Scholars in the Global South conducting research on Open Educational Resources (OER) – a relatively new field in the region – are often torn between two competing imperatives: to follow the dominant disciplinary trends established by the comparatively abundant OER research from the Global North, or to explore new and unknown intellectual paths shaped by their own local context. This is a familiar tension, but how they choose to manage it impacts whether their work contributes to a broader (largely Northern-defined) OER discourse or ends up marginalized for being too regionally specific.
As the first project of its kind to explore OER activity across multiple continents in the Global South, the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) programme seeks to balance these imperatives by:
- engaging with the issues that have emerged from the dominant OER discourse
- positioning its research from a self-consciously Southern position (remaining attentive to diverse local factors)
- re-shaping the broader OER discourse through this engagement.
This involves a number of strategies, but a key one has comprised an ambitious, but voluntary, research question harmonisation within the programme. The process aimed at harmonising the survey questions developed by ROER4D’s various sub-projects as much as possible with those of other OER surveys (many of which come from the North). It also sought to harmonise them across the sub-projects so that the research data is comparable internally and externally.
This process ran from March-December 2014 – as part of a broader research capacity building effort in ROER4D – and consisted of a series of activities thought sought to balance the project’s inward and outward-facing commitments. In chronological order, ROER4D:
- Consulted nine major OER surveys to develop a bank of potential questions in a cloud-based spreadsheet (made public to members, with comment rights)
- Discussed question options within the network hub, chose the best and recorded the rationale for decision in a cloud-based document made public for members with comment rights
- Shared questions with researchers, showing how they would appear via an online survey site
- Engaged with researchers via webinars to harmonise questions
- Continued discussion off-line via Sakai-based forum and/or email
- Piloted survey (v1) based on harmonised questions with ROER4D members and other OER colleagues
- Assessed results and fed results of pilot survey back to network
- Revised the questions and shared them with network as a complete survey (v2)
- Encouraged researchers to utilise and/or adapt questions from the harmonised survey in their own sub-projects
- Provided a platform for researchers to present their adaptations of the survey for their specific sub-projects via webinars
Due to this process, many sub-project researchers were exposed to OER surveys and research that they were not yet familiar with; they incorporated many of those questions into their own survey instruments, they adapted many others to suit their local context and, where they identified gaps in the surveys, developed new questions that were relevant to their environment.
However, because this was a voluntary process – integrated into the programme only after it became clear to the network team that this element needed greater attention – some of the results were uneven and unanticipated. Positively speaking, it engendered a deeper sense of community amongst those who participated in the 15 synchronous, online question harmonisation webinars that were carried out during the nine month period. Negatively speaking, however, some did not participate in the process at all, or appeared to have missed the point of the exercise.
Such unevenness is to be expected in any experimental process in a big project (with dozens of researchers located across 16 time zones on three continents), but the lessons learned were highly valuable to the network team and offer useful insights for other large-scale educational and developmental research project that seek to harmonise their research activities.
In this paper, I will discuss the ROER4D question harmonisation process, assessing its constraints and opportunities, as well as its key outcomes. It will analyse the extent to which the process was successful, or not, in navigating the tension between the project’s desire to engage robustly with other (largely Northern, or “septentrional”) OER studies while also remaining locally responsive to the Southern (“meridional”) context. Crucially, it will also offer operational suggestions for carrying out such activities in other projects.