Category Archives: Open Educational Resources

Maths in the City website re-launches with new features

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As a prelude to announcing the competition winners, Maths in the City is happy to announce the launch of an updated website.

Visit the interactive map on our homepage and go on a mathematical tour of cities around the world. Join the adventure today and shine a mathematical spotlight on your city.

Amongst the top new features we’ve added are:

  • New homepage: find maths in your city and around the globe using the interactive map
  • Maths in the City competition entries: these sites are now visible. If you entered our competition, find yours and send the link to your friends and family
  • Snapshots: this is a new kind entry that you can add to the map, see this page for details
  • Rate Sites and Snapshots: you can now rate Sites and Snapshots using our new five star rating feature – log in to start rating your favourites
  • “Recommended” content: gold icons indicate a Site or Snapshot that has been approved by a Mathemagician because of its high quality, see this page for details
  • Improved image uploader: it is now easier to upload images into your Site or Snapshot
  • Improved equation display: if you’re including mathematical equations in your Site or Snapshot, they will display better. For those of you who like knowing this kind of stuff, we’re using MathJax to support LaTeX

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

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.

Woruldhord, Ancestral voices, the Great War and more.

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One of the main conclusions from our Mosaic project (which developed an online course, ‘Ancestral voices: the earliest English literature’,  primarily from pre-existing content and made it freely available for reuse and adaption) was that the best way to get your OERs used is to make them as discoverable as possible, by putting them or linking to them from as many places as possible, and especially those places where your target audience are likely to look.  To this end, while we submitted the outputs of that project to JORUM as required by JISC, we also made them freely available through our Open Moodle site, and have been pursuing other opportunities to share and use these materials ever since.

Building on this we are now really pleased to be able to contribute the course to a new project here at Oxford, the JISC funded  Woruldhord project which “sets out to collect together into an online hoard, digital objects related to the teaching, study, or research of Old English and the Anglo-Saxon period of history”.

This project builds on the work of OUCS in community collections from the The Great War Archive and in OERs with OpenSpires.  As  we already use outputs from both of these in our courses,  it is really good to be able to contribute content back in the opposite direction.

As I type this I realise that it is all sounding terribly inwards facing, but while all the examples here are from Oxford sources, this is in fact indicative of the wider growth of truly excellent academic (and non academic) resources on the web and the extent to which our course authors are using them in their materials.  While we are still a long way from the vision of pervasive reuse that I suspect many had a few years ago, at least in our online courses authors are as likely to direct students to an image from flikr, a project database, an online text book, a digitised primary source, a Google maps mash-up or even a learning object, as an article in a journal or a textbook.  The process is slow, but reuse is growing and the more projects like these that take place the more compelling the reasons for reusing digital content is becoming.

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.