This document summarizes a study exploring how first year university students in South Africa use digital content and open educational practices in their courses. The study found that while students found online resources, they did not intentionally search open educational repositories. Some students engaged in open practices like using open technologies, but most were unaware of concepts like Creative Commons licensing and open educational resources. The study recommends pedagogy encouraging digital content creation and collaboration between faculty and libraries to increase student awareness of open educational practices and resources.

1. Exploring open educational practices of first year
students at a South African university
Tabisa Mayisela
University of Cape Town

2. Outline
• Study background
• Problem statement
• Research approach
• Findings
• Conclusion and recommendations

3. Transition to Web 2.0 platform has an “implicit architecture of participation” which
facilitates new digital literacy practices (O’Reilly, 2007; Cardoso and Oliveira, 2015)
Background: Knowledge production

4. Background: OER movement
• ICT enables the re-use and distribution of OER
• Vast number of OER available through repositories (MERLOT, MIT open
courseware, Khan Academy, … OpenUCT)
• Fair use licenses (such as CC) allow academics and students to (re) use digital
learning resources that used to be restricted by intellectual property licenses
in the competitive higher education era (Hylén, 2008)

5. Statement of problem
• South-North divide of knowledge publication where the global South
publishes less knowledge than the global North (Bautista, Duran-Martinez,
Sierra, & Snyder, 2013)
• Network analysis of shared global traffic between 1000 most popular
websites revealed that most were developed in the global North (Wu &
Taneja, 2016)
• Over the three intervals of study (2009, 2011 and 2013), users in the Global
South were primarily consuming rather than producing content (Wu & Taneja,
2016)

6. Source: http://jalperin.github.io/d3-cartogram/

7. OER production (Hodgkinson-Williams, 2013), particularly by academics
(Arcos, Farrow, Pitt, & Weller, 2015), is predominant in the global North
Source: https://oerworldmap.org/

8. Open educational practices
•“support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote
innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers
on their lifelong learning path” (Ehlers, 2011:4).
• Include:
1) Use of OER
2) Open pedagogies
3) Open learning
4) Open scholarship
5) Open sharing
6) Use of open technologies
(Beetham, Falconer & McGill 2012)

9. Research question
How and why first year higher education students create digital content in their
courses?
Sub-questions
• What are the first year higher education (HE) students’ digital literacy
practices?
• What is the first year HE students’ understanding of open educational resources
and practices?
• In what ways do first year HE students learn digital literacy practices in terms of
digital content creation and open educational practices?
• What are the current enablers or contradictions influencing the students’ digital
literacy practices?
• What are the driving forces for students to create digital content?

10. Methodology
• Critical realist approach
• Activity theory (Learning activities in two courses)
• Mixed methods
• Questionnaires – 103 (Course A = 39; Course B = 64)
• Focus groups – 6
• Interviews – 2

11. The structure of a human activity system (adopted from Engeström, 2001, p.135)

12. 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Other
OER Institutional repository
OER directories
Blogs
Slideshare, iTunes, Tedtalks
Social networks
Google scholar
Wikipedia
YouTube
Search engines
Percentage of student number
Courses and student use of online resources
Course A
Course B

13. 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
Delicious Pininterest Diigo Evernote Other
Student use of social bookmarking systems
Always and Often
Sometimes and Rarely
Never

14. 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
Other OER descriptions
Wikipedia are OER
Any Youtube video is OER
Any image shared online is OER
OER are any resources found on the Internet
e-books are OER
All articles found in Google scholar are OER
I don't know what OER are
Student conceptions of OER
Course A
Course B

16. Source where students first
heard about the concept of
OER
Course A (39) Course B (64)
Course website/LMS 1 0
Lecturer 2 0
Orientation/induction 1 4
Orientation/induction;
Tutorial session
2 1
Peers 3 1
Peers; Library information 1 1
Tutorial session 6 1
Web searches 1 2
More than two sources
0 7
This is the first time I am
hearing of it
19 33

17. How students learnt that OER were used in their courses
Responses included:
• It was a link we could access to get more information
• Through a lecturer
• Through notes posted on Vula
• You could access it for free on the Internet, it's not copyright
• We were told that OpenUCT was
• Logic
• I was told to look for it
• Everyone could access it

18. Use of Wikipedia
• Students from both courses expressed that they used it to acquire an understanding
of course related concepts:
I have used it before. I usually use it when I don’t understand stuff… just to get an
idea. … I would look at it [content from Wikipedia] and then compare to the textbook
… because Wikipedia puts things into perspective whereas textbooks just explain
concepts in isolation. Wikipedia also gives examples so it kind of helps with the
understanding [Course A, G3, line 161-165].
I check Wikipedia for everything and then understand it and then I check what
scholars say because … ok, sometimes you find that something that is there … on
Google Scholar or JSTOR; any academic writing, … if I don’t understand it, I just go to
Wikipedia and read then I understand the academic writing easily [Course B, G2, line 31-
35].
• Another Course B respondent expressed that she used Wikipedia to read up on
authors’ backgrounds because she believes that any author’s writing is influenced
by his or her background in one way or another.

19. Non-use of Wikipedia
• They did not remix content from Wikipedia, in their essays or learning
activities.
• They were told at high school that they could not trust Wikipedia content
because anybody could edit it.

20. • Three Course A respondents:
• One of them heard about Khan Academy in passing while she was at high
school and then again here at UCT so she tried it out
• The other two said that they used it because “it is an international site”
that is “legit” [Course A, G1, Line 203; line 98].
• A Course B respondent indicated that Khan Academy was recommended to
her by a friend from another course. She added:
I understand the videos in Khan Academy more than the lecturer because I can
pause the video and if I don’t understand I can play it repeatedly. If I don’t
understand in the lecture theatre, there are few chances that I will understand
again because the pace is fast [Course B, G2, line 138-140].
Use of Khan Academy

21. Use of YouTube for learning
• A Course A respondent:
• Watched crash courses on Economics and other courses
• Used MathsTutor to learn some aspects that she struggled to understand
in Mathematics
• A Course B respondent said:
• Their lecturer recommended, and gave them links to YouTube videos
• She searched for YouTube videos for learning what she did not understand
in class

22. 0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
Facebook LinkedIn Google+ MySpace Other
Student use of social networking sites
For both study and personal purposes
For study purposes
For personal purposes
I don't have any networks on:

23. 0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
Follow people on
Twitter
Retweet social
information
Post social
information
Retweet study
related
information
Post study
related
information
Microblogging
Always and Often
Sometimes and Rarely
Never

24. Use of Twitter for learning
• Two students from Course A said that they followed experts in their fields and
so they did not contribute to the tweets, as one of them said:
I also use Twitter but do not contribute because the content is way above my
head … I follow people who are experts in my field so I just learn from them
[Course A, G2, line 380-381]

25. Use of WhatsApp for learning
• Groups were structured differently:
• Course A students formed WhatsApp groups based on their course tasks
• WhatsApp groups were used for communication, discussions, and sharing
of screenshots, links and images for their course tasks
• Course B indicated that some of their courses had WhatsApp groups where
students discussed and shared course related resources
• One of these respondents also shared that she was part of a residence
WhatsApp group that also discussed course work

26. Use of LinkedIn to start building own professional identity
I don’t know LinkedIn very much but what I use it for … I
normally view people’s profiles … maybe COOs, academics
or people who give you strength when you read their
stories … like COOs of companies or a person who holds a
post that I would like to hold in the future … I get their
views in LinkedIn [Course B, G1, line 159-162]
For career-focused stuff, maybe if I want to follow KPMG and
see what they are doing …career paths to follow and stuff like
that [Course A, G1, line 273-274]

27. Use of open technologies for personal purposes
(Open practices)

28. Awareness of CC licenses and OER
• All participants were not aware of Creative Commons licenses
• One of the Course B respondents who had used Khan Academy said: “Maybe,
in my case, I wouldn’t even see it, …even if it was written in big because … I
wasn’t looking for it” [Course B, G2, line 275-276].
• All were not aware that Wikipedia and Khan Academy were an OER and OER
repository, respectively.

29. Textbook, Internet, Khan Academy, Wikipedia, Word
processing, Google docs, open technologies
Conclusion

30. Conclusion and recommendations
• Students found resources on the Internet although they didn’t intentionally
search OER repositories (open learning)
• Students used open technologies for learning (OEP) and personal purposes (OP)
• Despite a very small group (from both courses) engaging in OEP, the majority of
the participants were still unaware what CC licensing and OER are
• These findings suggest:
• Pedagogy that encourages students to be producers of digital content
• A need for collaboration between lecturers and information literacy
personnel in an attempt to create student awareness about OER and OEP

31. References
• Bautista, M.A., Duran-Martinez, A., Sierra, J. & Snyder, R. 2013. Producing Knowledge in the Global South:
The Political Economy of Social Science in Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2327889.
• Beetham, H., Falconer, I., McGill, L. & Littlejohn, A. 2012. Open Practices: A briefing paper. JISC. Available:
https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/file/58444186/Open Practices briefing paper.pdf
• Cardoso, P. & Oliveira, N.R. 2015. Scholars’ use of digital tools: Open scholarship and digital literacy
• de los Arcos, B., Farrow, R., Pitt, B. & Weller, M. 2015. A Tale of Two Globes: Exploring the North/South
Divide in Use of OER. In Open Education Conference.
• Ehlers, U.-D. 2011. Extending the Territory: From Open Educational Resources to Open Educational
Practices. Journal of Open, Flexible, and Distance Learning, 15(2):1–10.
• Hodgkinson-Williams, C. 2013. Research into Open Educational Resources for Development in Post -
secondary Education in the Global South ( ROER 4 D ). Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape
Town, South Africa
• Hylén, J. 2006. Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and Challenges. Retrieved from:
https://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/37351085.pdf.
• O’Reilly, T. 2007. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of
Software. MPRA Paper No. 4578. Available: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4578/
• Wu, A.X. & Taneja, H. 2016. Reimagining Internet Geographies: A User-Centric Ethnological Mapping of the
World Wide Web. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 21:230–246.