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Last blog of the year and the decade December 23, 2009

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I say decade but it depends on where you see a decade starting and ending but I wont get into that.  So this is the final round-up of the year, no top 10 list I am afraid.

This week I have been doing a bit of housekeeping updating the Wiki with our outputs of our first metadata review meeting which can be found at http://wiki.ntushare.org/tiki-index.php?page=Metadata+changes and I also posted our review of some of the terminology within our LOR including some changes we would like to make.  I have also begun an audit of content that has been produced by CELS Centre for Effective Learning http://www.ntu.ac.uk/cels/ this is to identify content that might be appropriate to go into our LOR or in the learning and teaching collection within the IRep. CELS has facilitated the creation of excellent learning content, for example, presentations, research papers and activities, mainly for the science community but I am sure teaching staff from outside this discipline will find the resources useful as well. This activity will also help to inform our approach to making learning content publicly available but this is still early days.

Before I sign-off I would like to say a big thank you to colleagues at NTU for supporting the project during this busy year in particular the project team and the development and implementation group. I would also like to thank inf-11 programme colleagues and Andy McGregor for their help and support, as well as JISC Legal and CETIS for providing clarity on the issues that I sent them.

I am looking forward to the challenges waiting in next year’s wings, in particular our continued work in the areas of:

Happy Christmas and have a peaceful New Year!

LOR links in SST learning rooms December 23, 2009

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I’ve now finished embedding all my links, bar from some modules which are not yet in use (these will be added in the future). This includes some alterations to some resources which I had to change.

Overview of OER Resources December 21, 2009

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At our last Development and Implementation Group (the one I blogged on last week), those attending asked me to provide an overview of the OER resources that I listed in the Polldaddy survey together with links. I have now done this within our Wiki, which is publicly available. Of course this is not an exhaustive list and the target audience is the D and I group but I am happy to receive any comments on the list and recommendations for additions. The D and I group represents NTU staff in a range of subject and service areas. The Wiki page can be found at http://wiki.ntushare.org/tiki-index.php?page=OER+Resources.

This week’s round-up: Getting closer acquainted with OER December 17, 2009

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We had our monthly Development and Implementation wider meeting this morning, where we looked at Open Educational Resources. One of the areas we want to investigate with the project is giving an opportunity for making content open. As part of the project we are looking at how we can enable staff within the University to share content using a creative commons license.  This has meant a review of existing learning and teaching policies, to see what changes would be required to implement this.

For our meeting today attendees were presented with an overview of JISC OER programme, I found the slides presented at last year’s JISC conference extremely helpful. I also gave an introduction to OER commons web site which is a repository aggregator and JORUM. Here are the resources I used: 

In preparation for this I asked attendees to look at the OER Commons web site and also asked them to complete a poll so I could get some insight into their knowledge of open educational resources and how they found out about them – if you would like to see the Survey go to:

http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/738640D664446DFB/ 

From the responses I have received so far:

Repositories that individuals had heard of:

With regards downloading or linking to materials

Contribution ot repositories

Recommended sites

Regarding the question how individuals found out about new resources most cited source was colleagues with RSS coming last, as a result there was a call to have a future meeting on RSS feeds.  Other sources were serendipity, searching the Internet, JISC workshops and the Times Higher. 

With respect to the final question asking colleagues to recommend a web site that provides free to use content, the following answers were given:

Even though this was quite a short survey – the responses will definitely help to inform our activities in the New Year. One attendee has already requested that I run a session for their service on OER. And I am going to put links and details of OER resources together with an overview in our online course “Learning Object Repositories and Sharing Content”, which all members of the Development and Implementation Group have been enrolled on.

Week’s Round-up: Metadata and terminology review December 10, 2009

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The two main activities this week have been a review of the fields in our metadata records and the terminology within the Learning Object Repository. We had a really active meeting looking at our metadata record fields, at the moment we have for the School LOR a simple and intermediate record, for the institutional LOR we have an advanced record, all the records reflecting different levels or complexity.  After reviewing the fields today we are now considering reducing the number of fields in the Simple record and probably abandoning intermediate for the School LOR. We have not reviewed the record for the institutional LOR, we will do this in the New Year. We want to make the  metadata relevant and straightforward for colleagues, as they will be completing the metadata for themselves for the School LOR. The consideration being if it looks too complicated colleagues will be put off completing the metadata.

With regards the terminology, now that we have a more in-depth knowledge of the system we are reviewing the help screens, instructions and some of the descriptions. The aim is to make changes where possible that align with the language we use in training and support. We have done an initial review and we will make some changes in our test environment and get feedback on these before we implement them on the live environment. It is something that we did when we implemented the VLE so it is an activity that we are familiar with.

This week I also provided an overview of the LOR for our learning and teaching group within the School of Social Sciences. Not only did I have the opportunity to demonstrate the LOR but to also introduce staff to initial developments with regards our online course, which we are gradually populating with content, such as guides to the LOR and resources on Sharing, as well as discussions where staff can comment on things like usability and sharing in general.

LOR links progress December 8, 2009

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All the Computing rooms are now linked to the LOR; having different blocks available in the LOR is also good because I can put more than one in for cross-disciplinary subjects, which is useful.

Week’s round-up: Training Plan Comes Together December 3, 2009

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This week I have been trying to consolidate some of the issues we identified from our workshop in order to inform our training plan, which Anna Armstrong, who is leading the training and support on the project, and I looked at this week.  The plan is available at http://wiki.ntushare.org/tiki-index.php?page=Training+and+Support. As I think I said previously the content that we have produced we want to turn into an online course.  We also want to do some bespoke guides for the roles that will be using the LOR.  We also have a place in next term’s Education and Training Schedule for the LOR.

Myself and Lisa Warburton, our Copyright Advisor, also collated the feedback on the Copyright Checklist. The main points of discussion were deep linking and student IPR. There is guidance in the checklist on deep linking and student IPR is currently being looked at. We just need to check with deep linking that the guidance is in aligned with JISC Legal’s guidance.

Helen Adey, who is managing our evaluation workpackage and I looked at the evaluation plan. Some of the evaluation can already begin. We decided that it would be useful to put the requirements in chronological order in a table on the Wiki to help with the planning.

Work continues on testing the use cases and we have an issues list that we will review every two weeks. At our Elearning User Forum yesterday there was a recommendation for metadata tags relating to images which is something we can add to our to do list.

Pilot update December 2, 2009

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Hi all,

With workloads starting to get more manageable, I’ve blitzed all the Biosciences learning rooms which are active and relevant and which needed my LLR links; all these courses now have my links in. The whole process – this is a very large group of students with numerous courses – took about 2 and a half hours solid (I had done the MSc. course before), which is a huge improvement on having to import things manually. I hope to hit the other courses within the next week and to have much of this done and dusted.

Jon Fletcher