Using OER

1. Purposes of use

Open educational resources based on MediaWiki software offer opportunities for a broad spectrum of use on all levels of education. However, it presents the greatest benefits and possibilities for application to life-long learning and university education. In terms of university education, OER MWS is suitable primarily for studies that require a transdisciplinary overlap and access to the newest knowledge. These resources fulfill their purpose primarily in fields where emphasis is placed on: 

a) Openness of knowledge. The openness of knowledge is a fundamental requirement for the effective dissemination of knowledge. 

b) The need for current information. Knowledge is quickly developing. Primarily in the field of university education, it is therefore necessary to use current sources that are often available earlier in online form than in printed form. OER make it easy to insert links to thematic resources.  

c) Interdisciplinary thought. In university education, being able to think in contexts is appreciated. The OER environment makes it easy to redirect readers to associated topics and provides a well-arranged structure for understanding contexts. 

d) Interconnection of actors. Various problems of study require the connection of various actors in the creation of knowledge and problem solving. For example, open educational resources can be created by professionals from the academic sphere, but also allow for the involvement of actors from the practical field, who can add current knowledge to the resource from their daily practice (e.g. in problems linked to climate change, farmers can state how climatic changes are affecting them specifically in given areas).  

In addition, it is necessary to mention the specific study purposes that MediaWiki OER are best for. This naturally depends on the nature of each resource, which can be designed for various purposes. Nonetheless, it is possible to define the purposes for which these resources are ideal so that their added value – as compared to classic resources such as printed study materials and websites – can manifest itself to the fullest degree. 

The main principles of OER MWS that differ them from other resources can be defined primarily as the possibility of broad, open and collaborative editing, i.e. the option of the given resource to be edited after its creation by anyone, not just its creators or the users they have approved. This, however, can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, anyone with an internet connection can edit and update the resource to include the most recent knowledge, which supports the principles of citizen science and the democratization of knowledge creation. On the other hand, anonymous editing can represent a serious problem for the final appearance of the text, as anonymous contributors can intentionally or unintentionally damage the resource, add unsuitable articles or delete existing sections, thus lowering its quality. 

If the possibility of anonymous editing – as the primary benefit of OER MWS – is upheld, it is necessary to deal with the ways in which its quality and reasons for use are ensured. In cases of anonymous OER MWS, it is problematic when students consider these sources to be as credible as, for example, university study materials or other textbooks written by a professional in the field or a collective of authors. On the contrary, they should be highly cautious in using these resources. 

An ideal purpose for using anonymous OER WMS is as a guidepost to other resources. These resources are not meant to work as a coherent whole to substitute classic resources, but rather as an introduction to the issue – a certain “gateway to the world of knowledge”, i.e. a search engine of information and sources on the issue being studied rather than classic textbook text. From the research we have carried out, it is clear, for example, that the majority of student-respondents use OER MWS in this manner. 

On the contrary, using them for studying for examinations in the sense of substituting them for university resources is usually not recommended; exceptions are cases in which a teacher himself/herself has evaluated and recommended the given resource. Even in this, however, it is still necessary to take caution, as the resource may be changed after being approved of by an expert. Therefore, students should be notified of what version of the page has been checked and told to study that version.

2. Usability

If we are making a decision about something like which Mediawiki-software based open educational resource to use, realizing our educational/information needs plays a central role, and we need to answer the following question: “What are we planning to use the given OER MWS for?”

Correctly created OER MWS have a defined target group and should be able to satisfy its information and educational needs. For example, there is a difference in using individual wiki systems. While Wikipedia’s target group is relatively open (it defines itself mainly as an encyclopedia) and the creation of its content is liberal in the sense that it is up to each article’s community to create their own content. In comparison to this, for example, the Czech medicine-oriented WikiSkripta focuses on students of medical studies, and its ambition is to educate students in these fields; it does not attempt to substitute classic study materials or textbooks, but to act as an addition to them. The Enviwiki encyclopedia of the environment is designated to those interested in knowledge from the area of the environment, both for students and the general public; its purpose is not to substitute Wikipedia, which it differs from in a number of ways. 

Generally speaking, anonymous OER MWS are usually not recommended as a primary source for studying a given issue in an area like university education, where students should primarily be taught to use traditional and respected resources (see the previous chapter on Purposes of use). Even an anonymous resource can be suitably used, primarily as a guidepost to other sources, which can be cited for further research in the references at the end of the article or in a section like “literature for further study”. If we do not want to use the resource only for our educational needs but also use it to create another resource, it is first necessary to look at the licensing conditions, i.e. what license the resource we are using is under and whether this license allows for further use. It is ideal if the resource is licensed under some form of open license.

3. Verifiability

The verifiability of a statement via respected sources is a basic criterion for orientation in open educational resources – especially anonymous ones – based on MediaWiki software.  

Thanks to the verifiability of individual statements, an anonymous resource to a certain degree becomes non-anonymous thanks to the cited information it contains. In universities, for example, students are often taught not to cite Wikipedia. Ideally, this should not be necessary. If articles on Wikipedia are written well (according to their rules), each statement that is not publicly known (and thus usable for university purposes) should be properly cited. The user should then not cite Wikipedia, but the source cited within it.

But, if we like a certain formulation on Wikipedia that is not properly cited, we can look at who entered it into Wikipedia. The special Wiki Blame tool is used for this. In some cases, encyclopedia creators act non-anonymously (for example the well-known Czech Wikipedist and Charles University professor Jan Sokol) and can be cited – instead of Wikipedia, e.g. as the author Jan Sokol. The MediaWiki software environment makes it possible to look up every single edit and its author (including their number of successful edits, etc.). In a certain sense, it is less anonymous than articles that list a number of authors in which it is unclear who wrote what. With MediaWiki software resources, we have a detailed overview of all the activities of a given user. 

Another problem with referencing/verifiability is how to cite. Below many articles, we see a list of references and used literature that was used during the creation of the text. However, a problem arises when we want to find where a certain statement comes from. We don’t know which of the given sources it comes from, if at all, or whether the author was only using his/her own knowledge. Although for the writer it is often the easiest option – i.e. rather than citing statements directly in the text – careful citation gives the reader another dimension of usability for the resource and it becomes crucial at various educational levels (e.g. at university) for the potential use of the given information. 

Proper citation using respected sources in a given field is what heightens the text’s quality (in the sense of the verifiability of information). A similar practice applies, for example, to prestigious scientific papers, in which the authors often avoid making baseless statements in sections like the introduction, and thus the majority of statements are those that are backed by references (or they are the subsequent interpretation of these statements by the authors of the articles). A similar practice applies to the best articles on English-language Wikipedia, which are also characterized by the fact that they are properly cited (see the Figure below)

Figure showing best practices in citing the best articles on English-language Wikipedia in the introduction of the article “Climate change”. 

Another aspect we can use to help us orient ourselves while using OER WMS is the degree of respect for the used sources. In the case of university education, this differs from field to field. However, it is generally true that sources respected by the academic community such as scientific books or articles in scientific journals should be cited rather than reports from the media. For better orientation in the hierarchy of resources, Eaton’s Hierarchy of Sources may be helpful (Table below). 

Table. A table of respected sources for teaching students, which, after editing, can be useful for the creation of OER WMS on a university level in other fields.

4. Topicality

Topicality is a key factor when using open educational resources based on MediaWiki software (OER WMS).

The ability to easily update the content of these resources (which can often be done by practically anyone) is what gives them a competitive advantage over their more closed counterparts, i.e. primarily printed resources and, to a limited degree, static websites and other resources from the web 1.0 environment, which can often be updated only by the given website’s administrator. Wikipedia and other OER WMS, although often created in the beginnings of the internet’s development, belong to the group of websites under the web 2.0 label, i.e. resources that allow for users to take part in their development and potentially edit their content. 

The significance of topicality became very evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, which afflicted the world in 2020. Over the course of several weeks, over four thousand articles on Covid appeared on English-language Wikipedia and registered over 240 million views (Wikimediafoundation, 2020). Multiple edits were often made over the course of a single minute. In practice, articles were thus being updated almost constantly. In this period, Google also worked off of Wikipedia in its graphs to depict the number of afflicted persons in individual countries. 

A community of health experts appeared in a wholly spontaneous manner on Wikipedia surrounding coronavirus articles, monitoring them to make sure no baseless information was entered into them (Cohen, 2020). In a period when academic and scientific journals were often lax in their quality assurance mechanisms and printing studies that under normal circumstances would not necessarily pass a peer-review process, Wikipedia became a kind of “gatekeeper” to the world of knowledge about Covid. The article “Coronavirus disease 2019” on English-language Wikipedia was edited by a total of over one thousand editors and also a score of bots (artificial intelligence algorithms), which altogether made more than five thousand edits (see the Figure below). It is clear that a similar mechanism of updating content would be impossible for printed publications (or for traditional websites), as would be their distribution throughout the world in such a short period of time. 

Figure. Article statistics for the Coronavirus disease 2019 on English-language Wikipedia.

In the creation of OER MWS content, it is also possible to use editing algorithms (or “bots”), which point users to problematic passages they’ve written. In the example of vandalism, these can be vulgarisms; nonetheless, editing algorithms are also useful for ensuring topicality. Editing bots point the editor to words like “this year’s” or “present”, recommending they be avoided and thus preventing the text from seeming outdated in the future. 

With the exception of citing the time a text was accessed (or the last update to the resource that we are using), for OER WMS use and citation it is better to list this data along with the specific page number (or ID), which we can find in the edit history. Listing this data guarantees that the party interested in citing the resource will find the exact version we are using. As was already stated in the case of OER WMS, multiple edits can take place over the course of a single minute, and thus citing both the hour or minute the article was accessed is not necessarily sufficient. 

Generally speaking, if we want to verify whether the resource we intend to use is updated, we have three ways of recognizing this: 

• Content – In terms of content, we often see time data in an article, which in some cases can be a useful indicator of topicality. This especially applies when we are reading a text on an issue with knowledge that we expect to develop over time (e.g. the Climate change article on English-language Wikipedia) and the last time data in the text is, for example, 2010 – in such a case, we can assume that the source is not being regularly updated. 

• References – References are a useful indicator of topicality. It is enough to look at the date of their publication and find out whether one is from a recent date. 

• Edit history – Edit history is the best indicator of whether “something is going on” with the article in the sense that someone is taking care of it. In OER WMS, history is often at the top right of the page (Figure 5). When we click on it, we can tell by the time data when the last update was made or whether the article is being regularly edited. 

At the same time, it should be noted that not all articles need to be updated. For some topics, the knowledge surrounding it is no longer developing as quickly, so the fact that they are not regularly updated does not necessarily mean a detriment to their quality. 

Figure. Graphic illustration of history options in the Global Warming article on English-language Wikipedia.

LITERATURE: 

• Wikimediafoundation. (2020). Instagram.
• Cohen, Noam. (2020). How Wikipedia Prevents the Spread of Coronavirus Misinformation. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/how-wikipedia-prevents-spread-coronavirus-misinformation/ (Available 9. 2. 2021).

5. Impartiality

When selecting suitable open educational resources based on Mediawiki software (OER WMS), objectivity and a neutral point of view play an important role. The resource should not ignore any perspective on the issue if these opinions are equally represented in public debate. 

Objectivity, i.e. impartial objective discourse on a specific problem, is important for educational reasons and especially in the process of university education, during which students should study from resources that are not created for advertising or the promotion of a certain opinion at the expense of another that is just as relevant for the given purposes. At the same time, OER WMS are at significant risk from their creators and their efforts to promote their own opinions, and can intentionally deviate in content from an objective field towards their own convictions. Editing a text is relatively simple, and thus it tempts many individuals to use it for such purposes. 

Objectivity is therefore one of the basic requirements for something like creating articles on Wikipedia. Articles that do not fulfill neutrality requirements should be rewritten. Just like Wikipedia, it is generally true that other OER WMS should also not be used as a space for the propagation of baseless opinions. On the contrary, all opinions that are not “common knowledge” (or universally known) should be backed by serious sources, ideally with the results of relevant scientific research (primarily in the field of use for university purposes). 

Objectivity does not mean that all opinions on a given issue should be contained within the OER WMS. This applies especially to opinions that are wholly marginal in public debate and are not supported by facts. For example, in an article on the curvature of the Earth, it is not necessary to state that this fact is doubted by a certain group of individuals who deny that the Earth is round and are convinced that it is flat. 

In order to preserve objectivity, it is important at least partially to summarize knowledge from sources that are widely acknowledged and respected in the given issue (for example, with scientific articles, their overall frequency of citation can be used, as the most widely cited works usually form the basis and core of the field – similarly to the authors of these works). Just how extensive this summary should be significantly varies, and depends primarily on the target group that the resource has been created for.