Appendix D: Addendum for a 2023 Post-Secondary Institutional Dedicated OER Policy

Introduction

Appendix D is a brief examination of a recent dedicated OER policy published online by the University of the Highlands and Islands (2023), and addendum to the research baseline of 28 dedicated OER policy corpus documents. The English language University of the Highlands and Islands Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy PDF had an open copyright statement dated 2023 with a CC BY 4.0 license (University of the Highlands and Islands, 2023).

Close and distant readings of the OER policy PDF followed the same approach as the study, including but not limited to conversion of the PDF to a text file for Voyant Tools. Similarly, to Appendix A, Voyant Tools output was compiled into a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet within a downloadable package for review and sharing at:

• on-linelearning.ca/oerpolicy/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2023/05/2023_addendum_DISTANT-READ_DEDICATED_OER_POLICY_CORPUS.zip

Corpus Addendum

The University of the Highlands and Islands Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy text file was included with the previous 28 dedicated OER policy text files for Voyant Tools analysis that produced the following URL for the purposes of online open research:

• voyant-tools.org/?corpus=227a53512abde752f3fa7ada7595bc36 (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2023a)

Close and Distant Readings Overview

The addendum dedicated OER policy corpus had the same five highest frequent terms of oer, open, university, resources, and policy, as in Appendix A (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2022u, 2023c). Notably, the keyword liability was not found in close reading of the University of the Highlands and Islands Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy (University of the Highlands and Islands, 2023). However, the term risk occurred twice, and a Risks section was dedicated to institutional issues regarding reduction of risks (University of the Highlands and Islands, 2023, pp. 6–7). The phrase open education practices had an occurrence count of 19 in the University of the Highlands and Islands Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy (University of the Highlands and Islands, 2023). The addendum corpus collocations changed from highest order of educational (term) resources (collocate) with a count of 284 (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2022g), to open (term) educational (collocate) with a count of 306 (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2023b). Furthermore, the OER policy document stated that “the policy is created in the first instance to support open practice” (University of the Highlands and Islands, 2023, p. 8).

Future Research

More exploration could be done to investigate why the term risk is now being used in the latest dedicated OER policy and how it will impact OER adoption. According to Sandman (2005), the term risk is used in risk communications and care needs to be taken in use of risk as the term has multiple meanings, such as uncertainty and “the magnitude of a bad outcome times its frequency” (sec. Risk). Thus, it seems plausible that the use of risk toward failures, fines, and loss could give a sense of uncertainty within the dedicated OER policy text (University of the Highlands and Islands, 2023).