Web Sites of the Week November 8, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThis week enhancements, efficacy and challenges in open education.
- JorumOpen - enhanced features previewing and editing
- A decade of OCW benefits at MIT - after a nearly a decade its benefits to users
- Open Education, Cracks, and the Crisis of Higher Education - a blog post by Stephen Downes
- Open Content and the Costs of Online Learning - the real cost on an online masters degree
- Learning with ‘e’s: Open for use? - Steve Wheeler open educational resources and open scholarship
A strategic approach to staff engagement in repository use November 8, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI am in the process of meeting our learning and teaching coordinators to discuss strategically how to engage staff in the use of learning repositories, the first one was last week. I have decided that a way to steer these discussions would be to create a checklist of activities that learning and teaching coordinators and their e-learning champions could support in order to enable a more strategic approach. The checklist would be something like:
- Opportunities and activities for sharing learning resources with colleagues have been identified in the School action plan or Service Operational Plan
- Staff have a knowledge and understanding of NTU’s learning repositories
- Staff have a knowledge and understanding of Open Educational Resources
- School/Service project/s that use NTUs learning repositories have been identified
- Illustrations of School/Service learning repository use have been captured and disseminated
- Support for the use of NTU’s learning repositories and OER have been integrated in School e-learning support
Activities to facilitate the above
- LTC’s and e-learning champions/friends understand how to use NTU’s learning repositories and access open educational resources
- Workshop on NTU’s learning repositories
- Workshop on Open Educationa Resources
- Learning repository and sharing learning room (toolkit)
- Models of repository use
- Illustration/s of learning repository use
- Illustration/s of using open educational resources
RSP Event Doing it differently November 1, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , 1 comment so farLast week I attended RSP’s one day conference Doing It Differently at Sheffield Cathedral. The invited speakers covered a range of areas with respect to repository usage. After an introduction by Bill Hubbard from the Centre for Research Communications at Nottingham University, Stephanie Taylor Research Officer for UKOLN provided in insightful history of repositories and provided some considerations for future repository developments, including hidden repositories, subject and national repositories, aggregation and finding out what end users want. This was followed by Beyond SNEEP: Ideas for Creative Repository Management – Richard Davis, Repository Service and Development Manager, ULCC. Richard considered the use of tagging, enhancing the user experience, through personalisation and customisation and the use of feeds, providing an overview of SNEEP - Social Networking Extnersions for Eprints. Richard said that Newsfeeds can provide links to datasets within the repository, they can be dynamically updated, and encourage the use of the repository as the single place to deposit. He suggested the use of repository stats, to demonstrate effectiveness, areas of interest, to support research exercises and encourage healthy competition, as well as putting links in abstracts to related resources.
After the morning break Pat Lockley, Learning Support Development Officer, University of Nottingham presented on Xpert: creating a repository using RSS. Xpert is a JISC funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources created and seamlessly published through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits. The aim of XPERT is to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use. Learners and educators can use XPERT to search a growing database of open learning resources suitable for students at all levels of study in a wide range of different subjects.Creators of learning resources can also contribute to XPERT via RSS feeds created seamlessly through local installations of Xerte Online Toolkits. Xpert has been fully integrated into Xerte Online Toolkits, an open source content authoring tool from The University of Nottingham. Xpert, Free to use, web based, open source (PHP / MySQL), lightweight (3 files), OAI harvester (as well as RSS), similar to the MIMAS demonstrator. Future developments include, Facebook Integration, VLE Integration, Wordpress Integration , “Searching” and “Serendipity”, Library Integration, Xpaper – linking OER and research. This was followed by Practice-based research in repositories: representing non-textual artefacts as research outputs – Stephanie Meece, Manager, UAL Research Online, University of the Arts London. As the title states Stephanie provided an overview of the challenges associated with depositing non-textual objects within a repository. Overcoming this challenge required consultation with endusers who would be depositing and retrieving resources with respect to how the artefacts should be best presented and the supporting resources required to contextualise the artefacts.
After lunch Jason Hoyt, Vice-President, Research & Development, Mendeley Ltd provided an overview of the reference manager and academic social network Mendeley. Mendeley aims to help researchers work smarter, make science collaborative and transparent and to create an open research database. Taking an approach similar toLast.fm it connects researchers to related libraries, researchers and papers- by aggregating research data in the cloud. The largest users of the database are Cambridge and Stanford Uni, overall it has 500,00 users. This was followed by RSS in, RSS out. Experimenting with WordPress for scholarly publishing – Joss Winn, University of Lincoln. Joss described how Wordpress can be an excellent feed generator and can be used as a content management system and provided an overview of http://jiscpress.org/ a document authoring, publishing, discussion and syndication platform for JISC’s funding calls and final project reports.
The day was concluded by iTunesU at Nottingham – Sally Hanford, Audio-Visual Media Development Officer, University of Nottingham. This presentation provided some useful observations with regards the resources and processes required to launch an iTunesU reflecting on Nottingham University’s experiences. Sally presented some impressive statistics on the Nottingham iTunesU which is a public site only and since its launch in June of this year has had 110,000 previes, 44,000 downloads, 67 albums, 300 tracks, 14 GB of data. The university had been podcasting since 2006 and saw iTunesU as an opportunity to reach/build a global audience for some the resources their inspiring educators produces. Its implementation was managed by a multi-disciplinary team which included staff from senior levels, marketing and media production. Sally said that success was dependent on a clear plan and ongoing resourcing and institutions should not underestimate the time it takes to upload a back catalogue.
Web sites of the week October 25, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentA short list this week but not lacking in quality.
- Repurposing open educational content - OU openlean study unit providing an insight into OER
- CORRE framework for transforming teaching materials into OER - useful diagram for those that want to start creating OER
- Repository file analysis - pie chart from Southampton’s ED SHARE Project providing an overview file types within repsositories
- Openness: From Sharing to Adopting – post from Stephen Downes who says we don’t upload them (OER) and merge them into prefab course modules. Who needs the grief? We link to them and let learners use them directly.
- Managing and Learning in Massively Open Online Courses - slide share presentation from George Siemens
Meeting with Bolviar Notay October 25, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI had a really useful meeting with Balviar Notay, the Information Environment Programme Leader last week – who I should also thank for her patience with respect to my slightly chaotic set-up as I was in the process of unpacking after moving office. It really helped to provide an overview of the project and to discuss our outputs. She, also, provided some helpful comments and advice on the national workshop we are planning for 16th March 2011. In addition, I was very impressed by how adept the JISC programme managers are with respect to their understanding of the diverse range of projects they oversee.
Latest metadata view is released October 25, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentWe released our latest metadata view last week. This is the most simplified view so far and we have also amended the help screens within the learning repository to provide extra assistance to users completing the metadata. For our purposes we finally opted for a an extremely scaled down version of LOM.
Title – on field -mandatory
Description – one field – mandatory
Keyword(s) – one field
Learning resource author
(Author details)
Role – select author from drop-down list - mandatory
Name(s) – one field – mandatory
Learning resource educational type
Learning resource education type – select from drop down list
Copyright description
Copyright details – select from drop down list – mandatory
Next we need to decide whether we just keep with this approach to implement creative commons or whether we use a template.
Web Sites of the Week October 18, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentWeb Sites of the Week
It’s been a while since I have done this but activity has picked up since end of the summer period.
- Open Educational Resources E-Infrastructure Update - an overview of the progress of the JISC OER programme and issues identified so far
- Research on OER sustainability - a list of articles from iterating towards openness blog
- OpenDisc - high quality open software for windows
- Open Education and Open Services - slide presentation
- Do Open Educational Resources Increase Efficiency - challenging article from Creative Commons
- JORUM Roadmap - overview of current and future activities
- UNESCO Open Educational Resources Site - provides links to useful OER resources
- Curriki’s Online OER Course - written for school teachers but some aspects are of use to practitioners what ever the educational level
- NYU’s Open Education Pilot
- Free Open Ed Business Course - run by OLNET starts 1st November 2010
- Reaching the Heart of the University: Libraries and the Future of OER
On the last leg October 18, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentWe have just over 5 months of the project left and I envisage that these will be busy months. The Development and Implementation wider group met last week for the first time in the academic year. We discussed the priorities for the remainder time of the project. I would like this group to be a peer review group providing advice on activities, guidance, support etc. Strategically I would like to work with our learning and teaching coordinators and champions within the Schools to ensure that considerations with respect to the learning repositories are illustrated in their action plans and technology enhancement activities. As I have mentioned in a previous post I want our ”Learning Respositories and Sharing Course” to become a toolkit – which includes guidance and advice relating to sharing learning resources within NTU’s learning repositories as well as providing an overview of the OER landscape. I presented the group with the following overview of project activities that will be taking place in the next few months:
Project Activities
- Monthly webinars – Learning Repository, Creative Commons, Open Educational Resources
- Implement Creative Commons
- Develop Learning Repositories online course (toolkit)
- Incentive Scheme identify small projects to publish to Learning Repositories
- National Workshop
- Integrate activities into Information Systems and Centre Professional Learning and Development
- Identify further repositories to harvest from
School and Services Activities
- Work with Learning Teaching Coordinators (and) elearning friends/champions on strategic actions with respect to learning repository
- Learning Repository to be support by elearning friends/champions
- Evidence of publishing to the learing repository
- One workshop before end of March
- Identifification of a small project that will use the LRs
Role of the Development and Implementation Wider Group
- To disseminate SHARE Newsletter
- Peer review Learning Repository resources
- Provide feedback on the learning repository
- Involved in the evaluation process
ATLC – 2010 Day 2 September 20, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThis was a bit of a SHARE Project day as we had a paper in the morning and a poster at lunch.
Angela Trikic and I shared our presentation slot with some innovative projects. This included “DAT’s the way to do it? Medical students and Learning Technologists working together at Peninsula Medical School. Sally Holden, Russell O’Brien, Zac Gribble, Paul Russell, Carmen Mallett, Robin Oswald“ This considered the concept of Dr as teacher, which encourages students to understand the importance of the role of Drs as teachers and life long learners. The elearning support unit provided support and resources on the induction to this course, which included collaborations with students on the production of reusable learning objects. Another paper ”Personal inquiry in formal and informal settings: nQuire for scripting interactions Eileen Scanlon, Mike Sharples, Paul Mulholland, Members PI Team” provided an overview of some activities of the Personal Inquiry (PI) project which is funded by the ESRC/ EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning programme, and is research jointly conducted between the University of Nottingham and the Open University in which young people aged 12 – 15 undertake evidence based inquiry learning across formal and informal settings. The aim was to increase engagement in science. The project created a tool to facilitate inquiry based learning activities. The final paper ”A Second Life pilot in two online M-level programmes Gabi Witthaus, Alejandro Armellini, Kelly Barklamb” looked at using second life to support work-based and distance learners, facilitated by Salmon’s 5 stage model and e-tivities. The study found that using a simulated oil rig to simulate an evacuation in SL “allowed students to take part in activities that they may later be required to carry out as practising Occupational Psychologists, such as planning work and developing training programmes.” The findings showed “that it is possible to create very flexible and cost-effective learning experiences using the affordances of SL. Used with well-structured tasks, and in combination with an asynchronous discussion forum, SL can add a useful dimension to distance courses.” Our presentation in this slot was well received and there was a lot of interest about incentives for engaging staff and encouraging them to publish as well as our approach to creative commons.
The final part of the morning was pretty active after my last minute decision to attend “Guerilla Narratives of Media” workshop, where participants in groups were asked to film ideas on their mobile devises on how to use media in teaching. The workshop was introduced with some ideas on how media can be used and then it was left up to the participants to come up with some ideas that were shared on YouTube and in a Wiki.
During lunch time I was able to provide some more information about our project to individuals that came to observe the excellent poster produced by Jon Fletcher within our project. Individual questions ranged from copyright, staff engagement and repository implementation.
After lunch I attended an endearing keynote The hole in the wall: self organising systems in education Sugata Mitra which provided observations of students self organised learning in India facilitated by a computer in wall. Mitra was able to evidence the educational progress of his young students over time that was encouraged by the interactions of their peers and some volunteer supporters, grandmother recruits in the UK. Mitra also showed a study he had carried out in Italy where students answered English questions with no English language knowledge and without the presence of a teacher just using the Internet.
The second day was concluded with some useful strategic presentations on e-learning implementation. “The programme-design sabbatical: an institutional strategy to mainstream technology-enhanced learning Colleen Connor” looked at Welsh initiative to mainstream technology enhance learning, lead by programme leaders, with a multi-disciplinary team based approach, by focusing on building the skills gap, encouraging staff engagement by routinely considering TEL in programme design, so that it was considered a normal process,. This was followed by “Infinite space: an innovative & collaborative e-learning approach to large cohort delivery David Fevyer, Brian James, Kathryn Cheshir” which focused on “the development of a multi-faceted e-learning resource to deliver a complex unit across multiple subject frameworks within the School of Conservation Sciences at Bournemouth University (BU)”. The development of this academic practice unit was a collaborative process which included included academics, research students, librarians and learning technologists. Taking a flexible on demand approach it implemented a variety of technologies and techniques to support the unit including streaming/recorded lectures, with formative feedback provided by postgraduate students. The final paper for this session “Captain, navigator, surgeon and cook: balancing leadership and support in educational change management – a case study from legal education Jonathan Powles, Aliya Steed“ looked at the transformation of an online graduate diploma in legal practice to “a group-based transactional and simulated learning” which “required a significant shift in philosophy, as well as practical changes, which affected almost every staff member in the organisation.” The change was facilitated by a team who had no subject specialism but had skills in education design and project management.
It looks like a major theme for the day was collaborative and multi-disciplinary team approaches to project delivery
ALT-C 2010 -Day 1 September 20, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentAs usual the first day had a packed schedule. It started with a challenging candid keynote from Donald Clarke, “Don’t Lecture Me” attacking the lecture as a concept, he also criticised the use of Maslow’s theory, stating that the only reason it survived was because it fitted nicely on a ppt slide. Clarke illustrated how lectures can be tedious for learners and argued that it is better if students see a first class lecture online than a mediocre one face-to-face, although he stated that all lectures should be captured so that students had a second chance to go back and listen to the info but gave no evidence as to whether students actually go back. Clarke went on to query the necessity to cling on to the traditional format of lectures, for example, instead of 1 hr in length why not 15mins, the necessity to attend - when on average only 50% do. He contested that researchers are not necessarily inspirational lecturers and that the lecture is not the most appropriate form for student thought.
The next session I attended was a workshop on Justifying the Costs of Learning Technology - this looked at the issue of replacing localised learning technology to a solution that is open source and centrally managed. We were asked to consider the resources, benefits and how to evaluate the process. This was quite an interesting session as we implemented a new VLE 2 years ago Desire2Learn and although this was not open source many of the issues we discussed in this workshop, such as staff engagement, training, content migration and gathering usage data related to our implementation experience.
In the afternoon I went to the session on Mobile Prardigms: DIY Portfolios the 3 papers presented looked at the use of mobile technologies within teaching. The first paper ”Mobilising remote student engagement on field trips Tim Linsey, Ann Ooms, Stuart Downward, Ken Field, James O’Brien” examined the use of mobile technologies in fieldwork to enable collaboration, communication and efficiency in fieldwork, as part of JISC funded project hosed by Kingston and De Montford University. A range of technology was used which included, phones, cameras and portable PCs to facilitate the integration of fieldwork. The second paper ” Immersed in the Digital: Networked Creativity through Mobile Learning Helen Keegan” presented an action research study where students used mobile phones to produce short films and discussed how students adapted their film production skills to mobile film production. The final paper “eFolio: a DIY ePortfolio (or ‘making the most of what you’ve got’) Alex Furr, Sarah Stevenage, Tom Randell, Fiona Grindley, Adam Warren” illustrated the development of a bespoke eportfolio using Wordpress that linked to their VLE Blackboard, which eventually moved more towards a portal.
During the final part of the first day I attended The tide is turning’: approaches to learning environment evaluation Susannah Quinsee, Carol Higgison, Maureen Readle, Mark Gamble, Richard Walker, although billed as a symposium this was more like a workshop. We were divided into groups that represented, teachers, learners, support staff and managers and each group was asked to consider what their given representative stake holder group would require from a VLE. I was in the group that represented learners. There was much discussion about, mobile technologies, flexible learning spaces and minimum standards of online content delivery. Again as with the morning session on looking at the cost of learning technology because we have already implemented a new VLE some the issues raised we had already addressed but it was useful to hear the experiences of other institutions and identify the similarities. I followed this by going to an engaging presentation by Sudhir Giri Head of Google Learning Labs. Sudhir gave the audience a run down of some the initiatives currently being looked at by learning labs. Which included g2g – sharing of learning material, google whiz an internal experts directory and search engine for google’s internal learning content.
