June 17, 2010
Posted by AngelaTrikic in : Comms, News , add a commentChange 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!
Communications Workpackage Update, June 2009 July 8, 2009
Posted by sarahhorrigan in : Comms, News , add a commentAs part of the Communications Workpackage for the JISC SHARE project, we thought it would be useful if once a month we gave an update of what we’ve done / got planned for the near future and shared that with the team. So, here’s our update of what we’ve been up to during the past month:
General Update
The acronym “SHARE” will be used as the name of the project and the unique tag “NTUSHARE” will be used for any social media comments / resources / images / videos etc. I’ve written a brief article announcing the acronym and you can find it on this site. I should also mention that you can subscribe to this website using its RSS feed or track a tag too if you want to find out about a particular element of the project! If you’d like to know more about how RSS works then you might find this video useful:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0neif11cak&hl=en&fs=1&]
Ian Mathers, D2L, will be joining the Communications Workpackage group. Thank you for agreeing to be part of the group, Ian.
There will be a section on the eLearning Community Website for the SHARE project which is currently being processed by Web Development. This area will contain static information for the project and link to this site which will contain news, updates and dynamic web 2.0 content.
We are currently testing an internal Confluence wiki and will be comparing it to the OpenSource wiki “TikiWiki” which will come as part of the external web host package as soon as that is set up.
An external web host which offers both an affordable hosting service together with excellent service levels and is a green energy web host – which fits well with NTU’s top university place in the UK’s Green League – has been sourced. We hope to get this set up within the next two to three weeks.
We will also be putting together a communications briefing paper once we have made a decision on the wiki which will best serve the project’s needs and let everyone know about that as soon as we can.
The issue of using NTU branding needs to be explored as a priority and a decision made on its acceptable use on the project website etc.
Actions for Project Team
We need to get photographs of every person listed on the Project team page. If you already have a suitable photograph (head and shoulders shot preferred), could you send it to me or elearning@ntu.ac.uk? If you don’t have a photo available, let us know and we’ll arrange to get one taken.
We would like the workpackage leads to have access to http://elearnntu.wordpress.com (our temporary project website home) in order for them to be able to post monthly updates about their workpackage (details on an approach to doing this will be provided). It will help keep the flow of communications going and be a quick and easy way to keep everyone – both internal and external to the project – informed about what we’re up to. If you already have a WordPress account, please let us know the username so we can add you to the site, if you don’t then let us know that too and we’ll get it arranged!
A final thing to look out for is that we will be arranging to talk to each of the workpackage leads to get an overview of their workpackage to put on the wiki / website – we’ll try to get this sorted out soon so that it is ready to be put in place once we’ve made a decision on which wiki we’ll be using.
Any questions about any of the above, do get in touch with Marek or me.
Sarah, July 2009
SHARE acronym announced July 3, 2009
Posted by sarahhorrigan in : News , add a commentOn 17th June we held our first project team meeting and, amongst other things, we made the decision that we will be using the acronym “SHARE” for our JISC and Desire2Learn supported Repository Enhancement project. The acronym aims to capture the spirit of the project and stands for:
Supporting
Harnessing and
Advancing
Repository
Enhancement
It will be used to identify the project both internally and externally and can also be extended to become the project’s unique social media ‘tag’: NTUSHARE.
Social Media Aggregation of services using the NTUSHARE acronym
Why the need for a unique tag? Well, it allows us to easily find and pull together all comments, postings, resources, videos etc connected with the project which is excellent for the purposes of collation and sharing. The NTUSHARE tag works regardless of the online service the resource originally came from. Every time you find something project-related which you want to share or if you want to make a comment on / about the project, just tag it with “NTUSHARE” and we can pull all of the project-related communications into one place for everyone to access. On Twitter, just use NTUSHARE as a ‘hashtag‘ in the form of #NTUSHARE and again, we can bring that together with everything else project-related using services such as Friendfeed, Cover It Live or NetVibes.
For more about tagging, you might like to read this article about hashtags on the Twitter fan wiki or this article on Tags & Folksonomies: What are they and Why Should you Care?
JISC Project success June 4, 2009
Posted by eLearning @ NTU in : News , add a comment“Integrating process and technology development for effective repository management”
Nottingham Trent University has attracted more than a quarter of a million pounds that will enable us to integrate processes and technology to develop effective management of the Learning Object Repository (LOR) in their virtual learning environment, the Nottingham Trent University Online Workspace (NOW).
JISC will support the project for the next two years with £210,000. A further £50,000 in kind has been committed by Desire2Learn who are investing in technical development.
This partnership draws on the work of the University’s LOR Working Group: Helen Adey, Trevor Pull, Jon Tepper, Helen Boulton, Vicki McGarvey, Barry Gregory, Lisa Warburton and Angela Trikic, who have carried out a range of tasks to prepare for the release of the LOR tool in NOW for the 2009-10 academic year.
Dr Trikic, Head of Educational Development, described how, building on the success of the Institutional Repository (IRep), the University is extending repository services to include a wider range of objects associated with learning and teaching. “For example, colleagues from the School of Animal, Rural & Environmental Sciences can look forward to using the LOR for resources being developed to improve science laboratory practical sessions,” Angela explained, adding, “There is a wide number of research methods modules that are delivered by most schools and there is likely to be a common pool of resources that each of these courses use..” Angela described how the LOR can be set up to support sharing across the University to maximise the use of research methods resources and to help reduce duplication of effort.
Programme Handbooks offer another example. Angela: “These are used by a suite of modules. By storing it in the LOR, the learning room for each module can link to the handbook, which will reduce the need for printed copy as well as economising on electronic storage.”
Here are some key highlights of the repository enhancement project:
• further develop the Institutional Repository and embed its use and content population into the life and work of academics at NTU
• collaborate with Desire2Learn to work on the integration of the Learning Object Repository with IRep and external repositories such as Jorum
• tackle metadata mapping and metadata application profiles for the description of different types of content
• develop policies for the sharing and licensing of content within the LOR, the IRep and National Repositories such as JORUM.
Fostering change in academic learning and teaching practice
The project has a significant cultural change goal and aims to promote and enhance content creation, facilitate learning and teaching resource sharing and management. By developing the interface between IRep, the VLE, LOR and external repositories such as JORUM we extend the range of learning and teaching resources that NTU can draw on, improve our capability to re-use and re-purpose these resources and contribute to a global bank of knowledge.
Angela explained that there are many learning and teaching resources currently locked up in personal storage devices, module locations on the VLE, and other less reliable media. “Within NTU there is a wealth of tried and tested resources and our academics are continuously building on this solid base and enhancing their teaching practice. Sharing these resources helps everyone, our academics boost their reputation, our students reap the benefits of a diverse learning experience and the institution is enriched as a whole,” she concluded.
