Ken Udas

University of Idaho | UID · Office of Provost & Executive Vice President

The function of the university in serving the state is the reproduction and legitimization of state functions and behaviours. Theorized in this manner, the university is observed as an internal auxiliary agent of the state that is made subordinate to dominant class interests and not as an independent agent able to critically and selectively respond...

Why is it that we tend to overcomplicate decision making when it comes to introducing innovative ideas? This can be especially true when someone wishes to try out a new and emerging educational technology in their teaching practice. Will it break the bank, threaten the stable core or simply put the institution at too much risk? In order to impact o...

In the face of constant calls for innovation from within and outside the university, why does it seem so difficult to liberate creativity among the higher education community? A strong culture of risk management, traditional design processes, high compliance burdens, and measuring return on investment created organizational gridlock at the Universi...

The overall goals of the research were to determine what Australian postgraduates think about their student experience and to recommend ameliorative actions to guide the strategies of higher education leaders. The specific project aims were to: (i) undertake a comprehensive analysis of the broad experiences of Australian coursework postgraduate stu...

The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has a strong social justice ethos. Based on this ethos, USQ is seeking to re-position and re-conceptualize itself as a university grounded in the principles of openness and open education. This chapter describes the experiences of USQ as it strives to build a culture of openness and agility and investigat...

The author reflects on the importance of civic engagement in the universities. Topics discussed include emergence of public intellectualism by the civic role of universities via academic programming and outreach activities, flourishing of corporate identity of universities and importance of questions and conversation for universities as the fundame...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that pointing to patterns of change in the adoption and institutionalization of educational resources, the appropriateness of traditional heavy and front‐loaded planning and management regimes is challenged in favor of alternative Agile Methods. Design/methodology/approach – Starting from the simple o...

This text is an edited collection of short essays and discussions that were part of the Terra Incognita Project that was hosted by Penn State World Campus from 2007 through 2009. It can now serve a an important part of the history of OSS and OER in higher education. The contents were all openly licensed and were subsequently converted into a Open T...

The growing influence of Open Educational Resources (OER),including Open Source Software (OSS),on the thinking of academics and academic administrators is now impacting the operations of colleges and universities (Caswell, et. al., 2008; Vest, 2006; Wiley, 2006). Developing systems to promote the reuse of learning material is a social phenomena tha...

Although many educators will find the notion of an Open Source Online University (OSOU) inherently appealing, the effectiveness of such an institution will be based on whether it is relevant to local needs, is affordable, and whether it improves accessibility in developing countries. The paper will address these criteria in terms of open and flexib...

In March 2007 a group of authors wrote short articles about the impact of Open Educational Resources and Open Source Software on education and engaged in dialog on the topic. The articles were posted on Terra lncognita. Several themes surfaced from the 11 articles, which included the roles of common-based peer production as an emerging economic and...

Udas, Ken. “Service Integration, Human Services Collaboration, and Computer Supported Co-Operative Work.” In Synergy Matters: Working with Systems in the 21st Century, edited by Adrian M. Castell, Amanda J. Gregory, Giles A. Hindle, Mathew E. James, and Gillian Ragsdell, 283–89. Presented at the 6th UK Systems Society International Conference. Spri...

Over the past decade, the Web has dramatically changed distance education in North America, greatly increasing the number and diversity of institutions involved in distance education, creating new institutions and models for institutional collaboration, and mainstreaming many facets of distance education into the fabric of traditional institutions....

This paper presents a comparative model developed specifically for evaluating learning management software for adoption decisions in which open source software (OSS) and proprietary options are under consideration in higher education. The model is built on the Business Readiness Rating (BRR), which is an emerging software evaluation method for rati...

This paper describes the development of global virtual communities of practice in Eduforge.org relative to what is considered the precursors to virtual community development and good practice. To this end, we will provide a) background information about Eduforge (a virtual collaborative environment, located at www.eduforge.org), b) identify and des...

Contributing Author Reporting on New Zealand for the Tertiary Education Commission --- Following the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000, scepticism about e-learning replaced over-enthusiasm. Rhetoric aside, where do we stand? Why and how do different kinds of tertiary education institutions engage in e-learning? What do institutions perceive to b...

Eduforge is a virtual collaborative learning and exploratory environment designed for the sharing of ideas, research outcomes, open source educational software, and tools within a community of learners and researchers. Eduforge encourages cross institutional collaboration among individuals within an independent environment outside the normal bounda...

Open source software (OSS) is increasingly becoming an important part of e-learning capacity in New Zealand’s tertiary education sector. The purpose of this report is to discuss the use of open source education software and the role of open source communities, and to achieve a better understanding of some of the relationships among OSS communities,...

Eduforge is a virtual collaborative learning and exploratory environment designed for the sharing of ideas, research outcomes, open source educational software, and tools within a community of learners and researchers. It is an open access resource allowing anyone with an interest in the exploration of teaching and learning to join the community. E...

The NZ Open Source Virtual Learning Environment Project is the implementation of e-learning content creation tools and an open source virtual learning environment (VLE) for use by a group of tertiary education organisations throughout New Zealand. The project team will adopt and contribute to e-learning application software from active open source...

In this paper the international intellectual property regime as defined in the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is described and analyzed in terms of critical systems thinking. The principal analytical constructs applied to the Agreement and its development are critical awar...

In this paper participatory action research (PAR) is offered as a foundation for the development of critical pedagogy. The need for public education reform in the United States is identified, PAR principles are described, PAR is discussed in terms of pedagogy and curriculum development, and potential barriers to implementation are indicated. PAR's...

In this paper Kurt Lewin's notions of conflict in social systems are applied to interprofessional social service and education collaboratives. Interprofessional collaboration and service integration are parts of a larger reform effort addressed at reconfiguring and rethinking the ways that social service and educational systems are designed, servic...

Management information system (MIS) professionals have a central role in technology development, determining how technology is used in organizations, and the effects it has on clients and society. MIS stakeholders have expressed concern regarding MIS professional's role in computer crime, and security of electronically stored information. It is rec...

This chapter details the threats to America's children, reviews the policies undergirding new proposals for changing the status quo, and reports on integrated service programs currently in operation and the design and development of interprofessional education programs to support them. Particular implications are drawn for the role that research an...

The notions of democratic and participatory decision making are integral to the discourse on interprofessional collaboration and service integration. Information systems have an important role in many organizations and must be designed using the same principles espoused by the larger organization. Using a case study of a service integration project...

The purpose of this study was to describe the organizational cultures of two university-based interprofessional development sites. The overall description includes presentations of case studies, as well as focused identification and analysis of the organizational outcomes of the projects; the barriers to interprofessional education and collaboratio...

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