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Autopopulating Metadata January 28, 2010

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Just a quick one on this. We have started to discuss today the issue of auto-populating our metadata records using templates. The metadata record has gone through a few iterations but we still have work to do and as it was commented in our Development and Implementation Wider Group today, that it would be good to have this sorted before we roll out our training which is a good point. From our initial discussion we are thinking about auto-populating the title, author name and possibly the learning room (course) name as a keyword description. We may also have a separate template relating to the copyright restrictions. Early days but I definitely think that auto-populating would make the publisher’s life easier.

Quality Assurance and Reassurance January 28, 2010

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Quality assurance cropt up in two meetings this week. The first meeting was our E-learning User Forum meetings, some concerns were aired regarding the reuse of content that was published in the Learning Object Repository, as well as, the issue of attribution and drawing users attention to version of the object.  We will be discussing how to make the version of an object clearer to the user and will probably suggest that individuals put to something in the description, which is clearly displayed with the learning object, this may, also, be a field that could draw a user’s attention to copyright restrictionsand any issues to do with accessibility – to complement the other metadata.

The issue also arose in the Development and Implementation Wider Group, this morning.  As I have mention previously each School has their own repository and then there is a University repository. Academic staff can publish to the School LOR in which their course runs. Publishing to the University LOR for academic staff will be via a NTULOR Coordinator which is mapped to VLE Coordinator Role. 

There were concerns at both meetings re: quality assurance of objects that would be available to a wider audience e.g. the whole of the University or beyond, if we manage to implement Creative Commons, which will facilitate the University in making some objects open. The project has decided with regards the quality assurance of objects we can provide guidance on Copyright and Accessibility which we do anyway with regards the delivery of online content, as well as, guidance on metadata. With respect to QA of content the project thinks that this should sit within the School, as academic colleagues are best placed in deciding whether an object is of a quality to share more widely, as they have the subject and pedagogic expertise. I think generally academic colleagues agree with this approach but the dilemma is how to do it. One approach is to trust the professionalism of academic colleagues and allow them to make the decision with regards what they want published beyond the School, then there would be no need for an NTULOR Coordinator. The alternative approach is for Schools to come up with their own process for QAing e.g. via School quality assurance group, School exec. etc.

We have therefore decided to talk through this issue at our next wider meeeting. In the meantime I will be writing my briefing paper on LOR which will also include something about QA. Whatever approach we take all I know is that we cannot make these decisions in isolation and having the engagement of colleagues via our Development and Implementation Wider Group is of great help to me.

Project Management’s Many Hats: Metadata, training, terminology, policies and processes etc. January 21, 2010

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There has been considerable activity within the project this week and I have been wearing many hats. Such is the interesting life of a project manager.

I have started to look at the terminology within our system to see if we can make changes using terms that are more meaningful to the staff that will be using the LOR. However, we also have to be mindful that we do not make any changes to the terminology used by the other tools in the VLE as part of the  process, as there are commonalities. The approach we tend to take is first try changes on our development and test systems and then implement the changes on the live production system. Another related activity will be looking at the help screens within the system, which we will probably do next.

We had another meeting to discuss our metadata views within the LOR, as we need to make the completion of the records by staff as straightforward as possible but also we need to make sure that we are getting enough metadata for learning objects to be discoverable. We have a very basic metadata view for the School LOR which we are calling  “Brief” view. We have almost come to a consensus on this we just need to look at some of the drop down lists and the terms used e.g. in the learning resource type. Next will be our advanced view which we are calling “Full” view, this is mainly for stuff going into our NTULOR which is discoverable by staff across the whole of NTU but might be made public in the future, depending on how well the implementation of Creative Commons goes in the University. We also had another discussion about quality assurance, it has been decided that the main QA elements we will give guidance on,  are copyright and accessibility and we will leave the Schools to QA the pedagogic aspects. I will be producing a briefing paper on the LOR, which will provide an overview of  what it is and what it does, it will also cover QA.

We have also decided to wrap up our Policies and Business Processes sub group for the moment. As many of the processes will be covered in training, by the briefing paper, or by existing  processes within the Schools. We still need to pilot our NTULOR coordinator role which we will be doing in the Business School. And issues such as content retention the University will have to look at in general with regards the retention of online content. With respect to a take down policy we are more than likely going to use the same approach as that use by IRep our institutional repository.

Finally we have been putting together a structure for the LOR workshop which is integrated as part of our EDU training Schedule. We are reusing the slides we used for the workshop at the end of last, year but are making sure participants have some hands-on because we have a test area in the LOR for them now.

Building blocks for a national event January 15, 2010

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A significant aspect of the JISC SHARE project is aimed at trying to achieve a change in academic practice towards more organised sharing of educational resources. Early feedback indicates that this is happening on an informal level in many subject areas so this is a good starting point. We’re hoping to build on this by encouraging colleagues to use the Learning Object Repository (LOR) in the VLE as a container that they can both deposit and search for resources.

Moving from informal arrangements to offering a more structured approach to resource sharing has prompted consideration of processes and workflows that may be needed at School and University level. The Policy and Business Process sub-group have recently identified a number of tasks for a LOR co-ordinator role. I have followed up with a discussion with Bal Johal, Deputy Academic Administration Manager for the College of Business, Law and Social Science. Bal has agreed to pilot this role with the Business School to check out the feasibility of academic administrators supporting academics in their use of the LOR.

Another issue that has arisen in considering resource sharing relates to how best to do this more widely where opportunities for collaborations either with other universities or participants external to the University is presented. This immediately raised the University’s Intellectual Property Rights and current Copyright License policy. Again this demonstrates how the project is becoming a positive trigger for prompting the University to review these policies. We have carried out the groundwork investigations around Creative Commons options and have put forward a proposal for consideration.

The project’s work in forging transitions in academic practice that support open educational resource sharing and re-use has led us to put forward a proposal for a national event next march 2011 in response to the IE inf11 programme call, around the following:

For more details you can access the proposal in the project wiki, SHARE Project Management page. If you have feedback or suggestions that could help make the event even more useful please, all comments are welcome.

Encouraging staff engagement January 14, 2010

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As staff are still familiarising themselves with tools within our VLE “NOW” – as it has only been live for just over a year, the learning object repository is probably a bit down their list of tools which they would consider using within learning and teaching, so at the moment we are thinking about ways we can encourage staff engagement.

In February we will be having a Buzz Lunch (exchange of information, think buzz marketing - word of mouth marketing ),  where there will be presentations from two of our pilots and an early adopter. There will be an opportunity for those attending to discuss and ask questions, and all staff within the University will be invited.

Learning Object Repository training has been embedded within our training schedule, which already includes training on other tools within the VLE, such as, discussions and assessment. We also have a test course and test repository so that we can easily demo the tool to colleagues and this also enables staff to have hands on experience of the LOR withing training sessions.We are also designing a leaflet which will be a poster on one side and will have information about the LOR on the other side, and we are getting a pen designed that promotes the LOR, these we can give out at training and dissemination events. We also want to capture some case studies of staff using the LOR. 

Finally, we want to get early adopter colleagues, who are already using the LOR and are part of the project,  involved in the roll-out of the LOR within their Schools and Services, as staff appear to be far more receptive to this integrated approach.

Happy New Year! January 7, 2010

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Phew Christmas went by really quickly didn’t it? Anyway onwards and upwards into a caring and sharing New Year. I have spent most of this week getting to grips with outstanding actions from last year, which seems like ages ago.  We have many challenges for the beginning part of this year, including deciding what metadata we would want to auto-populate, putting together a classification scheme, presenting the Creative Commons business case to the University, piloting the LOR coordinator role and developing relationships with other OER projects. On top of this we need to further develop our training and support in preparation for roll out in March. I have also decided to write a briefing paper which will provide an overview of the LOR,  how to publish and quality assurance issues. This will be similar to the guidance that would go in a Uni QA handbook.

I have also just completed the audit of the Centre for Effective Learning in Science web site http://www.ntu.ac.uk/cels/. If you have not looked at it before this provides some excellent resources

The centre aims to create a more relevant, accessible and achievable image for science within both the Higher Education and school communities. Based on our excellent record in science teaching and nationally recognised widening participation activities, CELS is working with academic teams in the development and trialling of new approaches to teaching and presenting science to both communities. (web site)

Some of these resources would appropriately sit in two place in our LOR where staff could integrate them within their courses and also within the learning and teaching collection of our Institutional Repository.  The audit can be found at http://wiki.ntushare.org/tiki-index.php?page=CELS+audit.

Interview with Helen Adey, Evaluation Work Package Lead January 7, 2010

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First of all…

Happy New Year from the Communications Work Package!

Although it’s been a quiet few weeks because of the Christmas holidays, we’ve found time to put together another podcast in our series of interviews with Work Package leads.  On this occasion Marek Oledzki spent some time chatting to Helen Adey, the lead of the Evaluation work package, about her perspective on the project so far and the way in which evaluation will work alongside the other aspects of SHARE.

Helen talks about the role of the work package, some of the complexities of evaluating a large project and the reasons why it plays such an important role in a project of this scale.  For those involved with the SHARE project or for others involved in large-scale projects, I’m sure you’ll appreciate hearing what’s happening in terms of evaluation – thanks for talking to us, Helen!

 

Download the mp3 file of this Podcast

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

Date recorded: December 2009
Podcast Length: 5 minutes 17 seconds

A transcript of the podcast is also available in Microsoft Word format:

Helen Adey – interview transcript, Dec 2009