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.
MULTIFILE
Terms like ‘big data’, ‘data science’, and ‘data visualisation’ have become buzzwords in recent years and are increasingly intertwined with journalism. Data visualisation may further blur the lines between science communication and graphic design. Our study is situated in these overlaps to compare the design of data visualisations in science news stories across four online news media platforms in South Africa and the United States. Our study contributes to an understanding of how well-considered data visualisations are tools for effective storytelling, and offers practical recommendations for using data visualisation in science communication efforts.
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