Airong Luo

Towards building a productive, scalable and sustainable collaboration model for open educational resources

This paper reports on a case study of a Health Open Educational Resources (OER) project in order to examine how to facilitate cross-institutional collaboration for OER production. This study assesses collaboration needs, identifies social and technical barriers, and builds a collaboration model to facilitate OER production. In doing so, we make three contributions to the GROUP community: (1) Whereas previous studies on distributed collaboration tend to focus on well-developed collaboration, in this study we research collaboration in Health OER at an early stage of development; (2) By studying collaboration involving both developing and developed countries, we identify components that are particularly critical for collaboration between teams spanning differently resourced nations; (3) By studying the Health OER project, we better understand factors that affect distributed collaboration when participants are not externally funded and are constrained by their local organizations.

Informal communication in collaboratories

Recent years have seen an increasing use of collaboratories in distributed scientific work. This study examines the role of collaboratories in informal scientific communication. Hypotheses relating to potential opportunities for informal communication afforded by collaboratories are tested with data from in-depth interviews.

Informal Communication in Collaboratories

This study examines how collaboratories affect informal scientific communication. Collaboratories are virtual organizations, where various information technologies are adopted to support distributed scientific work. In this paper, a framework to understand factors affecting informal communication are presented and how these factors play out in collaboratories are discussed. The results of data analysis suggest that collaboratories bring about new opportunities, but there are also barriers to informal communication in collaboratories. Peripheral scientists encounter more barriers than their partners in US and Europe. The paper concludes with a discussion of areas for future research and implications of this study.

Supporting participation in communities of practice by scientists from developing countries — The case of high energy physics

Over the last decade, researchers have hypothesized that a new form of scientific organization, the “collaboratory” holds promise to greatly benefit scientists from developing countries by allowing them to reach remotely located experts, instruments, and databases. However, there have been no empirical studies to prove or disprove this hypothesis. Adopting a qualitative approach, this study examines how collaboratories affect one of the factors that purportedly lead to scientific productivity—communities of practice. Results of data analysis indicate that collaboratories bring about new opportunities for scientists from developing countries to access scientists from developed countries and their practices, but barriers also exist. The full value of collaboratories can be achieved only after the technologies themselves and the social practices surrounding the use of technologies are improved.

International partnerships in developing and deploying health open educational resources

Lack of training opportunities for new and practicing health care professionals constitutes a major barrier to patient care in many developing countries. Open Educational Resources (OER) hold the potential to provide more training materials and alternative learning opportunities for health professionals. OER are teaching and learning materials made freely and openly available for students, faculty, and self learners around the world. OER is not an online distance learning program. The focus of OER is on scaling up teaching and learning capacity in partner institutions by co-creating new learning materials and converting existing materials into OER. The context for which OER content is produced is often different from the contexts in which it is used. Thus, one of the major challenges of OER is to understand how to create a sustainable OER model to ensure that OER production and use fit different learning and teaching environments. The panel will share their perspectives on the following issues: How are different types of OER created and packaged for delivery and use? What are the challenges brought about by different contexts of knowledge creation and use? How do we design new tools and leverage the existing tools (Sakai course management system, Adobe Connect and similar web conferencing systems, OpenCast and lecture capture systems) to facilitate the creation and use of knowledge? How can we produce sustainable models of OER creation and use?

Collaboratory use by peripheral scientists

Recent years have seen an increasing use of collaboratories in scientific work. It is hypothesized that by enabling scientists to reach remotely located data, instruments and experts, collaboratories will benefit peripheral scientists (e.g., scientists from developing countries and scientists from minority colleges in the U.S.) more than core scientists. However, previous studies on computer network use have shown mixed results regarding peripherality effects. Adopting a qualitative approach, this study intends to investigate cultural, political, and technical factors that influence collaboratory use by peripheral scientists.