Glossary

This glossary defines the terms used in this hermeneutic research of dedicated OER policy texts that may have more than one definition. Terms that had no found definition, either on the Internet or in electronic dictionaries, were denoted as proposed definitions.

Academic Community

All students and academic staff of an educational institution (Academic Community Definition, n.d.).

Heathershaw et al. (2022) expanded the definition to include “academics, students and other staff teaching, researching and/or studying at a UK HE institution(s), exercising their academic freedom; or, those communities collectively within the UK HE Sector.” (p. 1859). Thus, academic community is comprised of people in different roles engaged in teaching, learning, and research in an educational environment.

Close Reading

“Close reading, also known as close textual analysis, investigates the relationship between the internal workings of discourse in order to discover what makes a particular text function persuasively” (Castilla, 2017, p. 136).

Collocates

“Words found in proximity of each keyword” (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016e, para. 3).

Concordance

“A list of all of the words appearing in a text often shown in their immediate contexts” (Seale, 2018, p. 586).

Contextual Frequency or Count (Context)

“The frequency of the collocate occurring in proximity to the keyword” in the corpus (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016e).

Copyright

“A bundle of intangible rights granted by statute to the author or originator of certain literary or artistic productions, whereby, for a limited period, the exclusive privilege is given to that person (or to any party to whom he or she transfers ownership) to make copies of the same for publication and sale” (“Copyright,” 2008).

Corpus

“Texts that have been assembled for analysis, often by computer-assisted text analysis software” (Seale, 2018, p. 588).

Creative Commons License

A form of internationally recognized public copyright license issued by the copyright owner to allow use of the copyrighted work in accordance with the license (“About CC Licenses,” 2019; “What Is a Creative Commons License?,” 2016; Wikipedia contributors, 2022b).

Dedicated OER Policy

A proposed definition is an exclusively allocated “subset of OER policies that are formally adopted public policies that directly relate to OER” (Allen & Shockey, 2014, p. 2); posited as the intersection of OER and policy. Note that “dedicated OER policy” is treated as a thing with “dedicated” and “OER” as “noun as adjectives” and the term “policy” as a noun, to describe a policy dedicated to OER (Noun as Adjective, n.d.; Nouns That Act like Adjectives, n.d.).

Distant Reading

Decomposition and recomposition by hermeneutic focused CAQDAS on and with text rather than direct human to-text reading (Rockwell & Sinclair, 2016).

Distinctive Words

“High frequency words that are relatively unique to a particular document” (Dickerson, 2018, p. 10).

ePublishing

The abbreviated form of electronic publishing to produce digital reading content (Wikipedia contributors, 2021b).

eTextbook

The abbreviated form of an electronic textbook or digital textbook that is intended for educational purposes (Wikipedia contributors, 2021a). An extended definition for a digital textbook is:

A mix of workbook, reference book, exercise book, case book and manual of instruction based on static hypertext or multimodal text, which meet curricula standards (pedagogic resources) or/and is an alternative learning tool, located in a digital library accessed through a personal computer or mobile digital device connected to Internet and directed from an educational platform. (Railean, 2012, p. 56)

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)

The meaning of “free” is without charge (“Free and Open-Source Software,” 2022; What Is Free Software?, 2022; Stallman, 2019). See the Open Source definition for Open Source Software.

The four tenets of FOSS (What Is Free Software?, 2022) are:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).

• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is “the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of scriptural text” (“The American Heritage Dictionary Entry,” 2020). A philosophical meaning of hermeneutics is “the study and interpretation of human behaviour and social institutions” (“Hermeneutics,” 2021).

Hermeneutic Circle

“A process of interpretation in which we continually move between smaller and larger units of meaning in order to determine the meaning of both” (Gijsbers, 2017). “The circle is a metaphor for the procedure of transforming one’s understanding of the part and the whole through iterative recontextualization” (Wikipedia contributors, 2022c).

Hermeneutical Situation

“The present situation is the “given” in which understanding is rooted, and which reflection can never entirely hold at a critical distance and objectify” (Gadamer, 2008, p. xv).

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)

“Ideas and the way they then appear as objects, and other media somehow belong to those who shaped and produced them” (UNESCO, 2011). Furthermore, copyright is how the IPR associated with objects can be protected (McGill, 2010b; UNESCO, 2011).

Internet

A world-wide system of interconnected computer networks that originally developed in the 1960’s (“Internet,” 2021a; “Internet,” 2021b).

Inter-rater Agreement

“The degree of agreement among independent observers who rate, code, or assess the same phenomenon” (Wikipedia contributors, 2022d). An expanded definition is “the degree to which two or more evaluators using the same rating scale give the same rating to an identical observable situation (e.g., a lesson, a video, or a set of documents)” (M. Graham et al., 2012, p. 5).

Latent Content

“An analysis of text informed by the interpretation of the researcher” (Seale, 2018, p. 597).

Liability

“A comprehensive legal term that describes the condition of being actually or potentially subject to a legal obligation” (“Liability,” 2008).

“Legal responsibility for one’s acts or omissions. Failure of a person or entity to meet that responsibility leaves him/her/it open to a lawsuit for any resulting damages or a court order to perform (as in a breach of contract or violation of statute)” (Hill & Hill, 1981a).

“A legally enforceable claim on the assets of a business or property of an individual” (Wex Definitions Team, 2022).

Manifest Content

“The surface characteristics of content, described with the minimum of interpretive judgment” (Seale, 2018, p. 597).

Metaverse

“A virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users” (“Metaverse,” 2021).

Online

“Connected to, served by, or available through a system and especially a computer or telecommunications system” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).

Online Open Electronic Textbook Publishing (OOETP)

A proposed definition for online open etextbook publishing is a social OER publishing ecosystem on the Internet dedicated to the production and consumption of open etextbooks for education (Tarkowski et al., 2019, p. 8).

Open Access (OA)

Peer-reviewed journal literature with “free and unrestricted online availability” (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002).

Open

“Knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness” (Perens & Stallman, Richard, n.d.).

Open Educational Practices (OEP)

Also known as Open Pedagogy, “is the use of open educational resources (OER) to support learning, or the open sharing of teaching practices with a goal of improving education and training at the institutional, professional, and individual level” (BCcampus, 2023, sec. What is Open Pedagogy?).

Open Educational Resources (OER)

“Learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others” (UNESCO, 2022).

Open Educational Resources (OER) Ecosystem

“The combination of underlying content and the individuals, institutions, and organizations that contribute to and use that content to advance teacher practice and student learning” (Huttner et al., 2018, p. 2).

Open Educational Resources (OER) Paradigm

A proposed definition is the application of the OER definition framed by the OER Model (Stacey & Rominger, 2006).

Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy

“OER policies are laws, rules and courses of action that facilitate the creation, use or improvement of openly licensed content” (Coolidge & Nicole Allen, 2017, p. 4).

Open eTextbook

Content and/or activity set collected to support the mastery of a given area of study delivered electronically for consumption on screens from computing devices (Chesser, 2011). An extended proposed definition is a freely available digital OER with open copyright licence, published on the Internet in a package format available for viewing online or offline (BCcampus Open Education Support Team, 2019; Frydenberg & Matkin, 2007; ISKME, 2009).

Open License

“A license that respects the intellectual property rights of the copyright owner and provides permissions granting the public the rights to access, re-use, re-purpose, adapt and redistribute educational materials” (UNESCO, 2022).

Open Research

Comprises open access throughout the research cycle, inclusive of protocols, methodology, data, code, software, and instructions freely available online (Kendal, 2022; Open Research: What Is Open Research?, n.d.; Wikipedia contributors, 2022f). According to Kendal (2022), “it is about being as open as possible, as often as possible, and only being as closed as is necessary.”

Open Source

“Denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified” (Lexico, n.d.).

Policy

“A course or principle of action adopted or proposed by an organization or individual” (“Policy,” 2021).

Pressbooks

A free open source book content management system for Internet ebook and etextbook publishing, developed by Book Oven, Inc. (Pressbooks – Open Publishing. Open Web. Open Source., n.d.; Wikipedia contributors, 2021e). This free and open source software is a plugin to the WordPress blog platform (Zimmerman, 2013/2018).

Relative Frequency

Each frequency (i.e., term count) is converted into a value per million words and is called normalising the frequency score that is advantageous when comparing sections of the corpora of different sizes (Lexical Computing, 2021; “Relative Frequency, Frequency per Million,” 2016; Smith, 2014). The calculation ((term count in document / total tokens in document) * 1000000) is the frequency per million words equal to the value of the term count in the document divided by the total tokens in the document multiplied by 1 million (MacDonald, 2022b). Note that tokens represent words, see the glossary definition for tokens.

Stopwords

Words that are excluded from a text analysis (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016l). Voyant Tools automatically provide a default list of stopwords that can be customised and saved (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016l).

System

“A set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network” (“System,” 2021).

Tokenization

“The process of identifying words, or sequences of Unicode letter characters that should be considered as a unit” (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016g).

Tokens

“The number of individual words found in the document” (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016h).

Transmedia

Literally “across media” (Jenkins, 2011). “A phenomenon that transcends media or the boundaries thereof, something that transfers media content, or perhaps a system that crosses the borders of media” (Byun, n.d.). The term is associated with storytelling, such that Jenkins (2011) states that “transmedia refers to a set of choices made about the best approach to tell a particular story to a particular audience in a particular context depending on the particular resources available to particular producers.”

Unique Word

A unique word has only one occurrence in the document (Rockwell & Sinclair, 2016, p. 57).

Vocabulary Density

Unique words divided by total words (Dickerson, 2018, p. 7; Ishaq, 2017, sec. My first publication).