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OER10 Reflections Day 1: Morning March 31, 2010

Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a comment

I provided a quick overview of the OER10 conference last week – here is a little bit of a more detailed overview I have decided to do the posts in half day chunks for manageability as there is so much.

Malcolm Read: OER and the Open Agenda: Malcolm talked about the broader context of the open environment, he introduced a range of open activities e.g. source, standards, access, data, e-resources and science. He said that he expected the HE environment to embrace openness, that academics want to be open and that there are tools to facilitate this. However, there is a challenge with respect to rights clearance. He also referred to the importance of aggregating resources and the fact that strategic subjects should build-up the corpus of OER, as OER can help to expose the academic experience that students can expect. In addition Malcolm discussed the need for reducing the academic burden of tagging/providing metadata for resources,  that there was a need to reward academics for developing OERs and the value of providing good learning design.

Unicycle – a sustainable model of institutional implementation of OER Simon Thomson: This was an interesting presentation as some of the characteristics of the Unicycle Project are similar to the SHARE project. Referring to issues relating to sustainability Simon said that the size of the operation was important and issues with respect to engagement needed to considered. He presented a model of Central OER support which was not a controlling mechanism and involved senior level buy-in (PVCs office), specialist teams involved in technology enhanced learning, the copyright clearance office and the repository team. With respect to academic involvement the project linked to six faculties – all of which provided a faculty area coordinator and the 3 CETLs. The Faculty/Area Co-ordinator role involved:

A decision was made to manage quality within the faculties as they were in a better positing to identify the quality of the material. The project found that it was challenge to make resources open that had not been created with openness in mind and this issue came up a couple of times within the conference, clearing images was a particular demanding activity so there was a move to encourage staff to use Flickr - as we have mentioned at our meetings the advanced search has a creative commons option.  Simon also mentioned that there had been considerations with respect to rewarding staff who were depositing content and integrating openness within strategy, which was also another issue that other presenters and attendees had mentioned.

CORRE: A workflow for transforming teaching materials into OERs Simon Nikoloi and Tania Rowlett University of Leicester: This presentation provided an overview of the processes for transforming and developing existing teaching materials into open educational content. This included the screening materials, which included the legal, pedagogic and technical aspects – which as a result to facilitated the assessment of the quality, accessibility and and adaptability aspects of the material.  This was quite a formalised process Simon stated that there were there are three aspects of “OPENNESS ”.

Pedagogical questions
•Are changes required to the learning context?
•Are changes required to learning goal(s)?
•Are changes required to learning activity(ies)?
•Are changes required to learning outcome(s)?
•Are changes required to the assessment?
•Is learning support required to use this material?
•What level of users is the material aimed at?
 
Legal
•Does the resource contain 3rd party material?
•Have 3rd party materials/IPR been duly acknowledged?
•Is 3rd party material still in copyright or available under a re-usable licence?
•Has written permission been obtained from rights holders?
•Is it cost effective to negotiate a quote or reject the material?
•Has an appropriate Creative Commons license been assigned to the learning object?
 
Technical
•Is the resource available in a range of formats?
• Is the resource standalone or does it refer to related resources?
• Are other tools/software required by end-user to use the resource?
• Will the resource be compatible with other repositories?
• Does the resource have the potential to evolve as technology develops?
• Does the end-user require further technical help to use the resource?
 
With respect to evaluation Simon suggested asking users:
•What changes or modifications did you make to the OER?
• What difficulties did you encounter using or accessing the OER?
• In what specific way did the OER benefit your teaching or learning?
• How can the OER be improved?
And also to obtain evidence of the number of views, downloads, Google analytics, Web bugs and star rating.

OER 10 – end of day 2 March 23, 2010

Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a comment

Just ‘a bit of free time to post some comments on the OER10 event that I am attending at Cambride Uni’s Clare College http://www.ucel.ac.uk/oer10/index.html. Angela Trikic and myself have just done our presentation on “Towards OER: designing repository architecture and processes to support educational resource sharing” the other presentation within our session “Resource description and discovery and metadata for Open Educational Resources” so understandably the session was concluded with a lively discussion on metadata which was dominated by issues relating to, schemes, how much and why do we need it, aptly chaired by Peter Burnhill. The conference has been extremely well organised and we have done lots of networking and some potential follow-ups for future sharing of best practice and for our conference next year.  As the conference is about sharing open educational resources, quite a few of the presentations have been about reusable learning objects and strategies for evaluating their use. I will provide a more detailed blog on conference presentations, after the conference but I would like to mention some of the highlights for me: 

Preparations Begin For Our National Conference March 19, 2010

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We had our start-up meeting this week to discuss the nation conference that we will be holding here at NTU next March 2011.  We already have a draft proposal the aim of the conference is to focus on transitions in academic practice that support open educational resource sharing and re-use, in particular:

The objective is to share illustrations of learning and teaching repository implementation. Including

The target audience are colleagues within JISC IE 2009-11 programme and the OER community as well as:

In the start-up group we had some useful advice from the person who is involved in organising our university’s annual learning and teaching conference. She recommended that we consider the following

We also need to consider how we want to advertise the conference. Given that we have a domain name and our blog has become the gateway to our other forms of communication for this project this seems to be possibly the most appropriate place.

We are all extremely excited about this event it will be an opportunity to show case some exciting work that is taking place in the HE community. We are also are excited about the venue because it will take place in our new conference facilities.

More metadata refinements March 4, 2010

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Just a quick one from me this week. We are carrying out the finishing touches to the metadata views within the Learning Repository (note the change of name – we have dropped the object from the title). It looks like after some very useful discussion that we will just be using the basic view within the system and only having one view, initially we were going to have brief and full. The fields we have decided upon are:

The reason that we have opted for this even more simplified approach is that the project has decided to give most staff permission to publish to the University learning repository – taking out the need for a gatekeeper role for this repository (although there will still be one within the Schools to manage all content). As the description is clearly displayed within the search results we will be encouraging staff to put as many details in relation to accessing the content in this field.