Category Archives: Projects

TALL projects.

The Maths in the City competition is open today

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Join Marcus du Sautoy on a mathematical adventure in the city. Enter our competition and you could win great prizes including a subscription to Nature and even naming a mathematical object.

Open to all ages, competition entries need to show:
•    an interesting example of maths in the urban environment, or
•    a clear explanation of some maths you see in your city, or
•    a great way of demonstrating your mathematical idea on the streets.

Entries will become part of a virtual mathscape of cities around the world.  And finalists will be invited showcase their entry at an event in Oxford and meet Marcus du Sautoy.

Anyone is welcome to enter the competition, you can either enter individually or in a group, and the stories can come from any city in the world.

Tell us your favourite stories of maths in the city by visiting www.mathsinthecity.com.

The competition runs until noon 3 May 2011.

Marcus du Sautoy points up and mathematicians look up

Marcus du Sautoy and his mathemagicians

Enter our competition and join Marcus du Sautoy on a mathematical adventure of the city

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Our cities are filled with buildings, roads, cars, buses, trains, bikes, parks and gardens. They are crisscrossed with power, water, sewage and transport systems. They are built by engineers, architects, planners, doctors, designers and artists.

Our cities are shaped by our environment, our society and our culture. And each and every part is built on mathematics. To reveal the maths hiding in our urban surroundings we have just launched a new project: ‘Maths in the City’. The project is led by Marcus du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. Marcus and a team of volunteer mathematicians from Oxford will develop walking tours of Oxford and London taking the public on a mathematical adventure of the city.

Marcus du Sautoy and mathematicians looking at the Bridge of Sighs, Oxford
Bridge over troubled mathematicians

But we need everyone’s help! In April we are running a competition, open to all, asking people to share their mathematical stories of the city. It might be a piece of interesting architecture, mathematical sculpture or the maths behind something more mundane, such as traffic lights. We’re looking for:

• interesting examples of maths in the urban environment,
• clear explanations of some maths you see in your city,
• great demonstrations of your mathematical ideas on the street.

 

 

Winning entries will become part of our virtual mathscape of cities around the world and will help Marcus and his team develop their walking tours. And, of course, you can win great prizes! Including:
• a subscription to Nature, kindly provided by Nature Publishing Group,
• best-selling popular science books, including the ‘Last Word’ series kindly donated by New Scientist,
• having a mathematical object named after you,
• and showcasing your entry with other finalists at an event in Oxford in June with Marcus and his team.

Anyone is welcome to enter the competition — young, old, students, teachers, researchers, member of the public, journalists…— and the stories can come from any city across the UK or around the world. The competition is open for entries from 4 April to 3 May 2011 – you can find out all the details, including some ideas to get you started at http://www.mathsinthecity.com

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

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.

Using technology to support prospective students

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Aimed at staff responsible for coordinating the marketing of courses and managing student enrolments, this case study draws on the JISC-funded Cascade project’s experience of using technology to support the very first stage of the curriculum delivery process by making it easy for prospective students to find the course they wish to study and, where possible, to enrol and pay for their chosen course(s) online.

The project found that to encourage students to choose your institution, you should:

  • Make finding courses as easy as searching on Google;
  • Provide easily accessible information about all aspects of a course and the institution, and offer answers to common questions about what a course involves, both in pedagogical terms and practical ones;
  • Provide testimonials or case studies of previous students’ experiences of studying your courses;
  • Make enrolling on and paying for a course as easy and straightforward as possible, using online enrolment and payment wherever possible.

Read the full case study at:  Cascade Case Study 3: Using technology to support prospective students.

Customizing open source software: benefits and pitfalls

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Aimed at e-Learning developers, this case study draws on the JISC-funded Cascade project’s experience of customizing the Moodle assignment module, to highlight the benefits and pitfalls of working with open source software.

This aspect of the Cascade project had two key challenges: (a) to specify requirements for enhanced assignment-handling functionality in Moodle; and (b) to develop the code itself.  Both proved far more challenging than anticipated.

The experience of the project suggests that customizing open source software to meet the institution’s bespoke curriculum delivery requirements can result in the development of a robust system offering improved services to stakeholders, however there can be pitfalls.  Key recommendations for other developers considering similar projects are:

  • Define the processes involved before working on the development of software; a broken or unclear process cannot have an effective technological solution;
  • Keep all stakeholders informed of what the final result will be, providing updates when the requirements/functionality change;
  • Have everyone concerned with functionality and bug identification use an issue management system from the start of the project;
  • Use version control to manage code, but keep it simple;
  • Learn and work with the norms of the open source community for maximum wider benefit.

Read the full case study at:  Cascade Case Study 2: Customizing open source software: benefits and pitfalls.

Leveraging technology to drive business performance

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As part of our Cascade project we developed a series of five case studies to highlight areas of our work where we had the most interesting or useful outputs.  The first of these looks at the senior management perspective and is titled Leveraging technology to drive business performance.  It focuses on developing internal capability through the application of technology (or e-administration) so that operational and institutional strategy, as well as administrative processes and procedures, are delivered more efficiently and effectively.  The case study covers the following topics: project planning, problem identification, cost benefit analysis, managing organizational change, consensus building and developing a clear methodology for the embedding of project activities, and provides key points for effective practice and a series of recommendations for others hoping to achieve similar objectives.
Read the full case study, at: Leveraging technology to drive business performance.

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.