The affordances of Open Educational Resources (OER) have resulted in various initiatives around the world, but most of them cease to exist once the initial project funding stops. Communities might be a means to create sustainable practices, yet, such communities can only function if their members perceive these communities as valuable. We applied the value creation framework of Wenger, Trayner, and De Laat to examine the value teachers ascribe to their engagement with an inter-institutional community on OER. In this community, 15 universities of applied sciences collaborated on sharing knowledge and resources across their institutional barriers. We collected data through user statistics, an online questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. Major value creation occurred from teachers’ personal needs, with dominant immediate and potential values. Findings on applied and realized values denote that it became easier for teachers to connect with peers, and to initiate collaboration projects across institutes. The framework we used is helpful to inform actions to further promote value creation in communities on OER. Recommendations relating to communities’ aspirations, its relations with the wider organization, and adoption of OER are formulated to inform sustainable practices of inter-institutional communities.
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Baas, M, Admiraal, W and van den Berg, E. 2019. Teachers’ Adoption of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2019(1): 9, pp. 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.510Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to change the domain of higher education; however, adoption is still limited. As teachers are the pivotal actors to adopt OER, more insights are needed on their practices with OER and need of support. This exploratory study uses the OER Adoption Pyramid as a framework to analyse adoption of OER within a Dutch University of Applied Sciences. A questionnaire (n = 143) and semi-structured interviews with teachers who had some experience with sharing or using OER (n = 11) offered insights into the current state of affairs on adoption and need of support. The results revealed that informal sharing of resources within teachers’ personal networks happens frequently whereas the use of OER is more limited. If teachers use OER, they are mainly used ‘as-is’ or for a source of inspiration. Our findings indicate that the OER Adoption Pyramid does not properly describe the sequence of each layer within the context of this study. Availability must be lower in the pyramid as a prerequisite for teachers to explore their capacity and volition. Hence, the findings underline the need of support on subject-specific overviews of OER and the creation of national or institutional teacher communities. To improve our understanding, future research should focus on qualitative studies focusing on one case in which teachers engage with OER. This could lead to extensive insights on the factors and sequence of the OER Adoption Pyramid within different contexts.
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To find out what is needed to speed up the adoption of open sharing and reuse of learning materials and open online courses in publicly funded Dutch institutions of Higher Education, a qualitative research study was conducted in fall 2016. This study examined issues of willingness of educators and management, barriers and enablers of adoption, and the role of institutional and national policy in the adoption of open sharing and reuse of learning materials and online courses. Fifty-five stakeholders (educators, board members, and support staff) in 10 Dutch Higher Education Institutions were interviewed. The main findings of this study are: motivation for sharing and reuse of learning materials for educators and managers is directly related to the ambition to achieve better education for students; sharing and reuse of learning materials is common practice, very diverse and not open accessible for the whole world, and important barriers include lack of awareness of opportunities for open sharing and reuse and lack of time. Based on the findings from the interviews, the last section of this paper presents conclusions and recommendations regarding how Dutch institutions for Higher Education can formulate effective policies to raise awareness, organize adequate support and provide time to experiment.
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Micro and macro algae are a rich source of lipids, proteins and carbohydrates, but also of secondary metabolites like phytosterols. Phytosterols have important health effects such as prevention of cardiovascular diseases. Global phytosterol market size was estimated at USD 709.7 million in 2019 and is expected to grow with a CAGR of 8.7% until 2027. Growing adoption of healthy lifestyle has bolstered demand for nutraceutical products. This is expected to be a major factor driving demand for phytosterols. Residues from algae are found in algae farming and processing, are found as beachings and are pruning residues from underwater Giant Kelp forests. Large amounts of brown seaweed beaches in the province of Zeeland and are discarded as waste. Pruning residues from Giant Kelp Forests harvests for the Namibian coast provide large amounts of biomass. ALGOL project considers all these biomass residues as raw material for added value creation. The ALGOL feasibility project will develop and evaluate green technologies for phytosterol extraction from algae biomass in a biocascading approach. Fucosterol is chosen because of its high added value, whereas lipids, protein and carbohydrates are lower in value and will hence be evaluated in follow-up projects. ALGOL will develop subcritical water, supercritical CO2 with modifiers and ethanol extraction technologies and compare these with conventional petroleum-based extractions and asses its technical, economic and environmental feasibility. Prototype nutraceutical/cosmeceutical products will be developed to demonstrate possible applications with fucosterol. A network of Dutch and African partners will supply micro and macro algae biomass, evaluate developed technologies and will prototype products with it, which are relevant to their own business interests. ALGOL project will create added value by taking a biocascading approach where first high-interest components are processed into high added value products as nutraceutical or cosmeceutical.
Lipids, proteins and biological active compounds that are present in insects can serve as nutrient source for poultry production. Because of the potential benefit effects of using insects as feed additives, we must consider the effects of gut microbiome on the insect affects itself, and the expected effect on the microbiome of the broilers that consume these insects. This is specifically important in the situation where live insects are fed to poultry, without prior processing. In this proposal we describe to study whether larvae fed to broilers will affect their microbiome in a positive way for practical applications in poultry industry. Hence, a pilot proof-of-concept study will be carried out as basis for a follow-up proposal for a larger project in the future, that we also like to set-up within this project. In that follow-up proposal, focus will be on the effect of different substrates for insects, on the insect microbiome, to spike insects with specific bacteria and to track their microbiome dynamics over time, and the effect of these insects used as a feed additive on the broiler gut microbiome. This study will provide results on if live Black Soldier Fly larvae (BSFL) can affect the broiler gut microbiome in a positive way, and relevant outcomes will be exploited in a follow-up research proposal in which these effects will be unraveled in detail for adoption by the industry. The project is a collaboration between cooperative insect company RavenFeed and NGN Pro-active both with knowledge on BSFL rearing, Wageningen Bioveterinary Research (WBVR) with knowledge on insect diseases and microbiome analysis, Schothorst Feed Research (SFR) highly experienced in poultry nutrition research and having unique poultry facilities, and Aeres University of Applied Sciences Dronten (AHD) with research facilities for BSFL rearing under experimental conditions.
i-DEMO aims at supporting EU tourism professionals in acquiring and developing key competences in game-based tourism in order to foster innovation and improve overall tourism organizations’ performance by: enhancing specific skills and competences in game-based tourism; designing an i-DEMO course "Game-based Tourism"; creating an i-DEMO toolkit to apply gamification to tourism; enhancing the application and replicability potential of innovative game-based solutions.Societal IssueThe tourism and hospitality industry has rapidly evolved with technological advancements, especially through ICT and the rise of the sharing economy. Digital platforms, social media, and mobile technologies have popularized gamification in tourism, creating engaging experiences and enhancing consumer loyalty. Gamification immerses tourists in simulated travel worlds, improving satisfaction, behavior, and involvement. Benefits include increased visitor engagement, loyalty, improved marketing, and support for sustainable tourism. However, despite its potential, gamification adoption remains limited in tourism. To address this, initiatives like i-DEMO aim to enhance skills and competences, improving employability in the evolving tourism market.Benefit to societyThe benefits that gamification can offer in the travel and tourism industry are: 1: More Engaged Visitors: we must not underestimate the immersion level that games can offer to travelers; 2: Increased Visitor Loyalty: when somebody is truly satisfied with their experience, they are much more likely to come back; 3: Improved Marketing for Hospitality and Tourism: tourism and hospitality have been the biggest ones impacted by all of the lockdown restrictions; consequently they are using all kinds of marketing methods to motivate people to start travelling; 4: Sustainability: gamification could help promote more environmentally, socially and culturally sustainable forms of tourism, supporting the twin green and digital transition.
