Category Archives: JISC

Open Educational Resources at Continuing Education

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Among our other record breaking recruitment this term we have also launched the Ancestral Voices course developed as part of the Mosaic project for the 3rd time, with the largest cohort yet – in fact our maximum of 32 students.

I am sure this is not statistically significant, but for us it is our first example of freely available content, and students who are still prepared to pay for the full tutored learning experience.   Definitely a good sign for persuading the Department to do more with OERs.

Cascade Update

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We have just had a steering committee meeting and submitted out interim report to JISC for the Cascade project which has acted as a good chance on reflect on where we have got to thus far.

While this project started out with a huge scope we have managed to focus our activities so that we are now working in 5 main areas:

  • Online assignment submission
  • VLE support for courses
  • Generic content
  • Online payment
  • Course design

There is considerable overlap between these areas, VLE support for courses is likely to contain online assignment submission and generic content, course design will look at ways to best implement VLE support for courses etc.  However this classification definitely helps in terms of communicating our activities to stakeholders as well as focussing our  evaluation activities.

There is a brief overview of what we are doing for each area on our website here and we will have a more detailed overivew of each area available very soon.

Open content and libraries

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I was really interested in Tony Hirst’s recent post Open educational Resources and the University Library Website, which raised something which had never occurred to me and I am not sure why.  At the end of the Mosaic project one of our key conclusions was “maximise discoverability, put open content where people already look for things” and somehow in writing this, immersed in the web and web 2.0 and thinking of google and flikr I overlooked one of the  key places where people already look for things are library sites.

It still seems to me the two biggest barriers to wide-scale uptake  of OERs remains 1)  licenses and 2) the ability to find useful OERs in the first place.

So I agree with Tony, this is something we have to resolve, and soon.

Effective Practice in a Digital Age

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Effective Practice in a Digital Age

JISC have recently published Effective Practice in a Digital Age, which is an updated version of their Effective Practice with e-Learning guide that was published in 2004. The original version of the guide was recently identified as one of Eight Classic e-Learning publications by Tony Bates, where it is in very good company.  Through our work on Phoebe we have contributed to the new version and I think it is an excellent, easy to read overview of some of the latest thinking in this ever more complicated field.

Technology and task

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After talking to individuals in the department over several months we finally arranged our first wide scale events open to all departmental staff.

To try and move away from suggesting how we thought they might use technology and  to keep the focus on what they would really find useful, we started by asking them to identify challenges around specific tasks and only then moved onto thinking about using technology to support these. These were mapped against a matrix of “things you want to do” versus “things you have to do” and “student’s pastoral/administrative experience” to “students academic experience”.  In a couple of the groups we worked with there was a diagonal sweep (see below)

Technology and Task

with required tasks more on the administrative side and aspirational tasks more academic, as might be expected, but others were far more mixed.  As has been a continuous theme in this project an overwhelming impression was how much we do as a department. More specifically it proved a useful addition to our attempts to rein in the scope of the project from its original, far too broad starting point to the more manageable place that we find ourselves today.

Curriculum design, guidance and Phoebe

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I recently demonstrated Phoebe to the curriculum design and delivery projects for JISC (if you are one of these projects you can access a recording of the talk here – otherwise there is an older video of me demoing it here).  Tim Linsey from Kingston University Blogged this and it is interesting to see that his conclusions about where Phoebe might be most useful very much chimed with our evaluations.

After not having done much with Phoebe for a while,  we are seriously looking at how we can use it in out curriculum delivery project, Cascade.  More specifically we are revisiting ways that we can make the Phoebe guidance more usable,  useful and sustainable, both for ourselves and as something that could be consumed by other tools or projects, especially in the context of the LDSE project, but also more widely.

So if you think you might be interested in this, do let us know. The more information we can gather about how people might want to use and develop this content the more likely we are to take it in directions that suit us all.

OpenSpires

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TALL is part of a team, led by Oxford University Computing Services, that has recently been awarded funding from the JISC/HE Academy Open Educational Resources Programme for the Open Spires project.
The project has two purposes: to increase the amount of learning content (especially audio and video) released from Oxford and to enable the University to investigate the implications of making some of this material available as ‘Open Content’ under a Creative Commons or other suitable license. This means that quality educational content will be available for reuse and redistribution by third parties globally, provided that it is used in a non-commercial way and is attributed to its creator.
This funding will enable the University to build upon the Oxford iTunes U service launched in October 2008, which has widespread participation from Oxford academics. Oxford podcasts currently include recordings of guest lectures, interviews with researchers and conference presentations. The project will have a global impact, as the free-to-download resources are in many cases from speakers, researchers and visiting lecturers with high international profiles.
The project hopes to benefit the University by:

  • Enhancing Oxford’s global reputation – enabling the production of more material that has international impact and places the University in a leading position within the UK Open Content movement.
  • Ensuring expert legal scrutiny – the complex licensing and IPR issues associated with Open Content will be investigated by the University’s Legal Service office.
  • Enhancing current provision and accessibility – text transcripts will be produced to accompany existing podcasts.
  • Enabling the University to produce more audio and video content that brings the modern day University to life for its many alumni.
  • Improving admissions by enabling the production of more podcasts that will reach and inspire the key 16-18 age group.

The project started on 30 April 2009 and will last for one year.

Reflections on the ‘Conference that Cares’

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Attending the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) conference in Brighton last week was an intriguing experience for me. There was something in the atmosphere that I had trouble tuning into, something which pervaded every session but which I couldn’t pin down. Until, at the end of the first day I had sudden moment of clarity, the mysterious and all pervading dimension to this conference that was evading me was the fact that these people really care about what they do.

The first clue was an impassioned keynote from Ronald Barnett, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education. This was a presentation from someone who believed in education and had a real feeling for the emotive realities that students face, pulling out terms such as “anxiety”, “excitement” and “scary” from student quotes. In my opinion we often forget the emotional rollercoaster learning can be and how that ‘ride’ is integral to the experience not something that should be entirely ironed out.  In tension with this notion is the challenge that tertiary education continues to face under an implicit acceptance of ‘students as consumers’. This topic was not shied away from leading to a pithy debate on Twitter which included the plea: “We must kill off this idea before it kills us off”…

The importance of not allowing educational research and teaching practice to continue to diverge was a key theme which suffused the conference. This trend is to the detriment of both groups who need to learn from each other. It seemed clear to me that institutions should to do more to create roles which are less segregated, roles sit under the larger banner of ‘academic practice’ that can denote research and teaching.  The challenges inherent in making this happen was an area which I touched upon in my session entitled ‘Not Killing the Creative’. I reflected on the methods employed (some more successfully than others) in the recent JISC funded ‘Open Habitat’ project. Methods which attempted to make the overlap in the centre of the ‘educational researcher’ and ‘teaching practitioner’ Venn diagram as wide as possible.

The majority of the SEDA delegates are in professional positions which act as a bridge between the highest tiers of policy making and the teaching/research (there’s that problem again) staff within universities. These are the people who have the ability to embed new teaching and learning strategies and to influence culture change within tertiary education. It was refreshing to hear the closing thoughts in the opening keynote including the phrases ‘We need to play the game” and “We have to be subversive”. If institutional approaches are to be improved from within then a subversive playing of the game by people who care is exactly what is needed.

Only connect

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In the last few months we have been laying the ground work for the Cascade project, but now that we have our research officer, Bridget Lewis, in place we are really moving forward with our work on this.

What is really apparent at this stage is how interconnected everything is, I appreciate that this is hardly a revelation, but when you are working on very tightly defined deliverables it is really easy to ignore the implications of your choices beyond the boundaries of what you are doing.  When a significant focus of your work is looking at the bigger picture things start getting tangled.

A positive aspect of this, is how much we are genuinely taking forward outputs of  other projects that we have done over the last few years, Mosaic, Isthmus and Phoebe in particular are proving to be directly relevant, and it is great to feel that we have achieved things with them that can really improve what we are doing now.

In particular:

  • Mosaic –  better understanding of OERs, licensing and staff development materials around reuse.
  • Isthmus – what we know about our online students (although Cascade is dealing with a much larger student body than Isthmus did ) and the implications of innovating on live courses.
  • Phoebe – the tool itself as well as what we know from it about course design.

There is also a lot of overlap between Cascade and the LDSE (Learning Design Support Environment) project that we are working on with several London-based partners.  With Cascade focusing on changes in the hear and now, while the LDSE is designing for the future, they each act as a sanity check on what we are doing on the other project.

Licensing academic content

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One of the clearest lessons from Mosaic is how much content which may be used for learning exists on the open web through university domains, either in the websites of specific projects, individual academic initiative or other models.  However what is noticeable is that the vast majority of this material has no obvious licence or copyright statement attached to it.  It is a reasonable assumption that when academics put content on the open web, they think that they have shared it and made it open, and in reality for most use they have.  However attaching a licence such as Creative commons  allows for easier uptake. While in some cases this may be a deliberate omission, in most it is probably because they are unaware of these licences and what they mean, or they are aware of them, but don’t feel that they understand them well enough to implement them, or that they suspect using them may contravene IPR held by their university, and don’t know how to find out, so dodge the issue by not engaging with it.

It seems many of the barriers to reuse would be reduced if universities developed clear policies on licensing their exsiting web based outputs and applied it as broadly as possible across all their activities. This is happening already in certain domains – OERs and research outputs from an ever growing list of funders, but especially where universities are publicly funded, surely open licensing should be the default not the exception.