This post reports on a session at the ASIS&T 24 hour Global Conference which had 3 short presentations.
Firstly there was
Evaluation of Inequalities of Access in UK Online Digital Collections: A Systematic Review by David Brazier and Bruce Ryan, Edinburgh Napier University, UK (with Paul Gooding as a co-author). They talked about how the pandemic accelerated the movement of cultural heritage institutions online, but not all collections are digitised, and being digitised doesn't guarantee access. This raised the question of what research has been carried out about equality of access and evaluation of use of digital resources. They outlined their approach to their systematic review - the full strategy is at http://bit.ly/3JG6uOn.
They retrieved 86,000+ items and described how they focused on key interests by excluding and adding terms: this reduced it to 36 items. However they realised that they were missing some seminal items: including a citation search on these items enlarged the number to 60. They read the items posing key research questions.
The majority of items talked about lessons on the digitisation process and technology which e.g. revealed advice about project planning; the importance of metadata; the importance of sharing practice across sectors; use of crowdsourcing and information on use of open source software. In terms of lessons about access, issues included copyright challenges; the need for political will and funding; the need to consider users' motivation, sensemaking, what tech users have access to, and need for users' digital literacy.
Leading on from that, they talked about lessons on impact assessment: these included the need for community engagement, and the need to evaluate impact using different means e.g. webometrics and collaborative analysis. One of the conclusions was the need to engage with under-represented communities, and then "build factors of inclusion, diversity and access into impact evaluation".
The second presentation was Investigating the use of Open Education Resources (OERs) in Filipino in the Context of Emergency Remote Learning by Khristin Fabian, Perth College UHI, UK; Ray Abacan, Enderun Colleges, Philippines and Peter Esperanza, Barstow Community College, USA. They explained how teachers in the Philippines were, as in many other countries, forced online during the pandemic. The speakers presented some facts about the country, including that 120+ languages are spoken, and the PISA survey shows that 94% of those tested for maths speak a language at home other than the test language. Lessons in maths are often taught in English, which is a barrier to family supporting learning, and requires teachers to teach with 2 langauges.
Esperanza had started a multilingual Youtube channel supporting maths: Number Bender. This enabled some research (using these videos as OERs) into the questions "Does the use of supplemental video resources in Filipino enable higher math achievements" and "How are OERs being used by teachers?" Research involved 208+463 students and 25 teachers, divided into a group of students using materials in English, and ones using materials in Filipino.
The research involved a pre and post test, student survey and teacher interviews. Overall the results of the pre and post tests did not show learning gains: but this is highly likely to be influenced by the pandemic situation, with teachers not able to deliver all the teaching etc. There was, however, a difference between the Filipino and English language scores - the Filipino group did show a slight improvement.
The teachers, on the other hand, found the resources very useful (rating it 4.75 out of 5). They found it useful to have students view the videos before online sessions, and also as a tool for reviewing content. This was done by distributing the videos on flash drive, rather than requiring students to stream them online. Issues included curricular alignment (resources not mapping to the whole curriculum) and the need for more worked examples. The students' responses to the survey also showed that they also felt very positive about the videos.
The final presentation in this session was Supporting Diverse User Groups of Archives for Open Dialogue in Digital Humanities by Pia Borlund, Nils Pharo, and Ying-Hsang Liu, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. They introduced the Polyvocal Interpretation of Contested Colonial Heritage project. It "explores how archival material created in a colonial mindset can be re-appropriated and re-interpreted to become an effective source for decolonization and the basis for a future inclusive society." Teams in 5 countries are involved, and data is being collected through interviews and questionnaires. The Oslo team (who presented) are addressing questions about how people search archives, their information needs and strategies, and why they succeed or fail in searching. They reported on the questionnaire data collected so far. A pop up questionnaire in French, English and Dutch resulted in 46 responses. Most were from the UK, France or the Netherlands. Findings included that the larger number had at least some knowledge of the collection and gave insights into their search strategy (unfortnately I deleted my saved screenshots by mistake, so I will add some actual detail when I can access the slides!)
