Abstract:

This paper investigates online student attitudes towards ownership of collaboratively created online resources and explores whether a sense of community might influence such attitudes. Five participants were randomly selected as they represented a group working collaboratively to complete part of an online module aimed at postgraduate education professionals located in different parts of the world. Applying Rovai’s framework 2001 to identify a sense of community, the work adopts a case-study methodology whilst utilizing a range of data collection methods including email, personal online journal postings and a short questionnaire. Data generated was coded to identify emergent themes with a colleague acting as critical friend to verify the findings and ensure validity of the research. The findings indicate that students believe jointly- created resources should be freely available to participants and to tutors who may request that they be given permission to reuse or repurpose such artefacts. The sense of belonging to a Community of Practice is key to this view although the subsequent question of making such materials freely available across the institution or through OERs requires further investigation.RECEIVED 8 March 2017, REVISED 11 April 2017, ACCEPTED 14 April 2017

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