Category Archives: JISC

Testing Moodle templates

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/3267227227/

In the Cascade project we are in the middle of an intensive period of testing Moodle templates with departmental staff.  In the terms of our project the “templates” are Moodle courses with certain core materials and structures already in place which hopefully offer the following benefits to our staff:

  1. Save them from recreating the wheel in terms of identifying resources, links etc
  2. Ensuring all expectation setting and contextual materials are in place – what is unacceptable online behavior? does an online course support site mean my tutor will answer my emails 24 hours a day?
  3. Improving chance of producing something which will be truly valuable to students from the start, rather than having to try and work out what might be useful from scratch.

We have shaped the templates from the results of our pilots over the last year or so as well as our experience in learning design and from the literature more generally .  With this in mind we were pretty confident that the elements we were including were likely to be appropriate and useful, however it is fascinating to actually work through the process with  practitioners.

I think what has really changed in the last few years is the baseline awareness of the sorts of things technology might be able to offer to support a course – this has moved on immensely even in the last couple of years – even if staff are not always confident of how to get the technology to do what they want.  It also feels like for many academics that their perceptions of their IT competence is often worse than the reality.  Moodle is easy enough to use,  that if you can add an attachment to an email you really should be able to get pretty far.

Initial reflections on the future of online learning

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The first few months of 2010 were very busy for our group as we tackled (with the support of JISC) a complex and wide ranging study for the HEFCE Online Learning Task Force (OLTF). On 17 March we submitted our overview of the current provision of HE level online distance learning in the UK to the OLTF. Recently, as a result of the study and other research, HEFCE published a short paper to encourage discussion and feedback from the sector on the work of the OLTF. In the paper they highlight a number of our key findings:

  1. More should be done to provide a simple taxonomy of the wide range of student experiences that currently fall under the broad title of ‘online distance learning’.
  2. The vast majority of online distance learning offered by HEIs is focused on postgraduate-level provision.
  3. Most online distance learning can be identified as professional development, or as having a strong vocational focus.
  4. It can be challenging for potential students to find out about online distance learning courses, with information often hidden in complex institutional web-sites.
  5. Where details are available, they frequently fail to provide the full range of information that a potential student needs to make a decision about studying online.
  6. We need to improve the market intelligence available to give a clearer picture of the position of UK online distance learning in an international context.

Notably the paper also mentions that: “96% of undergraduate students use the internet as a source of information and 69% use it daily as part of their studies”. The Task Force however are not distracted by this level of uptake and set out a clear position with regards to technology:

“…It is also clear that technology platforms are not a barrier to success. The OLTF does not intend to dedicate significant attention to this area. We intend to pay more attention to business models to ensure sustainability and cost-effectiveness, and to pedagogical good practice to support academic quality.”

In my opinion this is indicative of a Post-Digital approach in which as one of the study’s interviewees put it “the technology is vital but not central”. I’m pleased to see this underpinning philosophy being taken by such an influential group (especially as Post-Digital thinking informed my two presentations to the Task Force).

As ever it is important to stress that the Post-Digital does not discount the importance of those groups and individuals employed to develop and manage technology. In fact this approach makes clear the need for ongoing innovation and an active engagement with emerging platforms/services.

“The OLTF is aware that there are a number of organisations that are already active in supporting UK HE as a world leader in online learning: for example the British Council, the Higher Education Academy and the Joint Information Systems Committee. It is keen to ensure that institutions harness such expertise…”

I hope that the ongoing work of the OLTF continues to recognise the importance of academic expertise, institutional savvy and the need to understand (and occasionally challenge) student expectations. Certainly any approach that does not imply that technology is some sort of ‘magic bullet’ for the limitless up-scaling of HE level education must be healthy. This approach also helps to manage institutions’ expectations of technology and those who are responsible for its implementation.

Our full study of online distance learning in the UK is due to be published by the OLTF in late June 2010. In the meantime take a look at the HEFCE discussion paper. Responses are due in by 14 May.

Beyond Borders – OERs at Oxford

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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

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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

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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.

Finding OERs

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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

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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?

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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.

Visitors & Residents: The Video

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Last month I gave a presentation on the ‘Visitors & Residents’ principle at the ALT-C conference which was well received so I thought it would be worth videoing the talk under laboratory conditions…

Some of you might also be interested in our paper on Visitors and Residents:

Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement
by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu.
First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3171/3049

Just a few notes to go with the video:

The original ‘Prezi’ presentation is here: http://prezi.com/x0nxciep_mlt/

The tinyURL that is supposed to link to Andy Powell’s ‘Twitter for Idiots’ post is incorrect. Please follow this link instead.

At points I use the term ‘real life’ which seems to imply that anything which is online is somehow not part of ‘real life’. A better phrase would have been ‘offline’. Language in this area is difficult at best…

The quote “…just knowing how to use particular technologies makes one no wiser than just knowing how to read words” is a quote from Prensky’s recent paper on ‘Digital Wisdom’. In the journal ‘Innovate’. In other versions of the talk I refer to Prensky directly but seem to have omitted it when I was in front of the camera.  All other non-attributed quotes are anonymised statements from our students.

The images I used are under the Creative Commons license:

‘Tourist Trap’ visitor image http://www.flickr.com/photos/sharpshutter/232909207/
‘Rusholme’ resident image http://www.flickr.com/photos/raver_mikey/2224048987
‘Sunny Park’ web as a space image http://www.flickr.com/photos/nhudson/2504679411
‘Tool Box’ web as a toolbox image http://www.flickr.com/photos/howardstrong/3238293371

OpenSpires and learning design

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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.