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JorumOpen is Implemented on Our Development System June 25, 2010

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We have successfully implemented JorumOpen on our Development system this week. Now that we can see how it works we can plan how we can support staff with its use. As I have already said MERLOT is fully integrated within our Learning Repository tool which means that staff can directly link to the resources that they find within their courses. JorumOpen is different because we are harvesting, which means occasionally staff may get a link straight to the resource but in most cases they retrieve the metadata record if it gives the link to the resource, staff can cut and paste it within their courses, but if this option is not there and there is only preview, download and export, this makes things a little bit tricky. On top of the clear guidance we need to provide on how to use JorumOpen – some which is available from Jorum, our learning repository tool has a rating system so I was thinking we could use this in some way to encourage staff to comment on how easy it is to access the resource in JorumOpen, when they find it.

Strategic movements June 25, 2010

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I have had two conversations about strategic approaches to sharing content within the University this week. Increasing staff engagement will be an important output of our project during this second year. Encouraging staff to engage with the knowledge commons, as I have mentioned previously, appears within our University Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy, which Schools have to address via action plans. To assist with this process myself and the Learning and Teaching Coordinator within one of our Schools are investigating developing an educational resources model that will encourage staff to use the OERs and which may, also, encourage colleagues to share internally and beyond. The model will include awareness raising via workshops, the development of an artifact which will clearly illustrate the OER landscape and possibly some statements that relate to championing sharing resources and use of OERs. Once this model has been developed we will share it with other Schools to see if they would like to adopt it or even repurpose it. We, also discussed looking at the issue of re-inventing the wheel with respect to subject content, for example, we have many courses on research methods, final year project and project management etc. is there a way that we can encourage staff to put some of this content in our learning repository, to encourage repurposing rather than rewriting.

I also talked to another senior colleague within another School which has an e-learning strategy. The School has various levels of engagement by staff in e-learning but they have a committment within their strategy for staff to put most or even all their content within the Learning Respository. This will be an interesting challenge that will need to be scoped.  The rationale behind this approach was not only sharing but also cutting down staff time on rewriting content.

Web sites of the week w/e 18th June 2010 June 18, 2010

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A report, a reflection, presentations and the inevitable open access discussions from communism to science – and a new word for me generativism, I found it relates to generative linguistics.


OER – Content creation and strategic integration June 18, 2010

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It’s been a bit of a mad week, I was on leave last week so no blog from me and then meetings and presentations all this week but being true to my by recurrent diary entry I don’t want to let the blogging slip. We are all very excited with respect to the revision of our “Copyright in Educational Resources Policy” and the inclusion of creative commons, which helps to prepare the future path for colleagues at NTU for their creation of OERs. We had our development and implementation wider meeting yesterday and as we are coming to the end of our academic year I thought this was a suitable point for us to discuss how the group should take shape next year. Given that quite a bit of the implementation work is complete I thought we should change the name to LR champions and concentrate on staff engagement. The group thought this was important but equally they thought it was important to keep the group going as there was still implementation work to be done.  Instead of there being a group of champions they that the LR should be addressed as part of the elearning agenda within Schools rather than separately and Schools should decide how they want to do this. We are going to discuss this issue at our last meeting of the year in July. The new learning and teaching enhancement strategy does have a priority on taking advantage the educational commons so Schools will need to think about this strategically.

Another discussion which has started to brew this week is the best process for making content open. Colleagues within our “Centre for Academic Standards and Quality Assurance”  would like to make some of there academic skill resources available more widely, they have been particularly impressed by the work at Leicester University. Now that we have copyright policy revision we need to unpack issues with respect to content creation, hosting and discoverability.  Questions like do we use Wimba Create build the resource in our VLE and make it open through our Learning Repository, and link to it from our web site blog etc? Do we create it Google sites, link to it from our Learning Repository, Uni web site, blog etc. Both approaches have their limitations e.g. Wimba Create enables packaging but requires hosting, Google Sites is already hosted but there is a slight risk there etc. So we need to scope this.

Finally, I had another opportunity to present the project to colleagues within the library as part of a showcase of other library projects. There is a tendency when your involved in a project that includes colleagues outside of your immediate service to not disseminate progress to your immediate colleagues so I welcomed this opportunity.

And a final, final point – one of our Learning Repository workshops that we are running next week is full – hoorah this is a first.

June 17, 2010

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Change in Copyright policy

Influencing a change in the copyright policy of the University is one of the objectives of the JISC SHARE project. This has now happened. The university has adopted a Copyright in Educational Resources Policy. This policy revision represents a significant step forward as it enable staff to create educational resources that can be deposited into learning repositories using a Creative Commons – Attribution – Non-commercial – Share Alike 2.0 UK: England and Wales license.

Assigning a Creative Commons (CC) license to a resource offers staff more flexibility in how educational resources can be used. It allows for publishing in the Learning Repository and making content open and discoverable. We will be testing out the discoverability of learning objects that are exposed as OERs and will report our findings.

The policy framework will serve the university well beyond the JISC SHARE and illustrates the sustainability of the resource sharing aspects of the project and a commitment to OER. As well as affording opportunities for promoting flagship university programmes it facilitates collaborations with external partners.

What is Creative Commons?

JISC has produced a briefing paper that gives a comprehensive outline of Creative Commons Licences. In summary:

Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) is a licensing system under which authors or producers of a work offer some of their rights to others to reuse their work under certain specified conditions.

The licence is attached to the content and is available in various forms allowing the rights holder to retain a level of control over how their work is treated.

CC licences have various advantages, including ease of use, widespread adoption, choice and flexibility, human-readable, machine-readable and symbolic representations of the licences, and a direct link between the resource and its licence.

Other benefits of Creative Commons include:

Citations and quotes are more likely

Adopting a Creative Commons license allows you to give permission for use and re-purposing so avoiding the need to deal with accidental infringement. This means that your resources are likely to be cited and quoted giving you and the university more exposure.

Less time dealing with Infringement

There has been a lot of concern regarding the interpretation of ‘fair use’ which has led to a cautious approach in relation to quoting and citing content. A CC license offers encouragement for reuse and is likely to increase the number of quotes because content is assigned as CC.

Finding stuff

We will be investigating the discoverability of CC resources for instance, using the Google search engine. However, we expect that content using CC-oriented search engines, is likely to expose work to wider audiences.

We will be disseminating this policy and supporting its implementation with guidance so all in all a good news story!

Web Sites of the Week w/e 4th June 2010 June 4, 2010

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We have presentations, guides, observations and directories this week.

Preparations for the Next Academic Year June 4, 2010

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After staff finish wading through their piles of marking they will start to think about preparing their online content for the next academic year. This means we will probably need to do a bit of testing with respect to those courses who have linked to content that within the Learning Repository and the impact of course roll-over. I am pretty confident that there will not be an impact as the Learning Repository is a separate tool and linking to a resource in the learning repository will be the same as linking to an external resource so there should be no impact.  But testing is never a bad thing. Also, we need to encourage staff to use the Learning Repository to support their delivery of learning content next year.

Strategic Directions and Staff Engagement June 4, 2010

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I had a useful meeting with Learning and Teaching Coordinator (LTC) in Social Sciences to talk about staff engagement. The project has been trying various approaches which have ranged from workshops to leaflets. It is possible too early to expect consistent engagement by staff across the Schools but the relationships we have built up with various colleagues within the Schools through this project and previous projects in particular our VLE implementation project means that we have a group of colleagues that we can call upon to be early adopters. In addition to this the LTC suggested that she puts something in her School action plan with respect to sharing resources. The University is about to release its new Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy, which refers to how students can benefit from using open resources, the LTCs are responsible for implementing the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy within their School via their School Action Plan. It will be interesting to see if we can come up with model that can be implemented across the University. I thought I would base my approach on the concept map presented by Dr Panagiota Alevizou at OER10 in her OLNET slide presentation Conceptualizing collaborative participation and engagement in OER communities – I thought I would add a strand that includes Resource Management which include our Learning Repository and some of the additional resource discovery tools managed by colleagues in the library.