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.

Beyond Borders – OERs at Oxford

Posted on 21 April, 2010 by Marion Manton

Yesterday I was at the very enjoyable Beyond Borders event, hosted by our colleague at OUCS which looked at OERs and work of the OpenSpires in particular. With many of the presenters stranded all over the globe they did an amazing job of bring things together and managed a truly multimedia experience. In one respect I was there with a Mosaic hat on, and it is a relief to find that our conclusions from that project remain equally true today. More generally it was great to hear what OpenSpires has achieved in the last year.There is an great summary of the event here, generated from twitter feeds and live blogging throughout the event.

However for me personally the most interesting aspects were hearing:

Andy Lane talk about the OU experience, they are continuing to do so much and there is a lot I want to follow up – In particular i think the work Patrick McAndrew and others are doing through OLnet is going to produce some very interesting findings in coming years.
Jan Hylén showing how much the OER movement has grown in a short time
Timm Unwin talking about his experiences ICT4D in Africa I completely agree that the idea that greater challenges of HE in Africa should make reuse more prevalent is wrong. We should not be surprised that people find it just as hard if not harder to reuse in resource poor contexts. But real sympathies on the challenges of working in this space which really took me back to our Global Health project.
Robin Wilson who presented using OHPs but in the best practice of trendy PowerPoints used virtually all images and no words, although I wonder if they were all copyright cleared images?

Also a great chance to catch up with so many interested in this area. I am sure they will have most of the sessions released as OERs themselves soon, so do check them out.

OERs and China

Posted on 11 March, 2010 by Marion Manton

I was recently teaching a session on online distance learning as part of the e-Learning MSc here in Oxford. During this I asked the students to critique an OER as an examples of effective online distance learning (or not). As part of this one of our students, Kitty Tong reported on her experience of OER use in China which revealed a picture of much more systematic reuse than seems to be the case in most other palces.

She demonstrated Core (China Open Resource for Education) which act as a portal for OERs in China (there may be many others). In particular it was amazing to hear about the amount of volunteer translation taking place and the extent that students were making their own informal learning opportunities around these resources. Her description reminded me of some of the vision of independent learning, collaboration and reuse the OpenLearn team had for their resources which was only realised to a limited extent.

Now all I need to do is learn Chinese so that I can check this out properly for myself.

Reuse in action

Posted on 28 January, 2010 by Marion Manton

Having been involved in several research projects around the area of OERs (especially OpenSpires) and more specifically the reuse of existing content (Mosaic and Cascade), it is really gratifying to see some of this work enter our mainstream course production practice. A major benefit of Mosaic was a real tightening up of our approaches to reuse, copyright and IPR across our entire short course programme and this is now starting to really pay dividends.

An example is the course we are currently developing on Globalization, available in May. Among other things, this course is using podcasts recorded by the author Jonathan Michie with the OpenSpires team. As we will be providing transcripts to make the course fully accessible we can make sure that these are fed back to enhance the original OERs – a virtuous circle.

Online course launches

Posted on 5 January, 2010 by Marion Manton

It is that time of year again when we embark on our online course launches for another term. We are offering 31 courses this term including our new courses in Literary theory and History of medicine, many are full, but there are still places on a lot – so if you would enjoy some intellectual stimulation in over the next couple of months and are interested in Archaeology, Art History, English literature, Creative Writing, History, or Philosophy do take a look at what is available.

Reciprocate at Copenhagen

Posted on 2 December, 2009 by Marion Manton

Learning

The RECIPROCATE programme will allow global access to innovative online learning materials to enable scientists, climate practitioners and policy-makers to understand and exploit regional climate predictions.

Community
RECIPROCATE will additionally build and support an online community of practice through which, knowledge and expertise about regional climate modelling can be shared. This will be of particular benefit in countries where such expertise is not so readily available.

Expertise
RECIPROCATE combines climate prediction expertise from the University of Oxford climateprediction.net team and the Met. Office Hadley Centre PRECIS team with the expertise of the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education’s expertise in delivering innovative and effective education and training solutions.

Like everyone else in the climate world some of the partners in the RECIPROCATE project will be at the Copenhagen COP 15. Richard Jones (Met Office) and Niel Bowerman (climateprediction.net) will be at the Met Office and University of Oxford stands. If you are at Copenhagen you can try and catch up with them, otherwise you can just visit our website to find out more and register your interest.

Finding OERs

Posted on 28 October, 2009 by Marion Manton

One of the biggest challenge for OERs is getting used. Despite many large scale projects I suspect most would say that uptake is relatively disappointing. I am sure the new JISC funded OER projects won’t be satisfied with only making everything available in JORUM – but it will be interesting to see what you can find using a basic Google search in the spring.

For OpenSpires the OERs we are producing are podcasts which also means that they don’t have the full text information inherent in most other online content, suddenly metadata and perhaps more importantly resource description becomes more important. However we also know that for the creation of OERs to really take off it is more important for the sharing process to be lightweight and easy then to expect our academics to not only podcast in the first place but then to subsequently provide all the information a consumer could ever require.

However with web 2.0 we are also in a situation where it is not just the content creator who can potentially supply information that makes a resources more discoverable. Recommendations, ratings and comments, as per Amazon etc as well as the sort of metadata a system holds about how a resource is used, by who , when and where, are all things that help a user work out which resource is most likely to be for them.

The problem with educational metadata

Posted on 28 October, 2009 by Marion Manton

Continuing to think around the information to provide around our OpenSpires content it is reminding me how problematic educational metadata is. It seems obvious that learning objects or OERs should be discoverable by metadata describing things such as, subject and educational level and it is arguably desirable that things such as instructional method or pedagogy might be covered as well. However from both our work reusing content and in learning design it is clear that the latter is almost never something that can be usefully encapsulated in a few simple terms, and while there are many lists for subject and level they are often surprisingly hard to penetrate. Browsing by subject in JORUM English literature is under Linguistics (can you tell what subject Mosaic was in) and while I know what Undergraduate level 1 means I am not confident I am right in guessing it maps to SCQF 2, Entry level 1, CQFW Entry, Access 2.

Clearly repositories like JORUM are just trying to make sense of a complex landscape – but we already know perceived complexity of the process is a barrier to sharing – and the reality won’t help.

So for now I think we are going to ask people to provide information in the following areas, title, description, subject, keywords and some variation on intended audience/use which will hopefully be a way of indicating level. As much as possible relying on existing information and individually provided definitions and see what comes out.

OERs for teachers or learners?

Posted on 22 October, 2009 by Marion Manton

I am sure most OER projects would say both…but in looking at this area recently it is clear there is a fundamental difference in expectations between making your OER available in iTunesU or YouTube and placing it in a repository – yet most of the debate in this area does not make the distinction.

In Oxford we have a track record in both, iTunesU is acting as the launch pad for our OER work, but projects like Mosaic were always more teacher focused. I know both camps would want all of these to be used by everyone, but I suspect there is more we could be doing to make it actually happen.

OpenSpires and learning design

Posted on 8 October, 2009 by Marion Manton

As part of the Oxfords OER project, OpenSpires we are feeding in our experiences from the Mosaic, Phoebe and LDSE projects. Despite developing Ancestral Voices as an OER, up to now we have been a net consumer of content (both those developed specifically as OERs and everything else on the web that might be used for learning) . This project is letting us look at it from the other end of the continuum, we are producing OERs what will help people use them?

For a long time I have been suspicious of the model of reuse learning design projects often assume, an unproblematic set of learning objects to be found in a repository certainly does not reflect reality. The LDSE team is definitely grappling with this – recognizing learning content comes in many different forms, that the stuff we use to build our learning experiences is everywhere. There is also the hugely social aspect of learning design, in a web 2.0 world I sometimes think we overstate this, but all the data we have on reuse and design processes suggests that this is crucial. So while we need to look at things like UK LOM I suspect that Flikr and YouTube are more important.

Last thought for now – we know academics are busy, they will only engage with these processes if they are easy, lightweight and offer demonstrable benefits to them.

Open Educational Resources at Continuing Education