Resource Sharing Toolkit August 26, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI began work this week on the resource sharing toolkit for staff here at NTU. My intention is to write targeted guidance for teaching and support staff, as well as, managers. I have written draft guides for OER and Sharing at NTU, which I will be piloting on one of your Schools here. For the OER I found the infonet’s OER infokit and OER guide produced by the Unicyle project extremely useful. For the approach here I used the leaflet that we have produced and an overview paper of the Learning Repositories that I produced some time back. The stuff I have produced so far is available at http://wiki.ntushare.org/tiki-index.php?page=Resource+Sharing+Toolkit.
CC and Resource Sharing Toolkit August 19, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentWe have carried out some further investigation this week on how we can use templates within our Learning Repository to help staff to tag rights information to the learning resources that they are publishing. The templates within the LR allow us to autopopulate information, so for example if a user selects the creative commons template the license information would be autopopulated in the description.
I have, also, begun identifying and developing materials for our Resource Sharing Toolkit which I hope my wider development and implementation group will be working on for the remainder part of the project. I have already developed a concept map and I am looking at the Leeds Met’s Unicycle resources which are excellent.
Beginning to Establish Priorities for the Final Phase August 12, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI met with my Development and Implementation core group this morning to discuss some of our outstanding issues and priorities for next year. As I have said probably on numerous occasions our main efforts will be concentrating on engaging staff, my colleague Anna Armstrong has been reviewing the training and support documentation to see if we can chunk it up a little bit more – and we need to write short guides for our external repositories JorumOpen and Merlot. My other colleague Lisa Warburton our copyright advisor is putting her documentation online in the our support course which I will eventually be turning into a toolkit – this will include a creative commons guide for staff wanting to make their content open. We still have some work to do with respect to developing the help screens in the Learning Repository and implementing rights within our metadata schema that takes into account Creative Commons, for this it looks like we may revisit templates again. We also, had a discussion about sustainability this morning, in particular ownership of the repository after the project, processes for requesting further repositories and the possibility of having a student repository. All of these issues I will duly note and revisit in the new year. So busy busy.
Healthchecking August 12, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI have had my head down doing healthchecks of the Learning Repository tools this week as Learning Environment Development system has just gone through an upgrade. As part of the project we have developed a series of tests relating to the functionality of the system and roles, that we need to go through to check that everything works when the environment is upgraded. The challenge is having a set of checks there are detailed but not that detailed that the process becomes unwieldy. Only by going through the healthcheck can we assess this. Eventually, we will have to hand this activity over to colleagues in Information Systems so we also need to make sure that the activity is clear enough for these colleagues to carry out when they take it over.
Continued use of the learning repository August 5, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentYesterday I met with a colleague in the library to talk about the best approach to using the learning repository for their information literacy material. Currently they have couple of courses in business and law that complement existing research modules being run by the schools that all students get enrolled onto. In addition they want to put generic resources into the learning repository that teaching staff can download and reuse in their courses. What we need to do next is provide some training and create a course where they can host their material and then discuss the best way to disseminate to rest the university access to the resources.
Creative Commons Implementation August 5, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentA group of us met this afternoon to discuss the best approach to implement creative commons with respect to the learning repository. Our copyright advisor Lisa Warburton has written guidelines and procedures for the revised “Copyright in Educational Resources Policy” , Lisa is going to develop these into guidance for staff on how to attach creative commons to their learning resources in addition I will be writing information on what staff need to do in the learning repository mainly in relation to metadata. Another aspect of the implementation will ensuring that creative commons educational resources have an open url within the learning repository so that we can disseminate and share resources outside of the university.
Project Receives an Award July 14, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , 1 comment so farSome exciting news happened this week the project received the Desire2Excel 2010 Collaboration Award and D2L’ s Fusion conference. We knew we had been nominated but never the less this is a big surprise and an honour. We feel that this recognises the collaborative efforts made by the project with respect to engaging staff in its activities and outputs. And a big thank you goes out to NTU and D2L colleagues who have supported and have been involved in the project over the last year, together with a thank you to the support provided by JISC.
Desire2Learn Fusion Conference July 8, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentNext week is Desire2Learn’s Fusion conference and we have two colleagues attending and giving workshops and poster presentations - Anna Armstrong is presenting on our use of the learning repository in a workshop titled An Object Shared is An Object Halved and Sanjay Gupta is presenting on reviewer access to our learning environment. In addition the project has also been nominated for a Desire2Excel award in the collaboration category. So best wishes go out to Anna and Sanjay and our colleagues at NTU, in particular Yvonne Monterosso. I am sure the conference will be a great success.
Strategic Discussions Continue July 8, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentMy Development and Implementation wider group met this morning to discuss how to progress into the next year. I had already canvassed some opinions from the group using a survey in Poll Daddy . Generally people wanted to stick with the monthly meetings but there was great discussion with respect to how these should be structured. This ranged from integrating in strategy and influencing senior management and sharing good practice instigated by early adopters. As this part of the project has a main focus on cultural change and staff engagement, I was thinking the creation of a tool kit or framework similar to RSP or the OER Infokit - that has sections addressed to manager and practitioners may be the way to go that includes guidance, overviews of the OER landscape etc. So we just need to get our thinking caps on – time is rushing by.
OTTER Project Sympsium July 8, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI attended a very useful online symposium this week that was run by the University of Leicester Otter Project . The symposium agenda was created with input from the attendees and they used Wimba Classroom as a platform which worked well.
This was the agenda
| Welcome and introduction | Samuel Nikoi | |
| 10.00 | Are institutions missing the point by focusing on using OERs as marketing tools? | Mick Norman |
| 11.00 | Engaging institutional partners in OER projects, what works and what doesn’t? | Alejandro Armellini |
| 12.00
|
Lunch break | |
| 13.00 | Is copyright the problem? “All rights reserved” versus “all rights reversed”: whither OER? | Samuel Nikoi |
| 14.00 | Could and should OER replace educators? | Chris Coetzee |
| 15.00pm | Wrap-up and close | Richard Mobbs |
There was some lively discussion mainly in the chat room – particular in the areas of staff engagement, strategic approaches, resourcing, collective approaches copyright and quality issues. I think the format worked particularly well and congratulations to the OTTER project for organising this, if they have recorded the event I will disseminate.
