OER10 Day 3Morning April 21, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , trackbackSiyavula: 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:
- 93% had desks for all learners
- 93% had chairs fo all learners
- 73% textbooks for all learners
- 68% computer lab at school
- 67% internet at school
- 60% shool library
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.
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