Author Archives: Marion Manton

About Marion Manton

I amSenior Manager: Learning Design and co-manager of TALL with David White. Previous to that I was eLearning Research Project Manager. As well as the day to day running of TALL I am responsible for the ensuring that all TALL programmes are best practice examples of learning online for their audience. I work closely with course teams to specify the learning they want to achieve with their programme and to identify the best uses of technology to do this. I also maintain currency with the latest research in eLearning, to ensure that TALL is aware of and exploits the best current knowledge of what works in terms of effective eLearning. My particular interests are in effective pedagogical models for different learning scenarios and how best to facilitate these by the appropriate use of technology. As well as the development of effective tools and processes to help academics identify these and translate knowledge of their subject and teaching into high quality online learning.

OER Sesame

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Genie in an oil lamp

I am delighted to report that we have received funding from the Higher Education Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme Phase 3 strand for the Sesame project.

Sesame aims to  produce a rich and sustainable source of open educational resources (OER), aimed at adult learners and their tutors, but of use to all, across a broad range of subject disciplines.  The resources will be made freely available for others to view, download, re-purpose, and incorporate in to their own learning and teaching.

The specific aims of the project are to:

  • Embed open ways of working in the development and delivery of the Department’s Weekly Class Programme.
  • Increase awareness and knowledge of OER among staff and students.
  • Enable weekly class students to find and use appropriate, validated OER in their work.
  • Improve part-time tutors’ skills and confidence in identifying, using and creating OER.
  • Widen access to Oxford’s teaching to new audiences globally.

To achieve these aims the project will:

  • Create and release new open content.
  • Develop tools and processes that facilitate open practices.
  • Provide training to support part-time tutors to identify, use and create OER.
  • Develop infrastructure to enhance discovery of OER generated by the Weekly Class Programme.
  • Share lessons learned from the project with JISC and the wider community.

The project began in October 2011 and will end in October 2012.

For TALL this project is an exciting move from our work consuming OERs through projects such as Mosaic and our broader online course development work, and researching how others do this in the OER Impact reports.  It will also give us a chance to contribute to the wider work  producing OER at Oxford that the OpenSpires project has started so strongly.  I am hopeful our experience as end-users will help us produce more usable and useful OER and that is certainly something we will be investigating as the project moves forward.

Image: Genie in an oil lamp. / shannonzhang / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Garden history, biblical archeology and mysterious numbers.

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Martin Heemskerck Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Martin Heemskerck

 

Course launches have just completed and over 1300 students have embarked on another term of online learning with us.  This term we have launched 3 new courses: Archaeology of the Bible Lands;  The Number Mysteries and English Landscape Gardens: 1650 to the Present Day , and I am very pleased to have discovered an image which combines a biblical garden with a vaguely  Escher like (that’s mathematical!) ambiance.

Having been in involved in the development of all our courses, I do think that these are 3 of the most enjoyable courses we have ever created and the students on them are going to have a fabulous time.

Enrollments have closed for this term, but if any of these, or our other 50+ online courses look interesting to you, do come and visit to make your choices for January, when we will also have a new Macroeconomics course available to help you understand what economists think is happening to the world right now.

Image: Hanging Gardens of Babylon / Carla216 / CC BY 2.0

Link curation at scale

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The weakest link

http://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinbell/465459020/

In our report OER: The value of reuse in education,  we focused our attention on the reuse of online resources whether licensed or not .  There was no doubt that making no distinction between licensed OER and stuff on the web reflects the experience of the majority of HE practitioners, who use “stuff” relatively indiscriminately in low risk contexts.

However when not writing reports we develop and deliver a large portfolio of online courses  where we make extensive use of online resources.  These are mainly from large institutions such as other universities, or museums, but very rarely cc licensed.  As a result we mainly link out to these rather than incorporating them into course materials, as clearing copyright at that scale is not manageable as we know from our Mosaic project.

We are currently launching to over 1200 students, something that brings home the value of open licensing in purely pragmatic terms.  50+ courses a term, with between 5 and 300+ links per course checked 3 times in the lead up to  a course run  = a lot of work. Obviously we have tools that automate this up to a point, but they only tell you whether a link is live, not whether it ends up where you expect, and then there is what you do when a link is broken……This is a major overhead and it is getting worse.  A colleague suggested this post should be called “This has been a *@#! term for links”

So yes licensing is complicated and we should not see it as the be all and end all of OER, but when open licenses are  in place, by letting us bring resources into our course so we don’t have to check thousands of links each term, they allow us to design and deliver better courses. Long may it continue.

Image: the weakest link / darwin Bell / CC BY-NC 2.0

 

New courses: lose yourself in the 19th century and find the great american novel

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NapoleonIt is that time of year again and we are in the middle of our online course launches for another term.  We are offering  40 courses this term including our new courses in Nineteenth Century European Literature,  Age of Revolution and  The Modern American Novel: an introduction.

Developing the first two in parallel was a wonderful experience and I would recommend anyone who wants to immerse themselves in the era to study them together.  When the novels you are reading are written by people living the history you are studying it gives a whole extra dimension to each.  The 19th century French society that Madame Bovary inhabits is shaped by the revolutions that had gone before – radical or otherwise.

The Modern American novel takes you from Gatsby to Beloved and American Pastoral  – a completely different world but just as fascinating.

So if you would enjoy exploring these worlds over the next couple of months or are interested in Archaeology, Art History, English literature, Creative Writing, Economics, History, Local history or Philosophy do take a look at what is available.

Image: napoleon / Sarah / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The Learning Design Support Environment and Curriculum Design

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I am doing a presentation on the LDSE for the JISC curriculum design strand which is also open to others if they are interested.  So if you are, here are the details and how to sign up.

The Learning Design Support Environment (LDSE) Project is working with practising teachers to research, and co-construct, an interactive Learning Design Support Environment (LDSE) to scaffold teachers’ decision-making from basic planning to creative TEL design.  The LDSE captures and represents a user’s learning design (at module and session level), structuring the user input so that it is amenable to analysis (in terms of learning experience and teaching time), and can also be adopted and adapted by others. Key areas the LDSE is investigating include:

  • Forms of representation of learning designs
  • An ontology for learning design
  • Designing at Module and Session levels
  • Importing and adapting an existing design
  • Selecting from existing teaching-learning activities
  • Editing the properties of TLAs
  • Extensive advice and guidance
  • Analysis of teaching costs and learning benefits
  • Sharing specific and generic patterns
  • Exporting a design to an institutional format

This session will provide a tour of the latest version of the LDSE highlighting the features italicised above, and allow time for discussion around the many areas where the interest of the LDSE and the Curriculum design projects  align.  In particular:

1.       How we model principles in educational design – What important principles do you use to support the learning design process?

2.       Guidelines and toolkits for staff – Could the LDSE tools support or work alongside tools being developed by projects?

3.       Joining up systems – Can our inputs and outputs work together? How do we join up institution-level business processes with learning-level design?

4.       Taking things forward – How can LDSE support and inform the work of the CDD programme? And vice versa?

 

Further information about the LDSE project: www.ldse.org.uk

Recording now available at:

https://sas.elluminate.com/mr.jnlp?suid=M.0E76AD7901018C376B4022FB9F6273&sid=2009077

Re-using 2 minutes guides

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Last term we added a 2 minute guide to our comprehensive online  support site. This site has always been designed for the least technically confident user imaginable, as we know from our support calls that they are the ones who need the help.  However in  the last couple of years it has become clear that the  majority of our students are competent IT users who didn’t look at our support site because it was too large.  Paradoxically this meant they missed out on the information even a confident IT user really did need –  hence our 2 minute guide.

In developing the guide I decided to take the OER route as surely we were not the first to write such a thing.  The nadir of this process was finding a 2 minute guide as a 5 minute video.  However,  in the end, old fashioned non OER reuse was the solution – I asked permission and paraphrased something someone else in the Department had written.

So an everyday story of pragmatic reuse.  Something I have recently been reminded about both in the context of our OER Impact work and our recent google analytics report which showed that the average time spent on the 2 minute guide page was 2.02 minutes – shall I let the person who originally wrote the content know?

Image: 1305 Seconds / Rob Lockhart / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

VLEs at the heart of curriculum innovation

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In the latest JISC e-Learning Focus they are discussing VLEs at the heart of curiculum devlivery showcasing among other work our development of Moodle for online assignment submission during the Cascade project.  Inspired by the wordle used in the e-Learning Focus article, I decided to create one from the Cascade final report.  While this is obviously a very simplistic technique it does provide a surprisingly useful overview of the work of Cascade as below.  I think I may be using this again.

Cascade Wordle

Cascade Wordle

OpenAttribute tool

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Happy woman

Jubilation / Keith Kristoffer Bacongco (http://www.flickr.com/people/kitoy/relationship/) / CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

Today we are very excited in the TALL office because David Kernohan has drawn our attention to the very cool OpenAttribute tool, available from http://openattribute.com.

As the site says:

The problem: Creative Commons licensed content is awesome, but attributing it properly can be difficult and confusing. The first rule for re-using openly licensed content is that you have to properly attribute the creator. There are specific requirements for what needs to go into that attribution, but those requirements can be confusing and hard to find.

It is in no way an exaggeration to say that a tool which addresses this challenge has caused jubilation from the project team at TALL, who while we frequently use OERs are always worried we have inadvertaintly attributed things wrongly.

As you can see from the example of the picture here, we can generate attributions from this tool in plain text (as in the caption) or in html (Jubilation / Keith Kristoffer Bacongco / CC BY 2.0) which is clearly more elegant, but not always an option.

Maximizing effective use of technology in new programmes

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Aimed at academic staff developing new courses and e-Learning managers and learning technologists seeking to encourage wider uptake of technology by teaching staff, this case study draws on the JISC-funded Cascade project’s experience of designing tools, systems and resources to enable academic staff to more effectively incorporate the use of technology in new programmes.

Using technology to support new course models that move a programme either fully or partially, online can allow for a much more flexible offerings to students.  However, to ensure this is done in an appropriate and sustainable fashion, staff have to be supported effectively in this process.  This can be done by:

  • Ensuring technology use is considered at the right point in the course design process;
  • Identifying where and how technology really addresses your needs;
  • Providing support and guidance for those designing new programmes and wanting to take a more strategic approach to using technology in order to achieve maximum benefits;
  • Providing information on the cost effectiveness and efficiency of different choices so that those designing new programmes can ensure their course is sustainable.

Read the full case study at:  Cascade Case Study 5: Maximizing effective use of technology in new programmes.

Enabling staff to easily use a VLE to support course delivery

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Aimed at e-Learning developers, this case study draws on the JISC-funded Cascade project’s experience of designing tools, systems and resources to enable academic and administrative staff to easily use a VLE to support course delivery.

This suggests that using technology to support a course delivered either fully online, largely face-to–face or via blended learning, can provide real value to both staff and students.  However, it is easy to do this in such a way that it creates more work without fully delivering on the potential benefits.  Avoid this by:

  • Identifying where and how technology really adds value;
  • Developing tools and procedures that make it easy for all staff to set up and use a VLE;
  • Embedding support within existing cycles of work, wherever possible;
  • Ensuring adequate support and guidance is available to prevent basic barriers;
  • Providing cost- and time-effective options to ensure services are sustainable.

Read the full case study at:  Cascade Case Study 4: Enabling staff to easily use a VLE to support course delivery.