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Overview of 1st Workshop November 27, 2009

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We held our first workshop in the University yesterday. It was attended by a small but select group, we had representation from 3 academic schools, the library, my own team Educational Development Unit and also somone from Turkey who was on a visit to the library. As I implied in a previous post there is nothing like a deadline to get things moving.  I will try and put together an audio for the slides that we have produced and make them more widely available, probably using Slideshare. Now that we have our “Learning Object Repositories and Sharing Content” course set-up in our VLE we can start to populate this with the content we have developed for the workshop. As well as the slides, we have  our publishing and retrieving guide, which includes a guide to our minimum requirements for metadata (thank you to Anna Armstrong who is overseeing Training and Support for putting all this together) and an overview of permissions (thanks to Trevor Pull and Barry Gregory for this). The workshop has also facilitated a greater knowledge of the LOR not only for the attendees but also for ourselves within the project.

The format of the workshop was as follows:

Part 1:

    Part 2:

The workshop generated some interesting observations about the LOR, one person suggested that it might be useful to put in the metadata the context in which the LOR could be used. There was a comment on the way we had marketed the workshop and the LOR, for example staff were not aware that students could not access the LOR.  Another thing that cropped up was the fact that we don’t have test area for the LOR, we thought this would not be an issue because individuals should only publishing content which they deem fit for publishing and sharing, not testing. However, it does mean that we could not have any hands-on in the session which we always have in the training session that we run on other e-tools.

My next task is to make the comments from the activity available within our course. With regards project activities we need to, start planning events for the New Year, overview our metadata templates and do some more exploratory work on classification and autopopulating.

NTU School of Education Blended Learning Group Presentation November 23, 2009

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I would like to thank the learning and teaching coordinator,  Helen Boulton, within the School of Education here at NTU for inviting me to do a brief presentation of the LOR.  It was well attended by colleagues within the School and hopefully my brief presentation got them thinking about opportunities for sharing either at a School level or within the University. One attendee did mention that the sharing of some of the digitised content would be constrained by our scanning license, which was a useful point and something that is mentioned in our copyright guidance.

I hope this presentation is one of many across the University.

Interview with Ian Mathers and Yvonne Monterroso November 23, 2009

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A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak to our Desire2Learn colleagues Ian Mathers (Programme Manager for the Learning Repository at Desire2Learn and Technology Work Package lead) and Yvonne Monterroso (Product Manager for the Learning Repository at Desire2Learn) about their involvement with SHARE and to get an update on where they are with the project so far.  Since Ian and Yvonne are based in Kitchener, Canada and we’re based in Nottingham we used Skype to conduct the interview and it was a really easy way of touching base with them both.

In this Podcast, Ian and Yvonne talk about the relationship between Desire2Learn and NTU, the way in which learning object repositories allow  ‘education to broaden its horizons with so much sharing’ as well as the importance of getting the technology right to enable change in teaching practices.  It comes across strongly that the benefits of SHARE  will extend far beyond the project’s life and the enthusiasm from both Ian and Yvonne is infectious!

We’ll be talking to Ian and Yvonne later on in the project to see how things have continued to develop and we look forward to tracking their progress.

To skip around within the audio track, click on the grey/ white progress bar between the pause and volume button.

 

Download the mp3 file of this Podcast


Date recorded: November 10th 2009
Podcast length: 12 minutes, 33 seconds

A transcript of this Podcast is also available in Microsoft Word format:

Ian Mathers and Yvonne Monterroso – interview transcript

1st Workshops: Preparations In-Hand, hosted aps and web 2.0 November 19, 2009

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Myself  Trevor Pull, Barry Gregory and Anna Armstrong are industriously preparing for our first LOR institutional workshops which will be taking place next week. For this collaborative activity we have a used a range of tools, starting off with the Wiki to host content and for writing actions. We have then registered for Dropbox http://www.dropbox.com/ so that we can connect to and make changes to our slides. I have also used PollDaddy http://polldaddy.com/ to create a survey for the workshop. With regards resources Flickr has been great because of the creative commons feature. I have found more OER resources via JISC and CC web site twitter feed which I have embedded. And I am going to caputre my demo using Screentoaster http://www.screentoaster.com/ so that we can turn the workshop into a little online course.

Development and Implementation Wider Group Meeting November 19, 2009

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We had our wider group meeting today. Not as many attended as last time but nevertheless we still had a large enough group to participate in the activities we had planned. In the first part of the meeting we reviewed our Copyright Checklist written by our Copyright Advisor Lisa Warburton, this was originally created for the implementation of our VLE NOW. We wanted to find out if people were ok with the format which they generally were, apart from a change of title as the document is more like guidelines rather than a checklist, although people still wanted a checklist. Somebody suggested a decision tree or a decision “forest” as Lisa called it – which I think was an interesting idea. With regards to content, additional content requested was, links to JISC Legal http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/ and JISC Digital Media http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/ , as well as guidance on web 2.0 applications. Somebody also asked for a link to a permissions form for audio/video recording.

The second part of the meeting was facilitated by Angela Trikic (Project Lead) she wanted to gather individual comments on why people would or would not share content. This included a questionnaire for people to complete part of which we will use for our workshop next week and an activity where groups were asked to rank their issues.

In reflection I think having activities for this wider group meeting works well and helps us with the outputs of the project. I have also decided that I will visit all of the reps in the wider group individually to get their ideas on sharing within the context of their School or Service.

Pilot progress November 18, 2009

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Just a quick note about progress with my pilot – I’m still going through and linking objects to learning rooms as appropriate; I hope to finish Biosciences today, and to get moving on other subject areas. It’s been slightly patchy as I’ve been putting links into other 3rd year rooms (etc.) as I’ve been doing sessions, so those who need to access these resources can do so at present, but I would like to get other key rooms finished as soon as possible. Issues as they occur are going into the Issues register.

Policy and Business Process update November 13, 2009

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Just to say that I’m attending an OU/HEFCE workshop on “Common sense approach to Creative Commons” this coming Monday (16th) somewhere in Camden.  One of the workshop’s stated aims is “unpacking some of the anxieties and issues”.  I’ll report back next week. 

For those of you who missed (or were unable to watch the whole thing) the JISCLegal webcast on November 5th on “OER- Legal Matters” is now available to view here.   It includes a really useful presentation on Creative Commons licensing by Naomi Korn.

Development and Implementation workpackage: update from Testing strand November 12, 2009

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At the moment, the most pressing task for the Testing strand is the development of a set of routine ‘Healthcheck’ tests for LOR. This means that whenever there is a change to the system – an upgrade or maintenance release (update) for example – we will be able to check in a systematic way that everything still works as it should.

Some basic LOR testing is already built into the general NOW Healthcheck regime; these tests will be built on and extended to help ensure that all staff and students are able to do all the things – adding, searching, retrieving, reusing – that they should be able to do.

Next stop: ‘Phase 2′ testing will investigate some ‘What if?’ scenarios around use of LOR. This is so that when some of the more complex examples of LOR use start to arise, we will be forewarned and forearmed, and ready to advise accordingly.

That’s all for now!

This week’s round up November 12, 2009

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Just wanted to do a bit of a plug for the JISC Legal’s OER Web Cast last week http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Default.aspx?tabid=573 lots of useful stuff for our project, and just waiting for it to be made available so that I can disseminate it more widely. We are currently gathering requirements for an approach to Creative Commons so Naomi Korn’s presentations will definitely help with this.

Currently I am organising our LOR workshops for the week after next this is for staff at the University, here are the details

Opportunities for Sharing Your Content with NOW’s Learning Object Repository

“It seems odd to think that, until very recently, the physical limitations of storing information and helping people access it were real problems.”

                                                (Peter Bradwell The Edgeless University 2009 p.28)

 There has been much discussion in the educational press regarding Universities making their learning content publicly available via open educational resource initiatives and projects. For some institutions such as the Open University and MIT this has become a reality 

This workshop will provide an overview of sharing learning content, together with the opportunities and challenges. You will also be given an introduction to NOW’s Learning Object Repository (LOR). Additionally there will be time to discuss issues relating to sharing learning content with colleagues.

There is nothing like a planned event to set the wheels of productivity in motion.

Work continues on developing Healthchecks for the LOR. We now have an issues page in the Wiki which links up to  the training and support our eLearning help desk provides and will give an overview to colleagues at D2L of how we are using the LOR.

We have had lengthy discussions on the implication of developing a retention policy – and in fact whether we need one. Angela Trikic is investigating if there are any legal implications in relation to retaining content, usually linked to QA and this will have an impact on this if there are.

We have also decided to gather requirements in relation to students accessing the LOR and Jon Tepper our Workpackage lead for this will be doing that during the early part of the next year.

Myself and Trevor Pull met with a colleague from our Centre for Academic Standards and Quality and a colleague from our Centre for Professional Learning and Development, to give them a more detailed overview of the relationship between the Learning Rooms within NOW (our VLE) and the LOR.  This helped me to think about how we could articulate this in our workshop e.g. Learning Rooms are for structuring learning  and the LOR is for sharing learning content.    

Next week we will be having our wider meeting, which includes professional service and academic staff. This meeting will concentrate on our Copyright Checklist and whether there needs to be any changes or amendments and then there will be a discussion and why individuals would want to share or why note.

The week’s round-up November 5, 2009

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Why is it every time I post to the blog I still manage to find mistakes despite previewing – answers on a blog-card.

You will have already seen that I had a very rewarding day in Southampton yesterday. Although it was quite a long train journey I did not have to change. 

We have had a welcome addition to our pilot group the  CELS project managed by Karen Moss http://www.ntu.ac.uk/cels/ - this project has created some excellent content in a variety formats which will really help us to test out the technical and the organisational aspects of the LOR. We also discussed the issue of accessibility and using metadata to identify any issues relating to this.  I am also going to review CELS content and consider the best places for dissemination e.g. IRep, eLearning Community web site, LOR etc.

Myself and Angela Trikic also reviewed our project plan, this was rewarding activity as we seem to be on course for most of our milestones within the plan.  Today we also met with Helen Adey who is heading up our Evaluation Workpackage. Helen has produced an excellent detailed plan for this activity which she will put in the Wiki.

We had our Core Development and Implementation meeting today. I provided an overview of the event yesterday. We also discussed our next wider meeting which involves academics and professional service staff.  At this meeting we are going to review the Copyright checklist. We will also discuss approaches for implementing creative commons and barriers and incentives for sharing.  I also asked members to consider involvement in NTU’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference.  Finally it was noted that we need to do further investigation into the use of JACs classification.

I also had a catch-up with colleagues involved in Testing and Training and Support. Our main priority with regards Training at the moment is prepartion for our two internal workshops which are taking place on 24th (Clifton) and 26th (City) November.  Anna Armstrong is also going to review our issues list to make sure we are capturing the right information and then we are going to link this to our institutional Wiki so that it can be referred to by out Education and Training Team. Barry Gregory who is managing the Testing work is developing more detailed Healthchecks for our maintenance releases.

Next week I will get on to publicising our workshops with the help of Anna, and will begin to collate the content.  I am also meeting colleagues within Professional Services to discuss their use of the LOR.