Preface

The germination of this study in understanding dedicated open educational resources (OER) policy developed from a broad spectrum of topics surrounding open electronic publishing for education. My research was an Internet-based exploration in finding meaning through the hermeneutics of dedicated OER policy documents that are virtual artefacts from post-secondary education institutions.

Provenance

The Open Textbook Pilot Project (epub-fhd.athabascau.ca) at Athabasca University (AU) inspired the notion of a dedicated OER policy to support OER activities. The idea of a dedicated OER policy emerged from the AU OER pilot project in connection with Canadian post-secondary education institutions engaged with OER, so that specific institutional policies governing OER could (or would) support and guide OER initiatives. This prompted the question of what identifiable and specific OER policies exist in Canadian post-secondary education that supported OER. A clearly identifiable dedicated OER policy document published online was found for one post-secondary education institution in Canada. However, a single institutional OER policy was insufficient for my study without more post-secondary institutions with OER policy for a homogeneous multi-document dedicated OER corpus. Therefore, a world-wide search of post-secondary education institutions revealed many more dedicated OER policy documents specific to implementation of OER that could form a multi-document dedicated OER policy corpus and support the idea of a dedicated OER policy for this research. Furthermore, the term dedicated as a noun adjective for OER policy was used in the search filter parameter from the oerworldmap.org website that resulted in a specific form of OER policy. Thus, in the process of this exploratory research, a holistic question was developed to guide understanding of OER in dedicated OER policy.

Declaration of Disclosure

The researcher voluntarily collaborated with faculty and students from 2015 to 2019 to develop and support the Open Textbook Pilot Project within the Faculty of Health Disciplines at AU. All remuneration from the researcher’s position on the AU student council was returned directly to the pilot project to support research and development, such as purchasing WordPress premium plugins and demonstration of a clone of epub-fhd.athabascau.ca running on a stand-alone Raspberry PI server hardwired to a router for distribution of open etextbooks in a wireless local area network (Swettenham, 2015b). This pilot project used the Pressbooks open source software on a Linux platform that was sustained by a few devoted authors and AU staff in the absence of a dedicated OER policy at AU (Swettenham, 2015b). The researcher and three colleagues developed and implemented the first open Internet Educational BBS (SciTech BBS/ISP) in 1993 at Mount Royal College, Alberta, Canada that published and distributed free digital media, such as office documents, images, video, Java apps, and web pages in multiple formats via multiple communication pathways (Ingham, 1994; Swettenham, 2020).

My research manuscript was partially scanned by an online grammar and writing checker service. The intention was for the online academic writing checker service to identify potential errors in the dissertation, but human checking was required for accuracy. The application was configured to the British language preference, academic writing document type, APA (7th ed) style guide, education subject type, and original article paper type. This online service incorrectly interpreted the term epubishing to be publishing and was unable to distinguish between intentional American and British terms in the dissertation. Thus, every online checker service alert had to be reviewed against the intended meaning in the text by the researcher. The online grammar and writing checker service was deemed unproductive and potentially harmful to the data in this text. My study includes a mix of British and American English languages from the dedicated OER policy corpus, as there was no found standard language for institutional dedicated OER policy.

Ethics Declaration

The official public dedicated OER policy texts retrieved from authentic academic websites typically included a copyright statement. However, where there may be questions of copyright infringement, the fair dealing, and personal exemptions of the Copyright Act of Canada (Branch, 2020; Queen’s University Library, 2022) provide access to the dedicated OER policy texts for the sole purposes of academic research that this study entails. The study was interpretive, without criticism, towards understanding OER in dedicated OER policy texts. This study aimed to be in accordance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FOIPP) Act of Alberta (Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, 2000), and the Athabasca University Research Centre ethics (Athabasca University Research Ethics Board, 2004, 2016, 2020, 2021; Office of the Provost and Vice President, Academic, 2016). This research project did not involve human participants, human biological materials, or animals.

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