Design Principles for Collaboration Platforms for Open Education

Safa’a AbuJarour

, Henri Pirkkalainen

, Jan Pawlowski

, Markus Bick

, Migle Bagucanskyte

, Anna

Frankenberg

, Raimund Hudak

, Constantinos Makropoulos

, Dimitra Pappa

, Vassilis Pitsilis

Anne-Christin Tannhauser

, Elena Trepule

, Aristedes Vidalis

and Airina Volungeviciene

Chair of Business Information Systems, ESCP Europe, Berlin, Germany

University of Jyv

askyl

a, Jyv

askyl

a, Finland

Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences, M

ulheim, Germany

Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania

Duale Hochschule Baden W

urttemberg, Stuttgart, Germany

National Centre for Scientiﬁc Research, Athens, Greece

Keywords:

Open Education, Open Educational Resources, OER, Collaboration Platforms, Collaboration.

Abstract:

Increasing the current low uptake of Open Education Resources (OER) is a key challenge for researchers and

practitioners in the ﬁeld. User studies have shown that collaboration is a main success factor for successful

open educational activities. However, effective collaboration in open educational contexts requires well

planned processes and platforms supporting collaboration, in particular in physically distributed settings.

We have been investigating the value of such platforms, their main features and user requirements to enable

collaboration from immature ideas to completed resources. We used quantitative and qualitative research

methods to collect insights from potential users of such collaboration platforms to validate our approach.

Based on these insights, we developed a collaboration platform for open education. We validated our platform

using observation groups and focus groups to identify the key design principles of powerful collaboration

platforms for Open Education. Examples are the need for a simple tool, use of a common terminology, and

considering Intellectual Property Rights. In this paper, we present our ﬁndings from an initial validation

of our collaboration platform and give recommendations towards powerful collaboration platforms for open

educational contexts.

1 INTRODUCTION: OPEN

EDUCATION

Emerging technologies have been enabling a

multitude of opportunities for creating innovative

and attractive forms of Open Education. The main

approaches currently discussed in the context of

Open Education are Open Educational Resources

(OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) (Chen,

2010; Hatakka, 2009; Richter and Ehlers, 2011).

OER deals with the learning and teaching objects

that are commonly shared in online repositories

once they have been implemented and applied in a

particular context and using an open license such as

Creative Commons (Davis et al., 2010). OEP are

shared as experiences or good practices after they

have been tried out in real life (Richter and Ehlers,

2011), helping others determining potentially good

learning designs. In principle, OER and OEP are

mainly shared after the resources are completed and

applied in a particular context, allowing little chance

for reﬂection and collaboration.

Researchers have observed that the wealth of

available OER and OEP is not up to their full potential

(Ochoa and Duval, 2009). It has been shown that

the main barriers against the adoption of OER are

related to several social, cultural, and organizational

issues that keep open education reaching its potential

(Hatakka, 2009; D’Antoni, 2009; Chen, 2010). The

main identiﬁed barriers include trust and personal

relations, and lack of awareness of open educational

opportunities and advantages (AbuJarour et al.,

2014). The key to Open Educational success is to

overcome these barriers and to increase trust among

users and corresponding repositories or platforms.

This article addresses the observed problems by

a new approach to get educators better engaged

349

AbuJarour S., Pirkkalainen H., Pawlowski J., Bick M., Bagucanskyte M., Frankenberg A., Hudak R., Makropoulos C., Pappa D., Pitsilis V., Tannhauser

A., Trepule E., Vidalis A. and Volungeviciene A..

Design Principles for Collaboration Platforms for Open Education.

DOI: 10.5220/0005451003490359

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2015), pages 349-359

ISBN: 978-989-758-107-6

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

to the process of creating teaching and learning

resources. Our approach aims at improving the

uptake of OER through a collaborative process. The

main idea of our approach is to emotionally attach

educators to OER by engaging them at an early

stage of the OER activity’s development process, i.e.,

when the resources are still in the ideation phase.

This engagement is enabled through a collaboration

platform, where educators can collaboratively create

and shape ideas of OER. We approach this problem

using a mixed approach of applying design science

research approaches, combining quantitative and

qualitative methods.

This article reports from an ongoing inquiry.

So far we have arranged discussion groups in

the form of six workshops and several interviews

to collect preliminary insights from educators

on their perceptions and actions towards open

education and the collaborative creation of teaching

resources (AbuJarour et al., 2014; Pirkkalainen and

Pawlowski, 2014). Based on these insights, the

basic requirements on our proposed approach were

generated for the purpose of this study. Our

proposed approach was reﬁned and a collaboration

platform for open education was developed. This

study presents the validation results of our developed

collaboration platform with potential users through

observation and focus groups. The main objective

is to give recommendations in a form of design

principles for powerful collaborations platforms in

open educational contexts.

In this paper, we report on our journey of

investigating the low-uptake of OER problem, leading

to our validation phase including observation and

focus groups, and our key ﬁndings with respect to the

design principles of collaborative open educational

platforms.

The key contributions of this paper are:

• Identifying key challenges, success factors, and

barriers for collaboration around OER.

• Revealing key design principles of collaboration

platforms that facilitating idea sharing approach

in open educational contexts.

This paper is structured as follows: This

introductory section is followed by the necessary

background in Section 2. Then, we describe our

methodology and instruments in Section 3. In

Section 4, we introduce our key ﬁndings with respect

to the design principles of collaboration platforms

in Open Education. We discuss the key points

in Section 5. Finally, we conclude this paper in

Section 6.

2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

In this section, we give the necessary fundamentals

to proceed with the rest of this paper. In particular,

we explain the importance of OER reusability and

the value of collaboration and idea sharing in Open

Education.

2.1 Re-using Open Educational

Resources (OER)

Open education consists of many approaches

to strive for openness on different levels of

education. Open Educational Resources (OER)

are deﬁned by UNESCO as “open provision of

educational resources, enabled by information and

communication technologies, for consultation, use

and adaptation by a community of users for non-

commercial purposes” (UNESCO, 2002). OERs can

be multifold digital resources ranging from simple

presentations,such as, PowerPoint ﬁles to full online

courses provided openly for educators and learners to

apply (Downes, 2007; for Educational Research and

Innovation, 2007). Teaching and learning resources

are re-usable and can be modiﬁed and adapted

to different contexts to improve the education

experience (Richter and Ehlers, 2011). Common

research approach has been investigating how to

make learning objects available and reusable for

educators and learners (Hyl

en, 2006; Hatakka, 2009;

D’Antoni, 2009).

Several OER initiatives have observed huge

potentials for the wide spread of OER and proposed

approaches to use, apply and re-use OER. Part of

these initiatives have dedicated efforts to provide

sets of guidelines and best practices about how to

re-use OER. For instance, Okada et al. propose

using of social media (Okada et al., 2013), whereas

Inacol (2013) and Pirkkalainen and Pawlowski (2010)

propose practical guides with step by step procedures

on re-using OER. However, such OER guidelines

are typically crafted based on ideal processes and

basic assumptions for creating OER rather than real,

conducted collaborations.

Many OER collaborative experiences have

been reported in the form of case studies from

cross-institutional OER creation (Educause, 2013)

to case studies in Africa (Sapire and Reed, 2011).

Such case studies draw attention to the opportunities

and beneﬁts of co-creating and re-using OER. While

being exemplary cases, the collaborative efforts in

open education are not yet a common practice.

Reviewing the main approaches of OER presented

above, we observe that the main character of OER is

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focused on re-using and adapting complete materials,

resources, or scenarios (e.g. lesson plans) during the

development of new activities (e.g., courses). This

means that OER are applied after the resources have

been shared in existing repositories and much of the

context-sensitive and pedagogical thinking might be

lost.

Reconsideration of the ways to make OER

sustainable needs to be addressed. Previous studies

on the existing OER platforms uptake have shown

how the open education still struggles to reach active

communities and knowledge sharing (Ochoa and

Duval, 2009) Educators experience difﬁculties and

barriers that usually relate to social and organizational

aspects and unawareness of OER (D’Antoni, 2009;

Chen, 2010). However, the open education movement

beneﬁts from the increasing use of ICT in education,

as teachers are exposed to new ways of open and

transparent didactics with a multitude of social media

applications for education (Wever et al., 2007; Lai and

Chen, 2011).

2.2 Lessons Learned from Related

Disciplines and Practices

While OER and open education is general is a rather

new domain area, it still deals with approaches and

issues that are encompassed in related disciplines. It

has become common approach to engage educators

in to virtual OER communities and expose them to

services most commonly witnessed and discussed for

social media (Ha et al., 2011). It is critical to discuss

how to embed the new types of OER platforms to

the daily practices of educators and to design these

to allow maximum efﬁciency and effectiveness.

The design of information systems has been a

prominent topic for decades within Computer Science

as in Information Systems literature (Iivari, 2014).

The research paradigm of Design Science Research

(DSR) has included discussions on meta-designs

and meta-requirements to elaborate how particular

systems should and could be designed (Hevner et al.,

2004; Walls et al., 1992).

Static information repositories that allow retrieval

and sharing of OER have been a common practice

for years across all educational levels, ranging from

national to international databases containing wide

range of educational resources (Tabuenca et al., 2012;

Ochoa and Duval, 2009; Davis et al., 2010). Yet,

only handful of these repositories reaches sustainable

user bases (Ochoa and Duval, 2009). Many authors

have argued that the didactical concepts, intentions,

the reasoning and the background of OER is not

properly understood and remaining shallow during

the data retrieval process within repositories (Atkins

et al., 2007; Chen, 2010; Richter and Ehlers, 2011).

The possible solution for this has been argued through

increasing knowledge sharing between educators

to elaborate and discuss how to best apply these

resources in practice (Hatakka, 2009).

While virtual communities and deployment of

better options for knowledge sharing can be argued

to be vital, the contribution behavior in online

environments has been witnessed to be challenging

to sustain. Such barriers have been identiﬁed and

explained in educational contexts (Pirkkalainen and

Pawlowski, 2014) as for open source communities

(Roberts et al., 2006) and for distributed settings

in general (Noll et al., 2010; Pallot et al., 2010).

Tsai and Bagozzi (2014) argued that group norms,

attitudes and anticipated emotions contribute to

towards behavioral we intentions that are crucial for

knowledge sharing in virtual communities.

To overcome those barriers, different

interventions are possible. We focus on intervening

during build time using design principles which

describe inherent attributes which determine the

success of a technology (Mueller and Strohmeier,

2011). As an example, Mueller and Strohmeier

(2010) propose necessary attributes for Virtual

Learning Environments, amongst them reliability,

security, interactivity, appeal, multimodality, or

enjoyment. Similar recommendations have been

made for Social Environments for Learning (Dron,

2007) and Collaboration Environments (Kollock,

1998) or Virtual Worlds (Chaturvedi et al., 2011) in

general. Therefore, we utilize the approach of Design

Principles to provide recommendations and ensure

the usefulness for practitioners.

The research activity described within this article

focuses especially on the ways to reach a commitment

and sense of belonging within virtual communities in

open education.

2.3 Towards Collaboration and Idea

Sharing in Open Education

In our research, we focus on tweaking the steps

that are accomplished before having the resources

complete and shared. In particular, in situations

when ideas are initiated, shaped, and shared with

like-minded people in order to create new educational

outcomes, such as OER. Our approach is based

on the initiative of Pirkkalainen and Pawlowski

that suggests taking a step back and deﬁning what

could encourage the collaboration in early stages and

sharing new ideas that are not yet matured to existing

OER (Pirkkalainen and Pawlowski, 2014). This

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351

initiative proposes that collaboration is more likely to

take place when educators feel emotional ownership

(Pawlowski, 2012) of the knowledge they create.

Emotional ownership is described as the degree that

individuals perceive that the knowledge belongs to

them (Bj

ornberg and Nicholson, 2012). Jones and

Jordan assume that the lack of emotional ownership

could be one of the main reasons that the uptake of

OER is very low (Jones and Jordan, 1998).

Although, idea sharing processes are not new,

they are not considered within the open education

context. The purpose of such processes is to engage

the collaborators to the collaboration process and to

the resources being created. Therefore, stakeholders

do not have to re-use completed resources, but

they are rather involved in the development process

itself. A similar approach is discussed from a design

perspective by (Treviranus, 2010) described as the

Wabi-Sabi principle. This principle aims at designing

resources in an imperfect way that later adopters

have certain space to incorporate their own design,

pedagogical, and technical ideas. This principle

enables stakeholders to be involved in an early stage

and build new OER.

3 METHODOLOGY AND

INSTRUMENTS

In this section, we describe our methodology and

instruments that were applied for validation purposes

to derive the main design principles of collaborative

platforms in open educational contexts. Following

a design science research approach (Hevner et al.,

2004), we decided to interweave qualitative and

quantitate methods whenever it is possible and

reasonable in order maximize the “knowledge yield”

(McCall and Bobko, 1990) of an evaluation endeavor.

The goal of applying this approach is: (a) to validate

the concept of idea sharing in creating OER in higher

education and business related environment, and (b)

to ﬁnd out the needs within Open Education and to

validate our proposed approach. Both goals lead to

identifying key design principles towards successful

collaborative platforms for open education.

3.1 Case Study: OEI2-Project

The research we conduct deals with new ways

for educators to share and collaborate on OER.

The context of inquiry is especially set to higher

education. The study was conducted in EU-project

“Open Educational Ideas and Innovations – OEI2”

(http://www.idea-space.eu). One of the key aims of

the project is to create a collaborative platform for

open education. As discussed previously in this paper,

several steps were taken to identify the perceptions of

educators towards collaborative creation of OERs and

towards idea sharing. The requirements gathering and

the conceptual work that were accomplished through

a series of workshops and interviews will not be

discussed in this article. Based on the results of the

workshops and interviews (AbuJarour et al., 2014),

a collaboration platform for idea sharing in open

educational contexts was created.

The validation of the collaboration platform for

open education will be discussed in this article,

leading to elicitation of design principles that serve

as meta-requirements or meta-artifacts (Walls et al.,

1992) for further creation of collaborative platforms

for Educational purposes. The platform is developed

to showcase collaboration idea sharing in the context

of OER.

Figure 1 depicts the main steps of our

methodology.

This online collaboration platform is designed

to enable and support collaboration throughout the

entire OER lifecycle. The core of our portal is a

component that enables educators to co-create and

Phase 3Phase 1

Workshops Interviews

Preliminary Insights

& Requirements

Implementation Observations

Design

Principles

Phase 2

Focus

Groups

Figure 1: Our methodology: Workshops and Interviews to gain preliminary insights and user requirements, implementing

these requirements, and validating the implemented tool to gain design principles (Highlighted areas depict the focus of this

study).

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share any type of ideas. Registered users can use it

to create OER, open e-textbooks, MOOCs or even

an educational software solution or virtual mobility

action between two or more universities. “Ideas”

represent the basic entity of this space. Registered

users can initiate ideas or join the development of

existing ideas. Through collaborative discussion,

these initial ideas can become mature and therefore

form OER. The basic functionalities of our platform

are:

Idea Posting and Sharing. Providing educators the

possibility to create new ideas (courses, materials,

documents, etc.) that they can subsequently share

with other interested peers.

Idea Search. Enabling users to search for ideas

based on several criteria, e.g., topic, educational

level, language, country, etc.

Idea Development. Providing a reﬁned innovative,

but yet simple to use, collaboration space where

ideas can be discussed, designed and developed

towards OER. The collaboration space includes

functionalities to structure the idea to several

activities, to write collaboratively, to comment on

others contributions and to use video conferencing

within the collaborative documents.

Idea Administration. Idea owners and

administrators can edit basic idea ﬁelds (e.g.,

title, description, idea visibility) and also add

more idea members (collaborators) either from

existing portal members or by inviting (via email)

non-registered colleagues, delete participants or

redeﬁne idea members’ roles.

OER Repository. Including a wealth of collected

OER for business and management in addition to

the published OER that come out of our platform.

3.2 Validation Approach

Our validation approach consists of two phases:

Observation groups and focus groups. During the

observation groups phase, educators were invited

to use the idea sharing space. We collected their

feedback on the platform and we observed their

behavior. During the focus groups phase, involved

users were invited to join workshops regarding their

feedback to the advantages and limitations of the

initial portal prototype.

The groups of potential users interested in

collaborative idea generation were introduced to the

initial version of our project. The observation

activities took place face-to-face, through Adobe

Connect or Skype video conferencing facilities when

collaborating educators were testing the platform.

The users invited collaborators to their idea and

tried all the available functionalities for idea creation.

During the observation, the users could freely use the

tool how they see best for creation of their idea. They

could develop new ideas or join existing ideas.

During the observation group, 23 teams have

been built in project partner organizations around

educational ideas whereas each team consisted of 26

collaborators. In total 56 users from 4 European

countries – Finland, Germany, Greece and Lithuania

have validated the process using initial infrastructure

of the portal.

Most of the observed educators were also invited

to express their ideas in the focus group interviews

after that and the feedback of their discussions was

documented. The focus of each session was to

discuss: 1) How did they like the platform, 2) how

would they improve it and for what reason, 3) whether

the tool is easy to navigate, 4) how to improve

the usability of the platform, 5) discussing the

opportunities for using the tool beyond collaborative

course development, 6) open discussion on the

participants perceptions and feelings towards the tool

and the conceptual foundation behind it.

There were 52 participants in 5 focus groups. The

educators and researchers who participated in the

open idea sharing space validation represented

different ﬁelds of education: Economics,

management, business administration, marketing

and communication, statistics, business information

systems, education, IT, eLearning, etc. Some

educators were more experienced in the ﬁeld of

creating or using OER while others were interested,

but did not have much experience in collaborative

idea sharing or creating OER. Some participants

were experienced in different aspects of technology

enhanced learning – teaching online using video

conferencing tools, creating, using and administrating

OER.

Table 1 summarizes the demographics of the

observation and focus groups.

4 FINDINGS AND DESIGN

PRINCIPLES

The ﬁndings of our research are structured as

follows. First we present the validation results from

our observations and focus groups. Secondly, we

present a synthesis on these ﬁndings and discuss

our recommendations for further developing the

concept of collaborative idea generation as well as the

collaboration platforms for OER.

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Table 1: Demographics of our validation phase

Host Groups Participants Medium Educational Fields & Positions

(Partner 1) 4 12 Face to Face &

Skype

- Information Systems Researchers / Teachers

- E-learning

(Partner 2) 4 10 Face to Face &

Adobe Connect

- Business Information Systems

- Information Technology

- Master Student, IT

- Mathematics

- PhD Degree, IT

(Partner 3) 4 12 Face to Face - Organizational Strategy and Change

Management

- Information Systems

- MSc, PhD Candidate, PhD holder

- Management and Tourism

(Partner 4) 5 10 Face to Face - Academia

- IT, Education

(Partner 5) 6 12 Face to Face - Academic Assistant

- Co-rector

- Communication Manager

- Marketing Manager

- Prof. for Consumer Goods

- Prof. in Economics

- Prof. in Management Studies

- Prof. in Quantitative Methods and Business

Administration

- Prof. of Economy and Visiting Lecturer

- Researcher, Educator, Business consultant

- Researcher

4.1 Validation Results

The Look of the Portal. The remarks regarding

the look of the idea sharing space portal provide

a rich variety of reactions ranging from very

positive remarks (e.g., “almost perfect”) to average

assessments (e.g., “OK”) and all the way to rather

negative reactions. 17 collaborating teams liked the

simple look of the portal, its design, colors and

that it is not crowded but rather structured and easy

to understand. 2 Teams indicated user-friendliness

and usability of the idea sharing space. One team

expressed positive attitude towards the portal, but

found it too anonymous as it was not clear with

whom collaboration is going on. One team was very

critical and felt that the portal is very chaotic and not

self-explanatory. Another team indicated that it was

“very basic, little bit old-school”, while another team

indicated a contrary and found it as “a very modern,

well-designed portal following all current trends in

web development”.

The Positive Aspects of the Portal. 8 teams of

collaborating educators indicated that they found

navigation easy and not complicated, as some have

pointed out “the portal is really easy to use even

for a beginner”. Others (9 teams) agreed that

it is generally easy to navigate, but also some

additional improvements are needed, such as missing

descriptions of speciﬁc aspects in some of the pages,

next steps, some buttons are not clear or quick

comment function. 4 Teams mentioned that they

found navigation not very easy and think that it should

be improved “It looks simple, but not very easy to

navigate”. It was indicated 3 times that there is a

need for a manual or video tutorial. 8 teams found the

portal difﬁcult to navigate and indicated some speciﬁc

aspects: “It is not clear what is the difference between

to collaborate, chat and comment”, “when a new user

is selecting an idea it is not clear who has initiated the

idea”.

The participants, who also participated in the

workshops and interviews, when trying the open idea

sharing space indicated different aspects that they like

about the portal. Part of the collaborating educator

teams (8 teams) mentioned that they liked the idea

of open idea sharing space itself. They expressed

their feedback clearly: “You don’t have to meet face

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to face and create a course online”, “I like the fact

that I can join groups of people with supplementary

ideas to mine”, “I like the fact that a new platform is

being developed which will give me the opportunity

to build and develop an idea faster and in a more

collaborative way removing time and space barriers”,

“I like the interactive work between collaborators”.

Several teams (9 teams) like the fact that they

may follow the collaborating partners on the screen,

interact with them and follow their contributions:

“The conferencing function in the etherpad is great”.

Moreover, they also like to see different partners

contributing in different colors, the video feature.

and the comment option: “The ability to comment

is an excellent one particularly for everyone using

social media...this makes the portal very engaging”.

Several educator teams indicated that they like the

simplicity and clarity of the portal (16 teams: “It is

kept very simple which it should”; “template is very

clean, organized, with perfect navigation, distraction

free”, “the platform looks clean and not too crowded”,

“easy navigation with the three steps: search, create,

repository”, “the layout is nice, and I like the ﬂat

design”, “easy overview”, “easy navigation”, etc.

Different teams like different aspects and features

of the idea collaboration team; a “lightweight” and

“responsive” mobile template, WYSIWYG (What

You See Is What You Get) editor with a lot of

capabilities, the feature of showing the newest idea,

the template to help in creating the idea, “the look and

feel” that is “very modern”, “serious and friendly”,

“pleasant” user experience, the idea of linking to

OER, which is “nice, interesting, and useful”, the

entry page that is “well-structured and easy to create

or search a new Idea”.

Aspects to Improve. The educators trying the

collaborating space for idea development also

mentioned different aspects that they deemed should

be improved. Some limitations that users expressed

are related to the current initial stage of the portal

development and will be eliminated in further

stages, e.g., users indicated that the temporary

warnings of the site with insecure content should

be removed and asked for more features (3 teams)

such as possibilities to connect MS Word, MS

PPT documents, links to social media, etc. These

features are planned to be added in further stages of

project development. One educator team regretted

that the space was not useful for creating MOOCs.

Their remarks are very important in this initial

phase of portal development as they provide clear

directions for further development and validation of

the collaboration space.

4.2 Design Principles

It is crucial that such new services for open education

are designed to ﬁt the needs and requirements of

educators. For this purpose meta-designs and artifacts

(Walls et al., 1992; Hevner et al., 2004) are important

to extract fundamental and crucial components of

these platforms. This observation emphasizes the

need for key design principles for collaboration

platforms in the context of open education. The key

principles based on our current research are:

This observation emphasizes the need for key design

principles for powerful collaboration platforms in the

context of open education. The key principles based

on our current research are:

The Need for Simple Tools. New tools for OER

should have a simple layout and intuitive

navigation. User experience on the system should

match user experience on social networks and

common websites, such as Google (Okada et al.,

2013).

Diversify and Adapt based on the User. When

creating ideas and building those towards OER,

the needs for the technology differ radically. It

is important to make clusters of main user groups

of the system and provide each with specialized

contents, structures and support. The system

needs to adapt and be responsive based on the

information users have given about themselves.

Enable the Creation of Multiple Types of

Outcomes and Personalize based on Those.

Educators do not only create course materials

from PDFs to PowerPoints, but they also

would like to create MOOCs, e-Textbooks and

educational software. Each of the outcomes

generated have implications on the collaborative

process and the structures and guidance the

system should offer. Users expect such structures

to be there automatically without spending a lot

of time modifying the offered templates.

The Use of a Common Terminology. New

technologies and ways of working easily

introduce new terms for users. This might raise

confusion. Just a term OER can be confusing

to a teacher, even if they are familiar what the

practice and concept stands for. Therefore, it is

important to introduce the terminologies used in

such systems.

Enable the Integration of Social Media Tools

and OER Adaptation Tools. Users expectations

differ drastically when it comes to use of

social media and Information and Communication

Technology (ICT) in their collaborative efforts.

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It is important to design the platform similar to

successful social media sites while adapting it

speciﬁcally to educational collaborations. The

further integration of tools should be at the

hands of the user. Offering an API (Application

Programming Interface) for educators is not

enough. The tools should be easy to drag and drop

to the collaboration space when there is need for

such.

Provide Simple User Support Regarding the

Stages of the Collaboration. It is important

to guide the educators during their usage of

the platform. Next steps should be explained

in advance by means of pop-up or tooltips.

For instance, what happens when they start/stop

collaboration, post an item, search for ideas, etc.

Without structure, educators easily get lost when

there is a new way for collaboration involved.

Version Control. In collaborative work, it is

essential to track changes. It is important to

track what is changed, when, and by whom.

Sometimes, it is helpful to go back to earlier

versions of the original idea or its surrounding

materials to verify that the development progress

is going in the right direction (Whitehead Jr. and

Wiggins, 1998).

Consider Intellectual Property Rights. Those

rights are not only related to completed OER. The

general question regarding the future of the idea:

What happens if I want to take my idea away?

Is it possible at all to delete it? Is it possible to

delete my user? (Richter and Ehlers, 2011; Gray

et al., 2008).

Support Uploading Different File Formats to the

Ideas. Rich content formats are vital to build

strong ideas. Textual descriptions and short

comments are helpful, but other ﬁle formats make

the idea richer. For instance, Excel, Word, PDF,

PPT, video, audio, etc. Users are friends of

desktop tools, therefore such tools need to support

these desktop tools to survive.

Low On-boarding Barriers. To attract educators

to new platforms, it is important to keep the

on-boarding efforts minimal. There are a plenty

of existing educational tools, and educators do

not want to learn yet another tool. Also, the

structures and designs of new platforms should be

comparable to the structures and designs of tool

educators are used to. For instance, user proﬁles

can be extended by importing user proﬁles from

existing professional networks, e.g. LinkedIn,

Xing, Research-Gate, etc.

Personalized Recommendations and Match-

making. Give educators recommendations on

similar ideas and further collaborators based on

their interests. Extended user proﬁles can be used

to achieve this goal. It is crucial to simplify the

user experience and the effort / time educators

need to use.

5 DISCUSSION

The validation results showed how educators are

rather new to collaborative practices on OER. What

needs to be discussed is the fact that many of the

collaborations taken place in the online platform

were initiated face-to-face by individuals who already

know each other. Additionally, many collaborators

who were active in the discussions face-to-face did

not engage in online ones. While discussing the

technical point of view for designing collaboration

platforms for OER, the non-technical perspectives

and soft issues will mostly deﬁne whether the tool will

be used or not. It is especially important to reduce

the amount of time educators need to use in getting

familiar with the technology. Satisfying the needs

for an efﬁcient collaborative practice is important but

also to place the platform in line with other successful

technologies in the market. To strive towards this

goal, the study at hand presented a validation of a

collaborative platform for open education, leading to

generalizable design principles that can be further

applied by related initiatives and developers.

Our research has shown that educators and

learners see the beneﬁts for online collaboration

on the idea-level, for instance, when new courses

and educational offerings are being planned.

Nevertheless, one of the challenges is the context of

higher education where openness is not always

a goal to strive towards. Universities have

been developing their regular and online-courses

individually. Learning content for speciﬁc courses

is either developed by individual instructors or

any collaboration is restricted to intra-university

communities and/or includes limited external

contributors that form part of the instructor’s

academic acquaintances. Therefore, it is critical to

the success of idea sharing in Open Education to

(a) address the educators’ lack of awareness of the

advantages of collaborative idea generation, and (b)

promote and empower a dedicated community of

contributors.

This study contributes especially in understanding

the requirements of educators and learners towards

collaboration platforms in open education. Our

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356

research resulted in key design principles for powerful

collaboration platforms in the context of open

education. Part of these design principles, support

main ﬁndings in existing research and emphasize

them.

There is extensive research on the user’s need

for simple tools, in particular with regards to social

networks and Web 2.0 applications (Crumlish and

Malone, 2009). Our validation results support this

argument and therefore, the new collaboration tools

for OER should have a simple layout and intuitive

navigation just like the common used websites

(Okada et al., 2013). With the capabilities of rich

Internet applications, complex user interfaces are

now feasible over the web, such as Adobe Flash,

Microsoft Silverlight, and JavaScript. However, it

is a key for the success of collaborative platforms in

open education, to keep these platforms as simple as

possible. Such complex components should only be

used if they bring a considerable value to the platform.

Otherwise, they should better be avoided.

The platform should also enable the integration

of social media tools and OER adaptation tools.

User experience on the system should match user

experience on social networks and common websites,

such as Google (Okada et al., 2013). Moreover, our

results showed that it is recommended to provide

simple user support regarding the stages of the

collaboration. It is worth mentioning that a reasonable

level of user guidance and user support through

online platforms should be provided. However, so

much guidance might be overwhelming and therefore

might have negative impact. Extensive user research

is necessary to identify the right balance of user

guidance ranging from no guidance at all to full user

guidance.

The essential role of version control has been

identiﬁed since the introduction of collaborative

authoring on the Web (Whitehead Jr. and Wiggins,

1998). It supports the storage of important

resource revisions for later retrieval. Version

control can also support collaboration by allowing

two or more authors to work on the same

resource in parallel. Automatic versioning records

successive modiﬁcations to a resource made by

versioning-unaware clients (Whitehead Jr. and

Wiggins, 1998). Our research has shown the

importance of this core feature of online collaborative

platforms in the context of open education.

Our ﬁndings reveal one of the main challenges

in the context of Web 2.0 authorship, namely,

Intellectual Property Rights (Gray et al., 2008).

Although this issue is typically discussed with respect

to completed resources in the context of Web 2.0,

it is even more complicated in the context of

open education, because it applies also to partially

complete resources and even initial ideas. Therefore,

establishing and enforcing standards for IPRs is a key

element towards the success of collaboration in open

education.

In addition to the aforementioned design

principles, which appear in existing literatures, our

research reveals another set of design principles.

These include: (1) Enable the creation of multiple

types of outcomes and personalize based on those,

which could be done by providing ready-to-use

templates for different types of expected outcomes,

such as textbooks, courses, or educational software.

(2) The use of a common terminology and introduce

this terminology in the system. (3) Support

uploading different ﬁle formats to the ideas. (4)

Low on-boarding barriers, and (5) Personalized

recommendations and matchmaking. These newly

identiﬁed design principles as well as the previously

identiﬁed ones should be considered for upcoming

collaboration platforms for open education.

6 CONCLUSIONS & FUTURE

WORK

This article describes the ﬁndings of the preliminary

validation of a collaboration platform for open

education. The focus was especially in collaborative

idea generation that leads to the production of

OER. Such platforms were not considered for open

education before this. Additionally, collaborative

practices in open education are usually not handled

in online contexts. There is a need to develop

collaboration platforms in open education further.

Within the discourse of the researchers as well as the

developers in our project, the following issues were

seen critical: The need for simple tools, diversify

and adapt based on the user, enable the creation

of multiple types of outcomes and personalize

based on those, the use of a common terminology,

enable the integration of social media tools and

OER adaptation tools, provide simple user support

regarding the further stages, version control, consider

IPRs, support uploading different ﬁle formats to

the ideas, low on-boarding efforts, and personalized

recommendations and match-making.

The online collaboration idea generation platform

should accommodate a collaborative community,

encouraging members to externalize and extend

their ideas in a collaborative fashion. Action

is needed in order to tackle any motivational

barriers towards collaboration and exchange and to

DesignPrinciplesforCollaborationPlatformsforOpenEducation

357

encourage educators to leverage the internet and

online social collaboration media to collaboratively

and openly develop educational ideas into educational

resources. Yet, while there is a proliferation of

online collaboration tools, a platform whose scope

is limited to facilitating collaboration would not add

value to content creation. Instead, a collaboration

platform for open education should aim at supporting

the development process from a methodological point

of view, including the accommodation of different

content types. Adopting a rigid process ﬂow would

reduce the platform’s applicability, while opting for a

free-ﬂow approach could limit its sense of purpose.

In this context, an attribute of paramount

importance to collaborative idea development is

workﬂow ﬂexibility, since there cannot be a standard

work process for learning content development,

consisting of ﬁxed work stages. Indeed, standard

university courses build on structured workﬂows,

while the design of complex learning objects (e.g.,

educational games) poses different requirements and

calls for more versatile (less-structured) approaches.

Consequently, each idea development project has its

unique characteristics. Therefore, one important step

towards enhancing the usability of the platform is the

provision of customized idea templates. By selecting

a predeﬁned idea template, the idea schema is created

using a speciﬁc format that applies to the respective

educational resource, for educators to collaboratively

ﬁll out and extend.

The platform should support the discoverability

of shared ideas, providing universal access to such

resources. The issue of sustainability is also

imperative to be addressed. A shared idea may inspire

one or more idea development projects yielding

an equal number of open educational resources.

Sustainability refers to the idea development project’s

ongoing ability to meet its goals. This calls for a

systematic approach in the idea development process:

Transparency and methods for documenting and

maintaining control over individual contributions,

document versions, etc. are required. Contributors

should be able to revisit and rework the idea

development project, in order to adapt it to changing

requirements.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research has been co-funded by the European

Commission through the LLP Erasmus program,

Open Educational Ideas and Innovations (OEI2),

539990-LLP-1-2013-1-F1-ERASMUS-EQMC

(http://www.idea-space.eu).

The observation- and focus-groups in this research

have been conducted by the OEI2 project partners:

JYU-Finland, ESCP-Germany, NSCR-Greece,

VMU-Lithuania, and DHBW-Germany.

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