licencing for works sourced and created within community development organisations could enhance sharing, collaboration, and help sustain high impact resources.