title: Qualitative variation in perceptions of Open Educational Practices by educators and academic administrators
title: A phenomenographic analysis
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Khalil, Abedelaziz
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2024

description: Openness in higher education is crucial for fostering collaboration,
 diversity, engagement, co-creation, and knowledge sharing. Recent
 scholarship has discussed the emergence of Open Educational Practices
 (OEP), studies of which have focused on providing the definitions of OEP,
 differentiating it from an earlier focus on Open Education Resources
 (OER), and stipulating the roles of the practitioners involved. Yet what
 seems missing is any conception of how the practitioners undertaking OEP
 understand, experience, and make sense of it themselves. 
 
 
 This thesis adopts a phenomenographic approach to understand the assigned
 meanings and variation of experiences of those practitioners who work on
 the issue. Seven educators and six administrators from an Open University
 in Palestine were interviewed about their practical understandings and
 roles in OEP implementation. Interview transcripts were subject to a
 phenomenographic analysis which sought to reveal patterns of variation in
 practitioners' holistic and detailed perceptions and experiences.
 
 
 The findings are presented as a phenomenographic outcome space presenting
 four distinct, ways in which the research participants describe the OEP
 phenomenon. In four progressively inclusive categories of description, OEP
 is understood as (1) Recontextualizing open resources and methods; (2)
 Collaborating and engaging learners through pragmatic activities; (3)
 Empowering OEP practitioners by enhancing their understanding of openness;
 (4) Engaging communities by creating knowledge and exchanging experiences.
 Between the categories, a developmental progression is illustrated,
 underscoring an expanding awareness across three dimensions of variation:
 practitioners, beneficiaries, and implementation. For example, in the
 first category, the OEP beneficiaries are understood as learners within
 the classroom, but by the fourth category, they are understood as the
 global higher education community. 
 
 
 This thesis contributes to the literature based on this close analysis of
 practitioners’ understandings. For example, in the literature on defining
 OEP, I contribute an understanding that reaches beyond content towards
 open pedagogies and collaborative practices. To the literature on the
 relationship between OEP and OER, I contribute an innovative perspective
 on OEP implementation, shifting from resources to approaches emphasising
 the interconnected use of multiple open platforms for immersive learning.
 In the literature on the roles of OEP practitioners, I contribute an
 appreciation of how practitioners perceive their roles as recruiting other
 practitioners, including learners, educators, researchers, administrators,
 and the global higher education community. These contributions offer
 crucial insights into the recent academic discourse of maximising openness
 in higher education, derived from analysing the real-world understandings
 of actual practitioners.