The role of brokers in cultivating an inter-institutional community around open educational resources in higher education

Abstract

Brokers are individuals who facilitate transfer of knowledge and resources, and coordinate efforts across boundaries of organizations. They are defined by their role rather than their organizational position. Brokers might be imperative for the formation and maintenance of inter-institutional relationship as they have the responsibility and the necessary structural position to connect otherwise separate groups. In the context of this study, brokers had the role to cultivate an inter-institutional community around open educational resources (OER) by connecting groups of teachers across higher education institutes. OER provide higher education institutes with an aid to face the challenges of improving teaching and learning. Yet most OER users encounter challenges that relate to finding resources that are relevant, up-to-date, and of good quality. Communities could minimize this issue, but many OER initiatives fizzle out as expanding their impact is an arduous task. This qualitative descriptive study draws upon cultural-historical activity theory to understand the complexities associated with the role of brokers in creating sustainable collaboration on OER across 15 higher education institutes in the Netherlands. Data was collected from project documents, process reports, reflections reports, and a retrospective focus group. The findings show that brokers engaged in a wide variety of actions but that a small-scale, personal, and content-oriented approach to encourage teachers to engage with the OER repository and the online community was perceived as the most valuable. Brokers also experienced conflicts due to the demanding context they were operating in, the ambiguity of their role, and the organizational constraints they were confronted with. Practical implications refer to supporting higher education institutes that wish to initiate sustainable collaboration across institutes.

What’s in it for me? A mixed-methods study on teachers’ value creation in an inter-institutional community on open educational resources in higher education

“…Their findings indicated that a deliberate strategy is needed with a dual focus on a supportive learning space for teachers to have discussions, generate ideas and to experiment with open textbooks, and on the role of facilitators to organize structured meetings and to connect teachers' needs with information and expertise within the institute. In line with this, Baas et al (2022a) showed the importance of brokers in cultivating an inter-institutional community on OER. Due to their personal, small-scale, and content-oriented approaches, brokers were pivotal in encouraging teachers to engage with the community.…”

“…OER communities might facilitate boundary crossing across institutes (Baas et al, 2022a). Findings on applied and realized value denote that it became easier for teachers to connect with peers, and to initiate collaboration projects across institutes, because boundaries between institutes had diminished.…”

Cultivating a new ecosystem in English language teaching: A focus on researchers in a textbook development project

“…For instance, SCRELE effectively coordinated activities for the advisors who worked with policy makers of MoE in the macrosystem to give a seminar on the 2017 Standards, coming in contact with the writing group in the microsystem. By and large, these agents played similar roles as brokers who facilitated boundary crossing and sustainable collaboration among communities or institutions (Baas et al., 2023).…”

Co-constructing ‘third spaces’ for engagement between minoritized community groups and environmental scientists

“…We had a conversation and then she put me in touch with D, Mosaic The connection between E and C was crucial to everything that followed in our partnership. E, a known, well-networked and trusted contributor among minoritized groups within the discourse of environmental equity, acted as a significant 'cultural broker' (Baas et al, 2023) The Walking the Walk project would not have been possible if we had not made connections with external partners through a combination of 'structured' (Palinkas et al, 2015) and 'snowball' sampling (Parker et al, 2019) The degree to which connections were maintained in person and through cooperative working were key distinguishing features between Walking the Walk and Landscape Stories. Walking the Walk involved connections between university staff and three minoritized community walking groups.…”