First Blog of the Year January 17, 2011
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentIt’s a little late I know. The project has had quite a busy couple of weeks. We had our first internal webinar last week using Live Meeting, the theme was an Introduction to our Learning Repositories, it was run by our Project Officer Anna Armstrong and I answered the questions that we received during the delivery. It was good fun an well attend a very different experience to running a face-to-face session. We intend to have another three before the end of the project, on OER, Creative Commons and Good Practice.
Last week I had a meeting with my colleagues which are developing support for technology enhanced learning they are planning to put all their supporting documentation into our NTU learning repository. Then there will be a course which will link to these resources. To streamline the metadata process they have decided to use templates to autopopulate the fields. I am not sure once this has been implemented this will make an excellent case study.
Also, last week I got together with some of my colleagues to start scoping our questionnaire and focus group for our evaluation process. The evaluation will be focusing on the objectives of the project so that helped us to start formulating the questions. We hope to hold the focus group at the beginning of February with the questionnaire shortly after.
Last Blog of the Year December 23, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentIsn’t it funny how you seem to manically plough through your outstanding stuff at this time of the year as if you were disappearing for weeks when it is just over a week. We are just heading into the final 3 months of the project which I predict will be eventful as we start to develop our processes for making our content open, host a National Workshop, present at a couple of conferences, finish our evaluation and write our report. We are, also, going to further investigate our IRep harvesting from our learning repositories.
I did not report that I presented our rationale for making resources open in our learning repositories at our Elearning Working Group and apart from some concerns about content they seemed supportive of us going ahead dependent on a process which we are currently developing, so that is definitely an excellent end to the year. We have had papers accepted for NTU’s annual conference and OER 11 which we are excited about. And we have now had confirmation that UKOLN, Jorum and Humbox will be speaking at our National Workshop.
So all that remains to be said is Happy Christmas and Peaceful New Year!
SHARE November Newsletter December 2, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentHighlights
Welcome to this month’s Newsletter. Not one to miss a chance to disseminate SHARE’s activities far and wide – it is a slightly abbreviated version of the one circulated amongst colleagues here at NTU.
At the beginning of the month I had a visit from Balviar Notay, the JISC Programme Manager for our project. This presented an opportunity to provide a more in-depth overview of the project’s outputs. Balviar was particularly interested in staff engagement with the learning repositories and the processes we had adopted to enable easy publishing and retrieval. Balviar commented that the project would be a useful case study for the wider higher education community.
With respect to the learning repository, we released another update of the metadata template that colleagues should complete when publishing. This is the simplest so far so we hope colleagues will be happy with it. We welcome any feedback on this or any features of the learning repositories.
The project, also, is pleased to announce after a couple of expectant months the national learning repository, JorumOpen, can now be searched via the learning repository tool, more on this below.
Bright Idea of the Month
The learning repository link now gives you access to the JorumOpen learning repository. The word Jorum is of Biblical origin and means a collecting (or drinking) bowl and JorumOpen provides a bowlful of learning and teaching resources deposited by UK, HE and FE Institutions. Everything in JorumOpen is free to reuse and repurpose and can be searched directly from within NOW. Are you thinking about adding fresh content to your learning room? Perhaps someone has already created an online resource for the topic you are teaching. Why not have a look in the JorumOpen repository to see what’s available?
Web Sites of the Month – a selection from SHARE Project web site
This month’s links includes dossiers, debates and developments:
- Taking OER Beyond the Community – With this initiative, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) are aiming to expand understanding of OER by educational decision makers and quality assurance experts in order to promote their wider use
- OER 101: Theory and Practice – Two presentations from David Wiley: The first presents a strengthened and clarified definition of OER. The second recognizes that in “practice” people play extremely fast and loose with the term “open”
- Roadmap for an Open Educational Highway – This project seeks to develop an interface for publishing Open Education Resources (OER) to a range of repositories
Monthly Stats
Here are this month’s stats:
- Number of learning resources published across all NTU’s Learning Repositories (including Schools and NTU LRs) – 3974
- Number of learning resources published in the NTU-wide Learning Repository – 1781
Web Sites of the Week December 2, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentOER hits the main press, more OER guidance and support as well as musings on OER.
- OER IPR Support: OER IPR licensing workshop form JISC Legal
- Why Free Online Lectures Will Destroy Universities – Unless they Get their Act Together Fast - Article by Adrian Hon the challenge to traditional teaching on online lectures
- Has Creative Commons Become Inevitable - some thoughts from Heather Ford
- Services to Support Repository Managers-a list to help managers to share their experiences, tips, ideas, solution and best practice
Snow and Dissemination December 2, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentJust a quick one from me this week. I have spent quite a considerable amount of time this week writing at home because of the snowy weather although I did manage to slot in some remote learning repository trouble shooting. This writing has included an interim report, a couple of conference proposals and our monthly newsletter. I must admit that sometimes it is not always easy motivating oneself to do these type of activities but on the reflection they are very useful endeavours. Reports help you to consolidate your thoughts with respect to how your project is progressing, a chance to revisit the project plan together with the expected outputs and given we are only four months from the end of the project an opportunity to reflect on our overall progress. Conference proposals help you to think innovatively about your project’s activities and also provides a chance to think about presenting on related fields. Newsletters help you to remind your immediate colleagues that the project is still there doing stuff. So despite my aching typing fingers I think it was all worth it.
Web Sites of the Week November 24, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentQuite a few this week, the list includes discussions on openness its benefits and definitions, links to repositories, software to encourage openness and a pitch for a project that is looking into developing an API that can help us to navigate the messy world of OER.
- OER Theory and Practice: 2 presentations: 1st presents a strengthened and clarified definition of OER, 2nd recognizes that in “practice” people play extremely fast and loose with the term “open.”
- Open Access Anthropology Repositories : new and incomplete overview over digital libraries and repositories with free access to papers and theses. Most of them are in English (some in German and Scandinavian languages) and mostly based on the overview at Open Doar.
- Trends in Large-Scale Subject Repositories : D-Lib article noting a lack of broad empirical studies on subject repositories, the authors investigate subject repository trends that reveal common practices despite their apparent isolated development
- Microsoft works with educators and open source to support free knowledge sharing wiki: New open source extension for Microsoft Word delivers support for MediaWiki file format so users can upload documents directly into Wiki repositories.
- Exemplar Preservation Repositories: Comparison by Format Profile : How format profiles can reveal potentially characteristic fingerprints for emerging types of repository – from Diary of a Preservation Project
- University of Michigan Library Enable Broader Sharing and Reuse with Change to CC: the University content on its website under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This announcement is significant because the Library had been using the more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license.
- Roadmap for an Open Educational Highway: This project seeks to develop an application programming interface (API) for publishing Open Education Resources (OER) to remixable repositories -and an excellent way to pitch a project
- Creative Commons Case Studies : organisations share experience of using CC
- Why Bother Being Open: from iterating towards openness blog providing an overview of the benefits of openness
National Workshop Preparation November 24, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentAs we get ever closer to the finishing line of the project our thoughts and planning turn to our national conference. The project threw around a few ideas with respect to what we wanted to focus on, the ideas ranged from OER to repository usage. In the end we have decided to focus on developments in learning respositories, I was inspired to do this after the recent RSP event at sheffield. The workshop will be called “I Fought the Learning Repository and the Learning Repository Won” and will focus on learning repository developments past and future, together with a short showcase of our project outputs. The workshop will take place on 16th March at our Nottingham Conference Centre and will be free. We will have places for about 50 people. We have had the date in our diary for several months and I have noticed that JISC is having its conference on 14th and 15th in Liverpool, not quite a clash and you can get a direct train from Liverpool to Nottingham (it takes just over 2hrs as you are going west east). More details can be found in the National Workshop tab and in the next month or so we will circulating details on how to book on to it.
Web Sites of the Week November 16, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThis week reports, history and guidance.
- Removing Friction in Open Education - Erik Duval’s keynote from the OpenEd 10 conference in Barcelona
- Report on the International Council for Open and Distance Education - looks at the barriers to open and distance learning
- Uncovering Open Access - a history of open access
- Taking OER beyond the OER Community - the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) aiming to expand understanding of OER by educational decision makers and quality assurance experts in order to promote their wider use.
Conversations on Strategically Embedding Sharing November 16, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI am continuing to have further discussions with schools and services on embedding sharing learning resources within their practice. So far I have had discussed this with colleagues in the Schools of Arts and Humanities; Animal and Rural Science; Science and Technology; Law and the Centre for Professional Learning and Development. In all of the conversations I have had so far colleagues have found not too challenging the suggestions I have made with respect to activities for embedding learning resources and all could come up with ways on how these activities can be implemented within their school/service, some had already begun to work in the suggested areas. These discussions and the subsequent responses from colleagues show that NTU is making further steps in the journey of staff engagement with sharing learning resources.
To recap – this is the checklist of activities further finessed as a result of my conversations with schools/services by March 2011 schools/services should have evidenced:
- Opportunities and activities for sharing learning resources with colleagues have been adequately addressed in the School Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy Action Plan or Service Operational Plan
- Staff have a knowledge and understanding of NTU’s Learning Repositories: It is expected that School/Service will host a workshop/s on NTU’s Learning Repositories.
- The start of an implementation of School/Service project/s that use NTU’s learning repositories: A suggestion is 2/3 resource management projects, for example the sharing of generic content (e.g. study skills, student support, assessment criteria, information literacy etc.), across a range of learning rooms. Alternatively, 1 large project evidencing collaborative sharing of module learning resources across a range of programmes (e.g. third year project, ethics, research methods, project management etc.).
- Illustrations of School/Service learning repository use have been disseminated within the School, the NTU Community and beyond: The project will help to capture these and details of the project/s will be in the final report.
- The use of NTU’s learning repositories has been integrated within School/Service learning technology/e-learning developments: The learning repositories should not be treated separately to other e-tools used within the School/Service, so for, example, if the School/Service has an e-learning champion/friend or any other method of support within the School the learning repositories should be integrated within the support already provided.
In addition to the above, the project would also like see that the School/Service is beginning to:
- Develop staff knowledge and understanding of Open Educational Resources
- Integrate OER into School/Service learning technology/e-learning developments
Further movement to OER November 15, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentAt our wider meeting we discussed moving towards publishing OERs in our learning repository. A couple of months ago the University changed its “Copyright and Educational Resources Policy” to accommodate the attachment of a creative commons license to educational resources. Lisa Warburton, the University’s Copyright Advisor has produced an excellent guide to Creative Commons so really colleagues can start to produced OERs now. However, we are still specing how we can make items open in our learning repository. There are two options make resources open in our NTU repository or have a separate repository something like NTU Open that just has OER. It looks like the most straightforward approach would be the latter option, resources could then be accessed via their URLs and/or the repository could be harvested. We now need to do some testing.
