Current projects

CURRENT RESEARCH

Copyright Ownership Policies and Perceptions at Institutions of Higher Ed and the Potential Effects on Open Education

This research is funded by the OpenEd Group. As 2019-20 Fellows, my colleague William Cross (NCSU) and I are conducting a two-fold investigation into faculty, staff, and student ownership of intellectual property per their institution’s policies. Our content analysis of institutional policies is being visually plotted using Google Maps so that individuals can easily identify and understand their own rights over their intellectual property produced at their institutions. In addition to the content analysis, we also surveyed individuals at these institutions to establish their own understanding of current policies at their institutions. Using both the content analysis and survey results, it is our hope that our results may help the Open Education community better understand ownership of scholarly works and instructional materials on individual campuses as well as trends in institutional ownership and strategies for lawfully openly licensing such material. To learn more about this ongoing research, please visit our Google Slides.

Open Pedagogy and Student Agency: Empowering Students as Creators

This research is also funded by the OpenEd Group. As 2019-20 OER Research Fellows from Roger Williams University and the North Carolina State University Libraries, we are conducting a study investigating how effectively faculty communicate to students about their agency, their intellectual property rights and their responsibilities as consumers and creators of openly-licensed content in classes where open pedagogy is used. We are defining open pedagogy as practices where students are invited to participate in the creation or co-creation of openly-licensed content as a means to fulfill one of the course learning outcomes. We are interview faculty members identified through scholarly circles and then snowball sampling. Some of these interviewees will distribute a short survey to their students seeking to establish baseline knowledge of their understanding of their agency in participating in open pedagogy projects. In addition to publishing our findings, we will also be applying for an IMLS grant to expand upon this research and develop a series of workshops for faculty interested in employing open pedagogical practices in their classroom but not entirely sure how to ethically leverage student agency in the process. To learn more about our research questions and methodology, please visit our Google Slides.