ADM-OER Resources Available through Jorum Open

05Feb10

We are pleased to say that the first project resources have now been uploaded and are available through Jorum Open:

Jorum Home

Many thanks to Mary and Stephanie from the UAL Project Team.



Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Enhancing VADS Project -Captivate: audience engagement and open educational content in the visual arts

29Jan10

The VADS (Visual Arts Data Service) Team will be presenting at the forthcoming OER10 Conference at Clare College Cambridge, 22-24 March.

Entitled Captivate: Audience Engagement and Open Educational Content in the Visual Arts – the paper will present the findings of the JISC funded enhancing VADS Project.

Project Outline

Project Slides and Blog

Conference Details

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

UAL Teaching and Learning Day

27Jan10

Sarah, Stephanie and I ran a session at the annual UAL Teaching and Learning Day last week. We had an hour’s slot. Sarah started by showing a short PowerPoint presentation to introduce OERs, and then we split into three groups of about 8-10 people to discuss people’s perceptions of OERs, current practice, incentives to contributing and people’s concerns. After 20 minutes or so, each of the three groups presented what had been discussed.

There were a lot of questions – and feedback was plentiful:

Perceptions / concept – the ‘nature’ of a resource

• It is not new – academics have been using offline resources for years!
• Materials are only one part of teaching and learning.
• Teaching resources are a “work-in-progress”.
• What constitutes a resource – in terms of OER?
• Is it a lesson plan or is it something that would inform teaching – such as a case study?
• Would the resources inform teaching only? What about educational resources for students?
• What is open education?
• University teaching / learning is different school teaching / learning. In schools there is more ownership of ideas / pride in work.
• The philosophy of OER seems to be at odds with the publication route of academia. Maybe these two models could work in parallel?
• MIT OpenCourseWare and OU OpenLearn were mentioned, as having been viewed / used.

Current practice

• Sharing locally.
• Using existing open resources.
• Wikis (with password access), which includes videos, software demos etc.
• BlackBoard. One group said that they used it as little as possible, but another group thought that it was adequate and that that would be a barrier for using anything else. It was suggested that a technical solution be found to move material from BlackBoard to the OER automatically.
• Gateway, set up for Conservation students (password-protected).
• Discussion lists of professional bodies, which include document areas to share resources.

Incentives

• Feedback / peer review / ratings were considered important. Therefore, comments boxes and ratings system would be welcomed (it was suggested that it would be useful to be able to sort by ratings – and also by date – c.f. below).
• Time / money!
• Rewards from institution.
• Sharing / benefiting from other institutions.
• Pride in showing work to others.

Concerns

• Ownership / copyright / IPR was probably the biggest concern. Many were worried about who owns copyright when creating a teaching resource as part of a course – is it the university, or the author? Can the author deposit content in the UAL OER that was created while teaching at another university? Many people at the event were visiting lecturers, who lecture at a number of universities. Therefore, branding from multiple institutions could be a problem.
• Third-party copyright was a concern. It was thought that a Compliance Officer would be needed to give advice.
• The Language Box idea of re-appropriating resources was not liked. It was felt that it was inappropriate for the author’s name to remain on the newly edited and uploaded resource, when it might be completely different from what the original author had intended. However, it was also felt that the original author should be acknowledged in some way.
• Would ‘my’ material be (re-)used appropriately? The material is often created for a particular class / room / situation, which can not always be replicated (i.e. the online experience is not the same as the ‘eyes on’ lecture). Therefore, in re-using the online material, it might not be used as originally intended.
• Teaching and Learning resources are never really complete. Therefore, it would be essential to date it, and to be able to sort by date.
• Would academics be given time to develop their teaching resources in this way? It was thought that it would be time-consuming.
• Would academics be given a grant / money to develop their resources?
• What about updating the resources?
• What about joint authorship? Recent collaborations have generated training resources produced jointly with University of Kingston, AHRC etc.
• Logos, branding, funder’s name?
• It was felt that the work should be given voluntarily – in good faith.
• There was concern that the teaching materials would not be suitable for public consumption – or not suitable for everyone all the time / own materials are not stylistically pleasing.
• “Would other people want to see what I’ve done?”
• Wouldn’t want the resources to be too dry.
• Would need help in developing the resources online.
• “Would this replace me?”
• Would there be enough relevant information to use?

Other questions / thoughts

• One group said that they would be happy to use the work from other institutions – why re-invent the wheel? Another group said that in arts, design and media subjects re-invention is important / part of the process.
• It was felt that there was a strong difference between disciplines. Practitioners of language subjects may be used to sharing online, but one person said that they “never have to write a lesson plan”. (Arts subjects are perceived to be more fluid.)
• Can science subjects be included in the ADM OER – e.g. cosmetic science? If it was created for a course at UAL then she was re-assured that it could be included.
• One group preferred the idea of a combined database with the UAL Research Online, rather than a separate teaching and learning database, as it was thought that often there is a very fine line between research, and teaching and learning.

Mary Burslem
27th January 2010

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  3 Comments

Nottingham OER Conference – Videos

08Dec09

With many thanks to Steve Stapleton conference organiser here are the links to the Conference Videos:
Key Note, Catherine Ngugi, OER Africa
Open Learning at Nottingham, Andy Beggan, The University of Nottingham
Xerte Online Toolkits and the Xpert repository, Julian Tenney and Pat Lockley, The University of Nottingham
Open Learning at the OU, Prof Andy Lane, OU
Jackie Milne, Intellectual property Rights and how this impacts education institutions when making educational resources available on-line, JISC Legal
Forging meaningful equal partnerships in OER between the UK and Africa, Bjoern Hassler, UK Commission for UNESCO & Neil Butcher, OER Africa

And highy entertaining case study – The Anatomist’s cookbook, Donal McNally

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  1 Comment

Project Metadata and Technical Information

07Dec09

In discussion with John Roberson from Cetis issues of the project metadata and technological standards. Here are some of the key topics and strategies:
Link to information
Some of the links to associated project metadata and standards models:
Language Box

E-Prints – Keep It
Keep It Blog
UAL Research Online

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  1 Comment

UAL Focus Group

03Dec09

We had our OER focus group this morning and had a good turn out of 8 members of staff covering a wide range of disciplines including graphic design, sound art, printmaking, pedgagogy, cultural studies, fine art and photography and ranging from technicians, to teaching staff to management. Steve and Debbie took charge of the one hour session while myself and Mary eyed the pastries. The following notes are what I jotted down from the session, please feel free to add/edit and comment.

• External sites were used by some staff instead of Blackboard (VLE) for a number of reasons, one being that they were open and that if there were external partners then they could access the material, which is impossible if it is just within Blackboard
• Authorship/Ownership an issue. Mentioned that certain teachers have ‘rejected’ using material that has been made open, since it is from another institution.
• Students themselves get material from everywhere, they don’t wait to have it supplied by the institution. Example of CS4 Adobe Photoshop which isn’t supplied by UAL so students have gone elsewhere to get the software and the information on how to use it.
• It was felt that reluctance to use other peoples material is an academic issue rather than a student issue.
• IT was felt to be a barrier to OER at certain times. For example lots of open source software is around but you cannot load it onto your machine without specific admin rights. So students cannot use it on UAL machines but can get them onto their own machines.
• Disciplinary differences across UAL e.g. London College of Fashion is creating material that is very ‘hands on’ and staff need teaching about how to use online or digital tools to enhance their learning, where at London College of Communication they are already using advanced software tools to create material.
• Important to examine how you create OER materials e.g. how you make a video of a tutorial
• There are very specific processes within the arts that can be particular to UAL or just one college
• Important to embrace multiple processes, form there you can decide which suits you, plus in the arts there is no one way of doing things. Students need to see and experience a variety of techniques, the student becomes the arbitor.
• There can be a lot of concern about the ‘look’ of OER material and of online work within the arts. However the look/style of something can go out of date very quick. Yet the look of a site can be important e.g. graphic design
• Important then to make it simple and make it work!
• Interest in what people are creating as teaching and learning materials/OER for their students. One teacher felt that he wanted to/should be doing so but unsure what and how to do this.
• Time to produce OER is an issue, as is the expertise to make the documentation.
• On one hand felt that UAL should help to produce this material so that it can ‘brand’ it and then feel the benefit of having that material used in the wider world. On the other hand there are a lot of part time staff who create material either in their own time or also for use on other courses across the university so would not be happy if it was just branded as UAL
• The decision in using a resource comes from recommendation, either teachers recommending it to students or staff recommending it other staff

The hour wanged by but we got a lot of good information and made some very good contacts and we will make sure we follow all this up.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: blackboard, disciplinary differences, focus group, ual

OERs in the Telegraph

30Nov09

Although detailing more science based courses the Daily Telegraph this week covered the UK OER Programme.

Read the Story

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Open Learning Conference, Nottingham University Nov 09

27Nov09

A Few Thoughts

A very valuable and informative conference and it was good to have the whole ADM-OER team present.

The Xpert and Xerte presentation was  an eye opener and I’m sure useful for the project once  resources are available in the  institutional repositories and  we can use the RSS feeds.

I think it became apparent from a number of sources how important it is for OER projects to have departmental/faculty and institutional support at the highest levels to help encourage staff to submit and develop the widest range of quality resources posible.

Copyright and IPR issues are always dominant and the idea of embedding links to third party content coould be an effective strategy to help to release more resources with such concerns

Many thanks to organisers of the conference from the ADM-OER project team,

Steve

 

 

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Any Student, Any Subject, Anywhere

16Nov09

 

Web technologies are driving a revolution in higher education, where many degrees may soon be studied online:

The Academy’s David Sadler, Director (Networks) and David Kernohan of JISC discuss Academy/JISC OER programme in a Education Guardian interview.

Read the Ful Report

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Evaluation of EdShare and Language Box in comparison with Kultur

12Nov09

I have written a very short report comparing UAL’s Kultur with EdShare and Language Box:

1.0 Introduction:

1.1 EdShare is a “resource for collaboration and sharing of materials used in teaching and learning” that has been created by the University of Southampton. There is no ‘About Us’ information either on the homepage or as a separate section. However, there is a PDF file on how to contribute resources, and there is also information about the latest Web 2.0 features added to the website (c.f. section 5 below).

1.2 Language Box was developed by the JISC-funded Faroes project, as part of the activities of the Higher Education Academy’s Language and Linguistics Subject Centre, which is based at the University of Southampton. The Language Box is a “place where students and teachers of languages can publish and share their learning materials, resources and links on the web. You can use the resources directly, or create new activities to put your own twist on things”. There is a comprehensive ‘About’ section.

1.3 Kultur is “a JISC-funded project which is creating a model of an institutional repository tailored to the needs of the creative and applied arts research community. This demo showcases examples of research from all of the arts institutions involved in Kultur – the University of the Arts London, University College for the Creative Arts, and Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton.” The University of the Arts London (UAL) Kultur site presents the work of UAL staff. There is an ‘About’ section with useful links and logos.

Therefore, EdShare and Language Box are about sharing and re-purposing teaching and learning resources, while Kultur is more to do with archiving and storing research materials.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  2 Comments