OER 11 June 7, 2011
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , 1 comment so farThis has taken me a bit of time to get around to this, but I wanted to congratulate the organisers of OER11 which took place 11th -13th May in Manchester. I found this a particularly rewarding event with respect to seeing examples of practice, strategy and pedagogy in the context OER – in fact it led me to think that things had moved on quite considerably since OER10 in Cambridge.
The particular highlights for me were the discussions on:
- open curriculum design and integrating subject aspects
- repurposing OER
- navigating the OER landscape and strategies for doing this such as concept maps and discipline/subject communities
- integrating OER into learning and teaching strategy and learning and teaching in general e.g. students on PGCHE’s producing OER as part of their assessment
I concluded from the event
- we still need guidance on how to repurpose OER e.g. in Jorum what is the best way to export a content package and import it into your particular VLE
- OER should not be treated as a separate issue it should be integrated into practice
- when adopting an open approach to curriculum re-design we need to identify which elements are generic and which are subject specific and the subject context is still important
- there may be other ways to navigate the OER messy landscape other than a search box e.g. concept maps
For me the following presentations were the most useful for my practice:
- MIT Core Concepts Catalog
- Where technophile meets technophobe: creating an OER repository for the social policy and social work teaching community
- Keynote 2: Sustainable National OER Provision: “All that glisters is not gold”
- Symposium Short Papers (5): – Social Sciences
- The importance of OERs in delivering a flexible continuing professional development (CPD) degree framework
- Towards crossing over the digital divide: the use of OER to promote digital literacy
- Why develop OER? Analysis of pedagogical imperatives for OER design and alignment with learners’ needs
- Designing culture specific and portable RLO-based OERs: an Indian experiment
- The art of sustainable OERs – symposium
Open Nottingham OER Seminar May 18, 2011
Posted by moledzki in : Comms , add a commentI was able to get to this event which took place on the 7th April 2011. The Summary of Open Nottingham Seminar document is a collection of my notes from the talks.
Recordings from the speakers have been made available on the Nottingham University Blog.
It was particularly interesting to hear from Steve Midgley (Deputy Director, Office of Education Technology, United States Department of Education) and Greg DeKoenigsberg (Chief Technology Officer for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) & OER Commons).
OER11 – SHARE Presentation May 18, 2011
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentJust catching up on my social networking re: SHARE project I know it has been a bit quiet for some time mainly because my substantive post has taken over and I have been trying to write and I am still writing my end of project report.
The project had the pleasure of presenting at OER11. Our presentation is available Transformational Processe: unravelling OER
The presentation generated some useful discussion with respect to institutional engagement, approaches to encourage and staff engagement in OER and in strategy in general. I will be blogging on the event this week. However, I would like to just mention at this point two important aspects with respect to engaging teaching staff in OER, think about how to design curriculum activity models that include openness and take into consideration generic aspects that can be transferred between subjects but also think about the subject specific components.
“>”Transformational Processe: unravelling OERs through strategic interventions”
Workshop Poster April 8, 2011
Posted by moledzki in : Comms , add a commentThis is a poster that we produced for the SHARE Workshop. Contact NTU SHARE for other formats and sizes.
Recordings from workshop available April 1, 2011
Posted by moledzki in : Comms , add a commentA quick update to say that the recordings from the SHARE workshop held on the 16th of March are now available on the SHARE Workshop page of this site.
The recordings were made using Microsoft Live Meeting and present audio, video and the slides of all of the presentation that took place during the really well recieved workshop.
The recordings are in there raw state (have not been edited) and follow the format of the program, (also available on the same workshop page). A setting on the camera meant that it is a little shaky even though the camera was tripod mounted (we couldn’t find a way of removing this setting).
We hope you find this useful.
Please email elearning@ntu.ac.uk if you experience any difficulties.
SHARE Newsletter January 2011 February 14, 2011
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentQuick Update
The project has now entered what will be a very busy final three months. We will be hosting a free national workshop in March “I fought the Learning Repositories and the Learning Repositories Won”. We are also liaising with our colleagues from Information Systems and the Centre for Professional Learning Development, with respect to handing over the system administration and training activities that we have been managing during the project. In addition, we will be liaising with colleagues in the Centre for Academic Development and Quality regarding the integration of our training material in their new technology enhanced learning and teaching resources. The project continues its work engaging staff with sharing learning resources with University colleagues and beyond via incentive projects, as well as moving towards making resources open and presenting webinars to colleagues.
SHARE Workshop Registration Open
I reported in the last newsletter that the project will be hosting a free national workshop on learning repositories, on 16th March 9:30-4 at the Nottingham Conference Centre. This workshop will have presentations from a range of speakers that are involved in learning repository development within higher education. For further workshop details and to register visit http://www.ntushare.org/national-workshop/
Movement Towards Making Learning Resources Open
The project is developing a process for making learning resources in the learning repository open to colleagues outside of the University. This includes testing within NOW and making sure colleagues have the appropriate support documentation for publishing open resources, which includes details on attaching a creative commons license as well as the workflow for doing this. We hope to have sign-off by the University for this by the end of the project.
Incentive Projects
In the previous newsletter it was reported that some funding had been set aside for Schools and Services to illustrate engagement with sharing learning resources using the learning repositories. I am pleased to report that nearly all the Schools and Services approached have been able to demonstrate how they will do this and more details will be provided in the project’s final report.
Webinars
On 13 January we ran the first of a series of 30 minute webinars based around learning repositories, using Live Meeting. The theme was An Introduction to Learning Repositories and was lead by our Project Officer Anna Armstrong. I took the role of moderator, answering questions from the participants. It was good fun and well attended. We recorded the webinar which can be viewed in the Learning Repositories and Sharing Content learning room in NOW.
We will be hosting three more webinars over the next two months using Live Meeting:
§ 10th February: Open Educational Resources, 9:50-10:00 – Vicki McGarvey
§ 10th March: Creative Commons, 11:15-12:00 – Lisa Warburton
§ 31st March: The Benefits of Using Learning Repositories, 11:00-11:40 – Anna Armstrong, Vicki McGarvey and guests
If you are interested in any of the above please contact vicki.mcgarvey@ntu.ac.uk.
SHARE: Spreading the News at Conferences
I am pleased to announce that we have had presentation proposals accepted for the NTU Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, and for the Open Educational Resources 2011 conference. Again this will give the project an opportunity to share our experiences with the wider higher education community.
Bright Idea of the Month
Learning repositories can provide you with fresh and varied content for your students. It makes it possible to improve the quality and range of resources offered to your students by building on other people’s work and making the resources available to your students through your NOW learning room. And why not share your new work with colleagues through the learning repository? Learning repositories can supplement your content where your technical skills are weaker, for example, by providing audio and video material that has been created and shared by others. The result is that students get a wider and more interesting range of resources to use.
NTU Learning Repository Resource of the Month
YouTube for Students: Introduces the educational benefits of YouTube to students. Created by Phil Wane, in the School of Social Sciences, this contains screen shots and a classroom video and is suitable for self-completion by students. To find this resource go to the NTU Learning Repository and enter the term YouTube.
Web Sites of the Month – a selection from SHARE Project web site
- UNESCO-COL Policy Forum Presentations – taking OER beyond the OER community
- Open Education Tools: Thinking about the affordances of openness
- Openness Socialism and Capitalism – David Wiley
Monthly Stats
NTU Learning Repository = 1781
Schools Learning Repositories = 2193
Total = 3974
Evaluation February 14, 2011
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentDuring the last few weeks we have been focusing on the evaluation of the project. We have already held a focus group with early adopters which focused on workflows, usability and policies for sharing. We are devising a questionnaire to compliment this which we share with a wider group of people. The outputs will feature in our final report.
Webinar – Introduction to OER February 14, 2011
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentLast week we had our second webinar, an Introduction to OER run by myself with my colleague Anna Armstrong, SHARE project officer moderating the questions. We had a good turn out and some interesting conversations took place in the usual areas such as quality and attribution. We used live meeting and with this being our 2ndwebinar we did not encounter some of the hiccups we had with our first one which was an introduction to the learning repository. We find that it is best if one person does the presentation and manages the slides and another person moderates the questions as we go along, it’s much easier to keep track and it also helps to establish a rapour with the participants. Our next webinar will be run by Lisa Warburton our copyright advisor and it will be on creative commons.
Pushing toward sustainability January 24, 2011
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentWe had a couple of important meetings last week. The first one was with our Information Systems Team to discuss admin support once the project has finished. We have documented changes we that have been made to the system and any issues that have arisen so I am optimistic that the handover will be pretty straightforward. We will begin the process in February and they will take over in March so that the project team is still around if any problems arise.
In addition, to this meeting I also met with colleagues within our Information Resources team to discuss the potential of using the University’s IRep to harvest the resources that we hope to eventually make open in our Learning Repository. There are quite a few issues to unpack with respect to this on the policy and processes side and the technical processes side. For example, IRep was originally set-up to be an archive and showcase but we would like it to harvest all our open resources. IRep uses DC and we use LOM although our learning repository does have walkthroughs to LOM.
Workshop Update January 24, 2011
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThe workshop tab now has more details with respect to what is taking place on the day. We have, also, set-up a booking system so that individuals can register. Now we need to do a concerted effort with respect to publicising the event. The JISC annual conference is on the two days before but it wont be difficult to get from this event to ours and our workshop will be equally pertinent with respect to what is going on with JISC projects at the moment.
