After over two years work we have reached the end of the JISC-funded Cascade project – wrapping this up and the final reporting requirements are a big part of the reason why I have blogged so little in recent months. This was a huge project looking at a very broad cross section of activities in the Department for Continuing Education at Oxford.
Technology-enhanced curriculum delivery is a large area and has the ability to affect everything we do; therefore, it was essential to closely define the scope of the project. Following a detailed scoping exercise, we focussed on areas where using technology offered the greatest potential impact, either through financial efficiencies, greater effectiveness, or application across a number of activities. This resulted in a project that developed sustainable new services that provide:
VLE support for award-bearing courses, incorporating online assignment-handling and access to generic content;
Wider availability of online enrolment and payment services;
Support for the course design process.
We quantified the benefits these services offer the Department in terms of greater efficiency, improved service or innovation, and have developed tools, processes and documentation to streamline and embed them in our work.
The cuts in funding faced by the Department as a result of the ELQ policy is now being mirrored across Higher Education as a whole, making many of our project outputs more relevant than ever to a wider audience. In particular they offer:
Suggestions of areas where other institutions might achieve comparable benefits;
Information on how to achieve such benefits;
Shared outputs upon which others can build;
Open source code for enhanced assignment-handing in Moodle;
allowing others to benefit from our developments. All outputs are available on the Cascade project website’s outputs page, and in the next few weeks I will blog in more detail about some of these.
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.
This post marks the official open-on-the-web style start to our JISC funded OER Impact study. The key tasks of the study being:
The investigation of patterns of behaviour around the use and reuse of OER.
Examining the impact of these behaviours on teaching and learning strategies from institutional, tutor and student perspectives.
Our methodology is distinctly qualitative, focusing on the ‘why’ and much as the ‘what’. Why you might be using OER rather than why they should exist.
As anyone who has cruised the blog posts around OER will know there is a never-ending debate about the value-cost ratio of openly licensing educational resources much of which hangs on an expectation of repurposing/remixing. Up to now there has been little research on the potential value of OER as distinct from stuff-on-the-web from the perspective of the users/re-users/remixers. We hope to somewhat redress that balance.
Most ‘big OER’ activity to date has been driven be the production side of the produce/resuse coin. I recently heard of a university which was considering working with iTunesU in a potentially OER manner. Interestingly it was the marketing department who was pushing for this which is indicative of an understanding of one of the values of open resources/OER from an institutional perspecitve. I don’t know if that marketing department has considered who might use/reuse the resources they hand to Apple?
In any event, stats out of our slice of iTunesU here at Oxford show that a lot of people are using OER. The majority of this use being informal (a term often incorrectly equated with ‘casual’) and individual. I suspect the videos which are CC licensed are used in much the same way as those that aren’t. After all, one of the benefits of informal usage is that you don’t have to be seen to be playing by the rules isn’t it..? That aside there is a pleasant ‘social-good’ aspect here because beyond any formal curricular use of OER they benefit the-man-in-the-street in a manner that would be difficult to argue against.
In a recent post Amber Thomas made the point that OER is a “supply side term” which I tend to agree with. Given that the distinction between OER and stuff-on-the-web is technical (in legal terms) one of our primary concerns is to make sure that we capture narratives of use/reuse which are related to OER not simply to open-stuff-online. Having said this we don’t want to devalue non-OER reuse or examples of the steady cultural shift towards an acceptance of ‘openness’ in the most general sense. To position our conversations with participants within a broad use/reuse territory we are proposing to use the following map.
David White, JISC OER Impact Study.
As ever the semantics could be tweaked/argued over well into the night but I hope the map covers much of the use/reuse area that could be found in and around a Higher Ed institution. Suggestions for how the diagram could be improved are, of course, very welcome.
In conjunction with our research questions this approach should allow us to concentrate on OER value from a use/reuse perspective without discarding valuable examples of the informal use/reuse of OER or close-to-OER type resources.
Over the next six months our project will interview staff who use OER in their teaching practice and those who are interested in taking advantage of OER. In addition to this we will be interviewing students about what motivates them to use particular resources in their learning either as directed by the curriculum or discovered independently. If you have any good examples of OER use/reuse which has been embedded in course programmes/institutional strategies then please let us know.
I was delighted to be invited to speak about our Study of Online Learning our group authored for the HEFCE Task Force at this years ALT-C conference. I focused on the issues that I felt arose from the long awaited report which is due to be published shortly.
The vast majority of online distance offerings are postgraduate ‘professional’ courses. eg. Masters in Law, Medicine, Business, Engineering etc.
I made it clear in my presentation at ALT-C that I don’t see this as a problem in of itself. The institutions providing these courses have found that the online distance format works well for those in full-time employment and that these types of courses have a ready market. Setting up successful online distance programmes is challenging enough so it make sense to pick the low hanging fruit in terms of potential customers when developing new products.
Did that last sentence grate a bit? It does for me and not just because of the dubious grammar. As soon as we talk in terms of ‘customers’ and ‘product’ I get nervous. There seems to be something inherently at odds with the philosophy of higher education as I understand it when it is couched in economic terminology. This is then compounded by the apparent keenness of the government to involve private partners in the delivery of higher education programmes online with the possibility of giving some companies the right to award degrees directly.
A fortifying cup of tea with some mini-chedders
I was at an amusing talk recently given by an American company who claimed that their “for-profit university was not preoccupied with money”. It’s very easy to sit in a university and poke fun at commercial educational providers, too easy in fact, especially as I’m quite happy to take my salary home each month. I haven’t done an MBA so I’m not an expert but I find it difficult to distinguish the financial approaches of public and private sector bodies sometimes. Universities are diverse businesses and have many money-making activities some of which are funded by the government and some which are straight commercial ventures. I believe that a simplistic argument around ‘for-profit’ and ‘not for-profit’ masks the real issue which in the case of online distance learning is to do with diversity.
Almost every institution in this field whether a university or a big corporate is providing an extremely narrow curriculum because certain courses have a better Return on Investment than others. The problem is not what we are providing online but what we are neglecting to provide. Where are the humanities and liberal arts? Where are the foundation and undergraduate degrees? There are a few examples of these (I cited The Sheffield College) but certainly not enough to reflect the character of our face-to-face universities.
The reason for this lack of diversity in both curriculum and academic levels is because non-STEM, non-Business, non-Postgrad courses have a less reliable income stream. It’s expensive to kick start an online programme. It’s a lot less expensive than building a lecture theatre or a library but because it’s a ‘new’ mode of delivery it’s assessed outside the economic machinery embedded in our institutions and has to be seen to pay-for-itself. Here is where the financial challenges bite. At ALT-C I made the statement that “Universities should enrich society not make society rich”. I admit that this becomes increasingly difficult when money is scarce but I feel that it’s important that we retain those aspects of our activity which work towards the public good. A public good which is not predicated on wealth and material growth but on wellbeing, one which equips individuals to be more than economic units.
I got quite animated (Image: Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales" : Mark Gregory of Photoshy.com)
This challenge is distinct from abstract notions of ‘quality’. I can’t honestly say what the standard of teaching and learning is like on the offerings our study discovered but I see no evidence that a lucrative course is destined to be a less ‘educational’ experience than one that loses money. In many cases I suspect that the quality of online learning is higher than equivalent face-to-face courses because students expect significant amounts of contact when at a distance. In face-to-face teaching scenarios the lecture (a controversial subject this year) provides a very efficient sense of contact and notional cohort cohesion. For online this cohesion has to be built by regular feedback, tutor-student contact and peer-to-peer learning. The risk of a lack of social presence in a predominantly text based medium coupled with the influence of the micro-contact culture of the web means that only the online courses with excellent learning design will survive. The mode of delivery inherently demands good pedagogy and active engagement or students simply drop out.
I think it’s helpful to consider this area in terms of identity because this forces a consideration of values beyond the economic. As it stands the ‘digital identity’ of online higher education provided by the UK largely looks like a highly academic professional development programme. I must reiterate that I’m not criticising this activity in of itself rather I am holding out hope that future funding models will allow programmes outside this area to move online and better represent the varied and excellent teaching and learning this country is rightly known for.
If you are keen to discuss the role of technology within/around higher education in a political context then you might want to consider registering your interest for the proposed ‘Tech, Power, Education’ seminar series.
It is fitting recognition for our group which has built up a successful portfolio of fully online distance learning courses, in parallel with running innovative and influential R&D projects and providing consultancy services. Over the years the Association for Learning Technology annual conference has been an excellent opportunity for us to keep up to date and to share the many aspects of TALL’s work. This has ranged from running ALT workshops on our course production process through to giving presentations on World of Warcraft and Second Life. It was a real honour to receive the award at the conference gala dinner last night.
The ALT panel of judges had the following to say about us:
“The TALL team has succeeded in developing a flexible model for production of material which is efficient and effective in the Oxford environment. It now delivers in a way that reflects the Oxford tutorial model with emphasis on frequent interaction between learner and academic and on regular updating.”
It is gratifying to see the aims we set out with around five years ago so neatly reflected in the judges’ comments. TALL has been at the forefront of elearning design production and delivery since it’s formation in 1996. Another way of looking at this is that we made most of our mistakes early, learnt from them and moved on.
“The judges were impressed with the speed at which learner numbers had built up along with the range of courses and projects being delivered in a difficult market.”
The unerring support of our Department has helped TALL to create and deliver online courses in highly technical subjects such as Nanotechnology together with a suit of short courses in humanities subjects, the latter being a much neglected area in online education.
The real strength of the unit however is in its breadth of activity. Research informs production and vice-versa.
“The judges were impressed with the balance in the team between production and delivery of online material and an active and strong research and development programme.”
This is very important to me as I feel that it’ s crucial for any unit, no matter how ‘technical’ it may appear to the wider institution, to maintain the university tradition of questioning the status quo and pushing the boundaries of disciplines. The heritage of units such as TALL puts them in a challenging position which should neither be wholly technology focused nor a purely academic. I find it very rewarding bridging these cultures, ensuring that thousands of students each year from all around the globe have an opportunity to engage with Oxford courses, while pushing our thinking and practice forward.
I’m frequently impressed by our team who have worked really hard to ensure that TALL has become an important part of our Department’s activities and has put online distance learning from Oxford University on the map.
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.
We are currently in the middle of piloting our new online assignment handling system as part of the Cascade project. While we are finding out all the usual technical glitches, more than anything what testing this with real students, real course directors and real tutors, submitting real assignments has revealed is:
how generous people can be in trying a new system for something which is so important to them.
how you can think you have thoroughly mapped all processes in abstract but there will always be some aspect which nobody mentioned until it happens in practice.
how completely random people can be.
While we certainly did not think our documentation and support assumptions were going to be perfect, with a lot of testing on trial assignments we thought we were probably on the right track, and for most of the process and the vast majority of students and tutors we were.
However where things did deviate from our expected norms, they did so in unanticipated ways. I won’t go into the minutiae here but it is certainly making us think about what are the issues you can plan for and design out, and what is going to happen no matter what you do.
As part of the Cascade project one of the things we have been looking at is how to take the best of what we know about supporting our online distance learning students and use it to see how we should use a VLE to support students who are essentially studying face to face courses with the Department. As part of this we piloted this activity with a few courses in over the last academic year, including our Undergraduate Diploma in Archaeology and our Psychodynamic counseling Certificate, Diploma and MSc. We’re still collecting feedback from our students (more on this later) but have finished our initial collection with staff.
Some of the findings have been reasonably predictable – using the VLE to easily contact students (especially during extreme snow) and to share materials are clear winners in the value stakes. However some are slightly less so. We have a lot of courses with many different sessional teachers, and while we did a good job at explaining Moodle to our core staff, piloting partners and students we did a less good job of engaging with these stakeholders, who often remained confused or oblivious about what Moodle was for and how they could use it.
So a new task for the summer to develop materials for this group.
Yesterday evening some of the TALL team attended the University’s annual OxTALENT awards ceremony and would like to convey our congratulations to Melissa Highton and her team at the Learning Technologies Group, who organised the event, and to all the winners of this year’s awards.
The OxTALENT awards are an annual competition celebrating the innovative use of IT in teaching and learning by academic staff and students at the University of Oxford. This year’s categories included:
1. Use of the University’s VLE to support a course or programme of study
2. Academic podcasting
3. Student podcasting
4. Student projects
5. Research project posters
6. Digital images
7. Use of technology in learning spaces
The awards opened with a welcome from Dr Stuart Lee, Director of the University’s Computing Services, and a fascinating presentation by Dr Chris Lintott on his Galaxy Zoo project, which is using the power of the public and the web to categorise hundreds of thousands of digital images drawn from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope archive.
It was also great to see the showcase of interesting projects taking place around the University including examples of innovative use of the VLE in both the sciences and humanities; a new media player, Belooga Media, which won the student project category; a classroom based voting system, which won the technology in learning spaces category; and not forgetting the smiling frog that won the digital image award!
The final award to be presented was the academic podcasting award, which was won by Dr Emma Smith for her very popular “Not Shakespeare” podcating series (which is available from the University of Oxford’s iTunes U site). Emma has also recently worked with the team at Continuing Education to develop a new ten-week online course on Shakespeare which includes part of the “Not Shakespeare” podcating series as an open educational resource.
n at Oxford.
