Abeywardena, I. S., Dhanarajan, G., & Chan, C.S. (2012). Searching and Locating OER: Barriers to the Wider Adoption of OER for Teaching in Asia. Proceedings of the Regional Symposium on Open Educational Resources: An Asian Perspective on Policies and Practice, 19-21 September 2012, Penang, Malaysia.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are fast becoming a global phenomenon which could potentially provide free access to knowledge for the masses. Since the inception of this concept, governmental and non-governmental grants alongside generous philanthropy have given rise to a vast array of OER repositories all over the world. With this movement gaining momentum, more and more of the learned community have started contributing resources to these OER repositories making them grow exponentially rich in knowledge. However, despite the availability of a large number of OER repositories, the use and re-use of OER are yet to become mainstream in many regions and institutions. One reason for this slow uptake is the inability to effectively search and locate desirable OER using the available search methodologies as it would be next to impossible to trawl through all the disconnected and disparate repositories manually. The findings discussed in this paper are part of a broader study into the OER landscape in the Asian region concentrating mainly on China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam where close to five hundred and eighty academics from public, private not-for-profit and private for-profit institutions participated. This research paper discusses how Asia fares with respect to searching and locating desirable OER and whether it is truly a barrier to the wider adoption of OER for teaching in the region.
Friday, November 9, 2012
E-Business - Taking Your Business Online in 9 Steps
This presentation provides you a comprehensive 9 step guide to taking your business completely online through E-Business. It deals with what consumers look for in a product, the difference between E-Commerce and E-Business, why go online, content management systems (CMS), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Online shopping carts, payment gateways, cloud computing, virtual collaboration, social media marketing and M-Commerce.
Parts of this presentation are shared under the CC BY license where ever it is specified.
Parts of this presentation are shared under the CC BY license where ever it is specified.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Beyond World Class 101: A consumer's RIGHT to an apology
If you have read my post World Best practices and the Asian Academic Institution, you will know that I'm a strong believer in the rights of a consumer whether it is in academia or otherwise. Unfortunately, here in Asia, us consumers don't seem to know our rights when it comes to purchasing goods and services. This lack of knowledge is either ignorance or naivete on our part, as Asians, as we think it is impolite to demand the service we deserve for the hard earned money we pay our service providers. As a result, the service providers have gotten into the bad habit of providing poor customer service all day everyday as their standard policy. Sadly, this is as true for multinational conglomerates and academic institutions as it is for street corner convenience stores.
"You are too demanding..." some say to me trying to justify why a service provider hasn't provided me the customer service I demand. Maybe this is true as I have been influenced by the West in recession where a customer lost equals to a pay-cut, a smaller bonus or someone loosing his/her job; Or maybe it is because I used to work for and later with a managing director (Mr. Ranjiv Bhalla) who truly believed in providing Beyond World Class (BWC) customer service. In his book, a customer who has paid hard earned money deserves on-time delivery of the goods and services he/she has purchased to his/her satisfaction. If not he/she deserves an apology followed by the timely rectification of the problem to his/her satisfaction. This fundamental ideology practiced in the West is what we Asians lack as there is a great shortage of good alternative service providers and an even greater shortage of consumer rights watchdogs.
Here's an example of the plight of an Asian consumer. Being a techi who likes gadgets, I recently purchased a new TV which is the largest (bigass) and the coolest I have ever owned with all the features on offer in the market (I'll do a review of it in a later post). I went to a very reputable seller here in Malaysia, paid for the TV in full and agreed on a mutually convenient delivery time. Unfortunately, the delivery time was at 2-3pm on a weekday and I had to apply for leave off of work to receive my item. Knowing how Asia works, I made sure I called the sales person at 2pm to confirm the delivery. The sales person promised to call me back in five minutes and as usual didn't bother (surprise surprise...). So I called back at 3pm in a much firmer tone and the sales person has the nerve (or the incompetence) to tell me that my item is not going to be delivered today; and as usual, there was no apology or reason for this tardiness. It was just the way they rolled. As a consumer who knows his rights, I made a few phone calls to the bosses and the bosses of bosses whom these people report and made sure that my item was delivered to me by 4.30pm (trust me when I say that it was a great victory to get it delivered on the day let alone in one and a half hours). I also made sure that they apologised for the inconvenience caused. Cutting a long story short, what I'm trying to say is that every service provider can learn a thing or two from many of the pizza delivery companies who will apologise for late delivery and compensate by giving you a free pizza. Obviously I'm not implying that stuff should be given away for free just because the service is poor. However, I strongly believe that the consumer has the RIGHT to an apology and the rectification of the problem to his/her satisfaction.
Maybe I'm an idealist but I truly think we need more Managers and CEOs who truly GET the rights of a paying consumer; Or maybe academic institutions should take serious note of this problem when designing their curricula; Or maybe I need to water down my expectations as a consumer in Asia and let these sales people scam me into paying my hard earned money for incompetent and unacceptable customer service; Or maybe us Asians need to be educated about our RIGHTS as consumers!
"You are too demanding..." some say to me trying to justify why a service provider hasn't provided me the customer service I demand. Maybe this is true as I have been influenced by the West in recession where a customer lost equals to a pay-cut, a smaller bonus or someone loosing his/her job; Or maybe it is because I used to work for and later with a managing director (Mr. Ranjiv Bhalla) who truly believed in providing Beyond World Class (BWC) customer service. In his book, a customer who has paid hard earned money deserves on-time delivery of the goods and services he/she has purchased to his/her satisfaction. If not he/she deserves an apology followed by the timely rectification of the problem to his/her satisfaction. This fundamental ideology practiced in the West is what we Asians lack as there is a great shortage of good alternative service providers and an even greater shortage of consumer rights watchdogs.
Here's an example of the plight of an Asian consumer. Being a techi who likes gadgets, I recently purchased a new TV which is the largest (bigass) and the coolest I have ever owned with all the features on offer in the market (I'll do a review of it in a later post). I went to a very reputable seller here in Malaysia, paid for the TV in full and agreed on a mutually convenient delivery time. Unfortunately, the delivery time was at 2-3pm on a weekday and I had to apply for leave off of work to receive my item. Knowing how Asia works, I made sure I called the sales person at 2pm to confirm the delivery. The sales person promised to call me back in five minutes and as usual didn't bother (surprise surprise...). So I called back at 3pm in a much firmer tone and the sales person has the nerve (or the incompetence) to tell me that my item is not going to be delivered today; and as usual, there was no apology or reason for this tardiness. It was just the way they rolled. As a consumer who knows his rights, I made a few phone calls to the bosses and the bosses of bosses whom these people report and made sure that my item was delivered to me by 4.30pm (trust me when I say that it was a great victory to get it delivered on the day let alone in one and a half hours). I also made sure that they apologised for the inconvenience caused. Cutting a long story short, what I'm trying to say is that every service provider can learn a thing or two from many of the pizza delivery companies who will apologise for late delivery and compensate by giving you a free pizza. Obviously I'm not implying that stuff should be given away for free just because the service is poor. However, I strongly believe that the consumer has the RIGHT to an apology and the rectification of the problem to his/her satisfaction.
Maybe I'm an idealist but I truly think we need more Managers and CEOs who truly GET the rights of a paying consumer; Or maybe academic institutions should take serious note of this problem when designing their curricula; Or maybe I need to water down my expectations as a consumer in Asia and let these sales people scam me into paying my hard earned money for incompetent and unacceptable customer service; Or maybe us Asians need to be educated about our RIGHTS as consumers!
Monday, October 22, 2012
OERScout: Autonomous Clustering of Open Educational Resources using Keyword-Document Matrix
Abeywardena, I. S., Tham, C.Y., Chan, C.S., & Balaji. V. (2012). OERScout: Autonomous Clustering of Open Educational Resources using Keyword-Document Matrix. Proceedings of the 26th Asian Association of Open Universities Conference, 17-18 October 2012, Chiba, Japan.
Abstract
The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has gained momentum in the past few years. With this new drive towards making knowledge open and accessible, a large number of OER repositories have been established and made available online throughout the globe. However, despite the fact that these repositories hold a large number of high quality material, the use and re-use of OER has not taken off as anticipated due to various geographic, socio and technological limitations. One such technological limitation is the present day inability to effectively search and locate OER materials which are specific and relevant to a particular academic domain. As a first step towards a possible solution to this issue, this paper discusses the design and development of a clustering algorithm which accurately clusters text based OER materials by building a Keyword-Document Matrix (KDM) using autonomously identified domain specific keywords. This algorithm is the first phase of a larger technology framework named “OERScout” which is a new methodology for effectively searching and locating desirable OER for academic use.
Abstract
The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has gained momentum in the past few years. With this new drive towards making knowledge open and accessible, a large number of OER repositories have been established and made available online throughout the globe. However, despite the fact that these repositories hold a large number of high quality material, the use and re-use of OER has not taken off as anticipated due to various geographic, socio and technological limitations. One such technological limitation is the present day inability to effectively search and locate OER materials which are specific and relevant to a particular academic domain. As a first step towards a possible solution to this issue, this paper discusses the design and development of a clustering algorithm which accurately clusters text based OER materials by building a Keyword-Document Matrix (KDM) using autonomously identified domain specific keywords. This algorithm is the first phase of a larger technology framework named “OERScout” which is a new methodology for effectively searching and locating desirable OER for academic use.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Open Educational Resources in Asia
Abeywardena, I. S., & Dhanarajan, G. (2012). Open Educational
Resources in Asia. Proceedings of the Symposium on E-learning and Open
Educational Resources: Practices and new initiatives organised by the
Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK), 18th April 2012, Hong Kong.
Recording and slides available at http://oer.ouhk.edu.hk/2012.php
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