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Web Sites of the Week April 29, 2010

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Some web sites and articles I have picked up on my virtual travels this week, as usual most related to my pet interest OER.

Yet another review of Metadata – to DC or not to DC April 29, 2010

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“When will the SHARE Project cease reviewing their metadata?” You may well ask. So lets recap the story so far – we started with UK LOM, went through two reviews of this and dropped several field/elements along the way. And what we have now is something that really resembles Dublin Core.

I have set-up two metadata views/templates within our Learning Repository using the above elements one using DC and another using LOM and to be honest the DC interface looks more user friendly than the LOM – this is because we are not using most of the elements within the categories but we still have the category headings within the view/template.  If we move to DC a trade off is having the ability to do classification before publishing, which is something we need to think about. So this is not quite the end of the tale of metadata but hopefully in the next week or so we hope to have written the ending – slightly postmodern I know.

MERLOT is released! April 29, 2010

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We have released MERLOT http://www.merlot.org within our learning environment today. As I have said within a previous post this repository is full integrated within the D2L Learning Environment http://www.desire2learn.com/LearningEnvironment/. Now staff can not only search and integrate learning resources from their School and University Learning Repositories within their online courses they can also do this with the online learning and teaching materials available within MERLOT. Hopefully, an affordance with respect to accessing MERLOT will be increased engagement by staff using open learning resources.

The rest of the activities for the week April 22, 2010

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At our Development and Implementation wider group I provided an overview of RSS – mainly focusing on aggregation using  Google Reader which is my preferred tool with respect to this but I also referred to Netvibes . Not many members of the group use RSS to provide updates on resources and information. I also referred to the fact that some projects are using RSS to disseminate new resources, whilst others are using harvesting, an approach we will probably consider taking in the future. I, also, mentioned that RSS was being complemented by Twitter for the delivery and updating of resources. I suggested that those that had not used RSS should go away and do a bit of experimenting, as individuals approach this differently, for example I do a combination of searching for feeds via google reader and setting up a feed when I visit a site that has this facility – complimented by Twitter via Tweetdeck. I also made referrence to these two excellent videos on RSS  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJinqplM0bY.

Web sites of the week April 22, 2010

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As part of my weekly blogging activities I thought I would start publishing a list of my favourite web sites, that have come through twitter and my RSS feeds during the week – in the true spirit of SHARING.

And here comes MERLOT! April 22, 2010

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We have now got the key to MERLOT, (a US repository of educational resources) and have switched it on on our development system. This will definitely enhance the existing learning resources within our learning repository. Merlot is fully integrated within Desire2Learn learning environment, so this means that teaching staff can search Merlot as well as NTU’s Repositories and fully embed the resources they find within their courses on the learning environment. We hope to make it live in the next week or so.  I demo’d it to out Development and Implementation Wider Group this morning and it appeared to be well received.

OER10 Day 3Morning April 21, 2010

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Siyavula: Building Communities to Support Teacher Use, Localization and Sharing of OER - This engaging presentation, which provided an overview of project that was trying address South Africa’s attempt at implementing a new set of outcomes-based curriculum standards by offering OERs to teachers. The project supported finding and adapting resources to local needs. It referred to theory of action – “where communites of practice are central to the sustainability of open content models” – providing professional development workshops and social networking tools to facilitate this.  The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)has been conducting research on Siyavula’s activities and those of its teacher users to increase understanding of factors that contribute to the creation, use and localization of OER within the South African teaching and learning context.  A survey Siyavula found that:

And that some of the teacher’s confidence was poor with respect to technology in comparison to their students.  Regarding collaborative working one teacher commented.

  “The benefits [of working collaboratively with other teachers] are that one can see the strengths and weaknesses of ones own work and colleagues can give constructive suggestions.” – Teacher survey participant  

Workshop observations and teacher interviews revealed evidence of the importance of OER to the teaching process. This was with respect to finding materials to fill existing gaps and meet curriculum needs. Localizing and adapting materials to match learners’ needs. Building  a searchable archive of effective resources. Communicating with other teachers around curriculum challenges and approaches

With respect to technology, culture and attitude barriers the project identified poor access to technology, complex roles structures, reluctance to share, staff not seeing the value of OER and the importance of face-to-face teaching.  The project found the best approach was to start with what teachers know, relating to existing work practices and encourge the development of communities around OER and other teaching challenges.

Open Content Literacy: developing a framework to support newbie content makers and sharers Lindsey Martin, Alison Mackenzie, Edge Hill University  Edge Hill University in the North West of England was one of 20 institutions funded by JISC under its Re-purposing & Re-use of Digital University-Level Content and Evaluation (RePRODUCE) programme to test perceptions around reusable content in a real-world setting that involved developing, running and quality assuring a technology enhanced course using at least 50% of learning materials sourced externally. Located within SOLSTICE, Edge Hill’s centre of excellence for teaching and learning, the ReFORM Project re-developed Dyslexia/Specific Learning Difficulties in Higher Education (Support Issues)adopting a blended learning approach. Among the lessons learned was the realisation that designing a curriculum with mostly reused and repurposed learning objects can be ‘messy’ and time consuming, reinforcing Littlejohn and Pegler’s (2007, p169) assertion that use and repurposing of digital content is dependent upon deliberate planning for reuse at the initial design stage. Post-project reflection have informed the project’s thinking about longer-term strategies to address issues of cultural change necessary to ‘mainstream’ wide-scale sharing of digital teaching content within our university. An important unintended outcome of the ReFORM Project; an Open Content Literacy Framework developed to support engagement and informed decision-making of staff new to working with open educational content whether as creators or ‘consumers’.

Opening up foreign language education with the Flexible Language Acquisition Project Alannah Fitzgerald (Concordia University, Canada / Durham University, UK) Shaoqun Wu (Greenstone Digital Library Lab, Waikato University, NZ) This presentation gave an overview of  the use of the web for language study because it provides examples of words and word sequences that are contextualized, authentic and frequent. It noted that the, use of the Web for language study is primarily limited to: online language learning materials, activities, dictionaries, thesauri, multi-lingual translators, and concordancers, most of which require subscriptions for more in-depth and research-based language support. It explained how one of its digital library (DL) collections, Web Phrases, presents an innovative use of the Web as a resource that does not rely on live search, but rather, utilizes an off-line corpus generated and supplied by Google. This contains short sequences of words,  along with their frequencies. They are pre-processed, filtered, and organized into a searchable DL collection based on Greenstone’s open-source software,  the system presents these phrases  in context by locating sample sentences containing them either on the Web, or in the British National Corpus. The user evaluation suggests that proficient learners can use the existing collections to generate text as well as revise it, whereas the more limited vocabulary knowledge of less proficient learners may restrict them to revising text. However, most learners’ texts demonstrate positive effects at the lexical, grammatical and perhaps most saliently the pragmatic level. Observations also suggest a number of useful ways in which teachers can mediate the system for its effective use in supporting instruction. Details of the tool can be found at FLAX web site.

OER10 Day 2 Afternoon April 21, 2010

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Minds are like parachutes; they work best when open” Helen Beetham, Lou McGill, Allison Littlejohn, Glasgow Caledonian University This workshop was run by Helen and Allison and was an opportunity for those that have been involved in developing open educational resources to share their experiences, consider some lessons learned and to also have a chance to look at the resources that will be used to evaluate the JISC OER Programme. The workshop was divided into six groups, legal, technical, educational, cultural, organisational and ethic and participants were asked to discuss:

The workshop encouraged some lively debate and issues which had already appeared in the other presentations such as, integrating openenss into learning and teaching strategies, the limits imposed by IPR and managing multiple deposits arose.

Towards OER: Designing repository architecture and processes to support educational resource sharing Angela Triki?, Nottingham Trent University Vicki McGarvey, Nottingham Trent University

This was our presentation and was well attended given that it was timetabled at the end of two very intensive days.  The presentation was to highlight some of the project’s  technical, policy and business processes and how these have been addressed in the design and implementation of our learning repository. Our observations encouraged some lively debate especially with respect to the simplified approach that we have moved to with respect to metadata. There was also interest in whether we were developing a sharing community and we explained how so far academic and professional service staff have been involved in the decision making process.

Resource description, discovery, and metadata for Open Educational ResourcesR. John Robertson (University of Strathclyde), Phil Barker (Heriot Watt University), Lorna Campbell (University of Strathclyde)-  This presentation provided an overview of the UKOER projects and their approaches to describing their educational resources and identified some issues relating to description when individuals are deciding to share. There is a challenge to OER projects with respect to deciding what descriptive information is need. e.g. author, title, date, url, file format, file size rights etc.  Describing resources requires time and money and there is tension between immediate users and requirements of the wider community.  There is an argument that standards may be irrelevant as they exist in underlying systems and an export standard can be mapped. Some systems provide full text searching however still need keywords for audio, video and flash materials, keywords and tags are useful for aggregators. The presentation considered the arguments for and against Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web age (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) which may deal with paid inclusion.and description for specialised discovery tools   Specialised discovery tools include – format based Vimeo, YouTube, Slideshare and Scribd, aggregators like DiscoverED and OERCommons and subject or domain repositories (Jorum), which often require domain specific terminology but may restrict fields of descriptive information – so there is tendancy to put everything in the available fields. SEO – too many high value terms may have a negative impact on the page rankings, it’s better to be highly ranked for fewer terms. with respect to how much metadata is needed, there is tension between how much needs to be created how much is used – but there are no clear answers for this – most projects within the OER programme are taking a light touch. Regarding dissemination the presentation went on to consider the pros and cons of RSS/ATOM and OAI-PMH. RSS (Really Simple Sindication) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss is a family of web feed  formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. ATOM applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub or APP) is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources http://www.ntushare.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=586.  OAI-PMH Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archives_Initiative_Protocol_for_Metadata_Harvesting is a protocol developed by the Open Archives Initiative. It is used to harvest (or collect) the metadata descriptions of the records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.   Most aggregators of learning resources are based exclusively around RSS/ATOM or support both RSS/ATOM and OAI-PMH.   Existing OAI-PMH harvesters are firmly focused on the Scholarly Communications community. Both approaches have issues – need to have technology which supports OAI-PMH.

 

OER10 Reflections: Day 2 Morning April 7, 2010

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The power of the collective - Alison Littlejohn Caledonian Academy, Glasgow Caledonian University – this presentation looked at learning with respect to networks  – that “connect people, organisations and resources” (Siemems 2006). She referred to Paulsen’s (1993) Law of Cooperative Freedom – where learners are free to negotiate their learning in place, time, pace, content and technology and went on to refer to Anderson (2006) who suggests learners should have the freedom to negotiate their relationships with fellow learners and teachers – facilitated by software tools. With respect to the Capetown declaration Alison illustrated where individuals are contributing to world of knowledge, in particular educators who are creating free open resources, which may lead to new approaches to assessments, accreditation and collaboration. She suggested that the emerging business models for OER involve individuals, groups and networks. With respect to collective knowledge the cycle is consumption, connection, creation and contribution. She referred to a charting tool that maps the interactions with respect to generating collective knowledge – which charts where the learner starts with where they want to be. Charting  provides an opportunity for the individula to interact with personal development and to “make use of people and resources and fine tune plans at each point”.  Alison concluded by presenting some challenges relating to OER, such as self regulation by learners within their groups, networks and collective; persuading individuals to contribute to collective knowledge; presenting new business models to universities and encouraging behaviour change with respect to learners, teachers, support staff.

Demystifying Re-Usable Learning Objects – Beverly Leeds and Debbie Barnes, University of Central Lancashire - Ev0lution Project This presentation provided an overview of the creation of reusable learning objects created by the JISC funded E-Evolve - (employability) and Revolve (re-use existing materials)Projects.  The RLOs for the E-Evolve project were created by academics – using Wimba create and Adobe Presenter. Evolution has unpacked theses RLOs and made them available as learning activities and resources – for different pedagogic representations. The materials have a Creative Commons license.

Never mind the technology – why would we share? Charles Duncan - Charles presentation related to creating an business case for openly sharing resources and in particular resources, drawing on the work of two JISC projects the Community Dimensions of Learning Object Repositories and Improving the Evidence Base in Support of Sharing Learning Materials. Six different approaches were considered with respect to sharing education resources:

Charles said with respect to sharing educational resources institutions needed to consider “who are the producers and who are the consumers” within the context of:

Regarding take up and adoption the key to success is identifying the benefits for teachers.

Designing for innovation around OER – Andy Lane This presentation related to the work of the Open University – the fact that closed educational resources need to be redesigned if they are to be made open. Andy presented the stages of open educational resources development

  1. Legal – creative commons release
  2. Practical – accessing content
  3. Technical – an environment for open access
  4. Pedagogic – designs that work
  5. Economic - a model for sustainable operation
  6. Transformative – change wasy of working and learning

 He stated that OER development involves products, people and processes – “openness provides an invitation to innovate, even if it is only to learn in a different way”. Action research for the OU’s OpenLearn - “has focused key actors in differing contexts” and the impact of OpenLearn content and technologies – learner, educator, researcher. Research has found that heavy learner users are volunteer students and social learners.  Educators have been involved in the learning design research – have modified content, used it as is and have had an impact on the technical changes.  LabSpace has facilitate collaboration.  OpenLearn has also stimulated other projects inside and outside of the University.

Repurpsing with a purpose – a story with a happy ending Lyn Greaves, Thames Valley University Clare Bradley, London Metropolitan University, RLO-CETL Professor Sibel Roller, Thames Valley University - This presentation was a case study of the Project BL4ACE which has worked with RLO-CETL. The project redeveloped an academic skills module, used in accountancy, business and law to develop critical thinkg skills required to study science, which was eventually delivered to premedical year, FDsc/BSc Helth and Exercise Science and Froens Science. The class size ranged between 35-70.  The reusable learning objects included resources on referencing books, websites and journals; reflective writing; internet detective (Intute)  and help with essay writing (AcademicPhraseBank Manchester) - as well as, research in Biosciences (Engage CETL Reading) Helping you plan your career (TVU Resource) The redeveloped module had a positive impact on student achievement – although the project acknowledged some limitations, which were, small student numbers, comparing three cohorts and they are still waiting for some data. However, there has been positive feedback from students, with respect to the module scaffolding, mixture of resources and media and ease of use.

Dimensions of Culturally Sensitive Factors in the Design and Development of Learning ObjectsMei Qi, ,Tom Boyle, London Metropolitan University - The presentation considered the cultural issues with respect to reuse, which may arise in the design and the development of learning objects. A cross-cultural comparative study between UK and China was carried out which identified the following cultural dimensions:

  1. The Knowledge dimension relates to cultural issues that are associated with the content of learning of the learning objects, and the required prior knowledge of learners.
  2. The Pedagogical dimension explores the culturally sensitive factors related to the activities of teaching and learning. Laurillard’s (2002) conversational framework is used as the basis for examining the cultural influences on effectiveness of learning.
  3. The Access dimension focuses on cultural diversity in human computer interface design.
  4. The Technology dimension focuses on the cultural differences in the technical infrastructure and learners’ technological knowledge and skills. These differences influence the use of OERs and learners’ experience of OERs.

OER10 Reflections Day 1: Afternoon April 1, 2010

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Evaluating a cancer biology learning package of OER: Dr Momma Hejmadi University of Bath – This is a partnership project with JISC, Bath is one of a consortium of 9 universities headed by the HEA Centre for Biosciences, trialling a pilot programme to support Open Educational Resources in cancer biology. The goals of this pilot project are to identify and resolve a significant number of issues and barriers which can impede the practice of discovering, sharing and openly building upon resources.  Momma provided an overview of a Cancer Biology tutorial – developed in Flash which is part of a suite of Cancer Biology OER Resources. The decision to use Flash instead of text was driven by students who wanted something that was more visually appealing. The project made sure that the object conformed to SENDA guidelines -  Momma said that the fact that they had a professional web developer involved made it easier to address issues with respect to accessibility. Some of the files are going on JORUM but there is a challenge with having the resources in two different places as resources would need to updated twice. Momma said there was also the cultural challenge that teaching is not high on the University agenda and possibly using the material without understanding the science.

OSS Watch OpenSpires Project : Rowan Wilson University of Oxford – Rowan presented an overview of open approaches with the Free and Open Software Communities (FOSS) synthesising the work of  Open Source Software Service OSS Watch and open content as exemplified in the project  OpenSpires which aims to increase the amount of audio and video content released from Oxford Open Content resources. The OpenSpires project has built on the success of podcasts.ox.ac.ukand iTunesU, which had provided a group of academics to approach. The resources cover a range of subject areas, economics, environmental change, business, research, ethics, medicine, physics, English, classics, art history and philosophy.  OSS watch provides information on open source they are not developers. Rowan provided description of what is free and open source software which is software:

According to Rowan the connection between Open Content and  FOSS is that they are both have ethically motivated beginnings, with general licensing models where community is central.  However, FOSS is between 20-30 years old and open content is less than 10.  He presented different open models:

Conceptualising collaborative participation and engagement in OER communities: Dr  Alevizou Open – University OLNet Project - this presentation related to research into OER typologies and communities.  Panagiot presented definitions of open education: resources and communities:

 She presented a conceptual map of OER which included:

The research has also categorised OER into:

Panagiot gave examples of collaborative outputs

And also communities of improvement

Panagiot went to provide an overview of the OER audience which includes; surfers; single-self regulated learners; autodidacts; volunteer students/teachers; social learners. Olnet has, also, provided interviews with stakeholders.

Evaluating the Practice of Opening up Resources for Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences:Dr Darren Marsh (C-SAP), Ms Anna Gruszczynska (C-SAP) – This presentation was based on the findings of the C-Sap Project  Evaluating the Practice of Opening up Resources for Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences which has endeavoured to adopt a critical social science perspective on the processes, motivations, and incentives for sharing digital educational resources – drawing on the insights of academic peer review, the project attempts to develop ways in which teaching and learning resources can move from a model of tacit, individualised production and consumption to one whose assumptions are shared so that the resources to be made ‘open’ are as fully appreciated as possible.  Anna referred to Goodyear Jones (2004) E-learning model as a model to guide the creation of resources. One of the outputs of the project will be a toolkit which will include mapping, diagnostic and generative aspects. With respect to reuse of modules Anna stated that the intent of the module need to be reexamined by the originator and future users – as teaching materials tend to be localised and context bound – changes for reuse may relate to the cultural aspects rather than the design, however taking away too much context may make reuse difficult. With respect to transformation of resources the following should be considered:

Materials

The challenge of OER to Academic Practice : Tom Browne University of Exeter – this presentation considered the tension between academics’ vision of OER and what can be achieved with the available resources. Tom talked about considerations with respect to the conflicting pressure of producing good practice in learning and teaching and the development of an academic profile and the need for OER to sit in educational and research strategies. He referred to the Educause Horizon Report 2010 which discusses the shift towards oepn content with respect to the way academics are conceptualizing education, a movement from information delivery to the process of learning and the partnership between teachers and students in their use of resources. Exeter’s project intended to provide learning materials and an open repository Open Exeter as well as look at the impact of OER on the educational culture with considerations with respect to sustainability.  Tom said that there are number o f  reasons why academics should contribute to OER   it contributes to the public good, it raises their profile, it enhances their career and it is an opportunity to share knowledge – OER needs academic buy-in. OER should be embedded in institutional strategies that relate to education, research and knowledge transfer, marketing and internationalisation and employability as it can impact on the univeristy reputation and student satisfaction. The potential of OER regarding curriculum design and delivery it can transform learning and teaching, encourage reuse and sharing, promote independent learning and can underpin research informed teaching.  However, the challenges are staff engagement and awareness, rewarding staff, inevitably IPR, quality, reputation, confidence, trust staff resources. With respect to staff awareness Tom suggested integrating the staff demand-side into staff development e.g. showing useful resources relevant teaching which are open but be aware that staff may feel that their authority is challenged if they haven’t produced the resources.  He said that that institutions needed policy incentives to encourage those staff that are ok with sharing resources and those that feel it may challenge their research or career.  Exeter has decided to take a risk averse approach with respect to IPR and he referred to Charlesworth (2007) who says that IPR is still an inhibitor with regarding innovative learning and teaching.  The challenge was also to move away from concentrating on what resources they did not want to allow access to, to a more “liberal access” approach. Staff have seen MIT and OpenLearn and are concerned with the amount of resources required to produce content. The recommendation is that OER should be part of staff development, this should be supported by “high quality exemplars”, room for debate, and embedding “supply agenda in design and delivery”.

Can open educational resources meet the needs of national educational initiatives : Kerry Welch, Chris Craggs, Richard Windle, Heather Wharrad, University of Nottingham – this presentation demonstrated a reusable learning object to support the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s essential skills clusters (ESC) - this one of a series of RLOs, all of which will be open. In addition they are investigating the potential for the reuse of OERs at other institutions, in particular the issue OER vs closed access. The RLOs they have produced are interactive and use a mix of media, are platform and content independent. With respect to ESC they have found so far that only a small number of institutions have used OERs and have used existing material or commercially available resources – OERs are sometimes viewed as poorer quality but a barrier may, also, be knowledge of OERs and knowing where to find them.