Category Archives: educational content

Differences in managing learning materials?

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Last week CETIS organised a workshop at the repository fringe 2011 #rfringe11 on the Advances in Open Systems for Learning Materials (#rfCETIS ). Phil’s collected blog posts and presentations-here.

This post is to briefly capture some of the discussion around the warm up  act – our attempt to help the workshop participants, think about some of the different challenges that arise when managing learning materials. Both to help those participants coming from a more general repository background think through any possible differences which managing learning materials might make to their practice and systems, but also to remind participants of the different requirements which emerge from different types of learning materials.

The activity was to consider the differences between an OER collection (of any type(s) of material) and a collection of high stakes summative question items (and answers/ rubrics). It was framed in terms of quickly identifying some of the key issues in managing collections, the key discovery mechanisms, and what role or functionality users might expect the chosen ‘asset management system’ to support. In retrospect the timing of the activity was perhaps too short for group discussions but a few people asked me to write up some of the group feedback, so..

Issues in managing materials for learning and teaching

  • Can students contribute?
  • Can you use external content?
  • Do you need a formal deposit/ management workflow? (more likely to be needed if content open)
  • Do you need to manage IPR?
  • Do you need to worry about producing a final copy? maintaining version control?
  • How do you judge / promote / surface quality materials?
  • Do you need to quality screen resources?
  • Do you need to update resources or provide a mechanism for them to go out of date?
  • How do you manage security for assessment items? how do you manage time-to-live or other date restrictions?

Discovery issues for learning and teaching materials

  • Can you find it in Google? (if not – forget it?)
  • How do you navigate balance of Google and local indexing/ discovery tools?
  • How much metadata do you need? from who? how much of a time commitment is it?
  • How do you apply licences?
  • How do you tie into/ relate to/ develop discipline specific social networks?
  • How does your system overlap with/ integrate/ relate to the VLE?
  • How do you support course based discovery?
  • What issues are there in sharing data (data artefacts and types of data about resources) [including individual’s data/ corporate image]?
  • What level and type of info do you want around assessment items?

Issues for users

  • How does the system enhance learning experience?
  • How does the system suggest/ support discovery of additional related resources?
  • Can you find out anything about past exams? what can you find out?

There was plenty of feedback I’ve not managed to capture in this summary, but this gives a bit of a flavour of some of the issues which emerged and helped frame the approaches that the subsequent presenters discussed.

opened10: brief thoughts

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Highlight thoughts

(all of these deserve posts in their own right):

  • what is the difference ‘open’ makes? (D Wiley)
  • when we meet – when are we going to do and not just talk? (unattributed)
  • how do you respond as an individual? (and why do you care about OpenEd/OER)? (Gourley; but equally could have been if i’d been in their sessions: Winn, Hall, Neary – though they’ve quite a different perspective)
  • if you have rubrics and marks as semantic data can you analyse for ‘soft skills’ across a programme of study?
  • how do i articulate what HE does that P2PU can’t, what can i learn from P2PU and what should i stop doing cause they do it better? (drumbeat)
  • why don’t HE courses create badges too? (drumbeat)

I’ll need to go back through the programme and remind myself of some of the sessions but as a first pass of some of the stuff that caught my attention emerging from opened10. not yet adequately linked or marked up and doubtless will grow a bit over time as different parts of my brain kick in.

All the conference papers are available in the UOC repository .

with apologies to those i know or have heard recently (Brian Lamb, Scott Leslie, Suzanne Hardy, Jane Williams, Simon Thomson, Jakki Sheridan-Ross, all the wonderful folk from the Open University, and  my colleague Li Yuan) – i’m too familiar with your work for it to make this first pass but i do think it’s great!

things to use now

some of the stuff that was presented is out there now to use:
smarthistory.org

smarthistory.org website

smarthistory.org website

fantastic opened site for art history – working towards being a viable alternative to OER – two art history teachers making stuff as they go to help students offset the massive cost of introductory art history textbooks for foundation courses.

twhistory.org

Twhistory website

Twhistory website

historical recreations on twitter: Gettysburg, 1847 pioneer trek, the sinking of the Titanic, the American revolution, possibly about to start working with UK national archives to cabinet war room twitter account of world war 2. Tom Caswell’s presentation.

edufeedr

a feedreader for running open courses – a tutor sets up a blog-based course and edufeedr aggregates content from across blogging platforms designed to gather together student feedback based from wherever they blog it.

information and stats

we’re finally at get to the point were we can make or not make business cases and informed decisions. (links will follow)

OER use and attitudes surveys Joseph Hardin Mujo Research present survey results from instructors at University of Michigan and University of Valencia – surveying their willingness to use and to publish OER.

OER use and attitudes iNacol (online schools, K-12) surveyed their members about awareness around OER – the data and paper aren’t published yet unfortunately

Rory McGreal – examining differences Open Access makes for a university press comparing Amazon rank of Abathasca University’s press which is OA with three other Canadian university presses. results didn’t indicate any significant difference for bought physical copies but only one metric and doesn’t account for greater access provided by OA downloads.

David Wiley offered some figures around Brigham Young University Independent Study Unit looking at sustainabilty of making content open – if content made open – can costs be covered by sustained or increased enrollment. the short answer- yes -just.

under development

Open Rubrics and the semantic web – Megan Kohler (Penn State) and Brian Panulla – well i’d call them feedback or assessment criteria but wither way they’ve developed an OWL ontology and reference implementations for sharing and storing marking rubrics (and associated marks) – in terms of technical developments i think this is potentially the most important thing from the conference.

stuff to think about more

building courses with OER: Griff Richards presented about a project he’d worked on create course syllabi for a master’s course in instructional design. one to follow up after the final report and syllabi are out. [personally it brings me back to thinking about course syllabi around OER for librarians – but that’s another post in a month or so]. His metaphor of clothes shopping for looking for learning materials is also worth keeping around (Tailored: expensive, perfect , emperor’s new clothes; Off the Shelf: not quite fit, but do the job, reasonable price; Charity Shop: nearly free, hard to find what you want, might just find something perfect).

David Wiley the difference of Openness. the challenge is what does ‘open’ allow us to do pedagogically that we can’t otherwise do [open specifically not all the good stuff that often is triggered by open]? Identifying Concrete Pedagogical Benefits of OER

David Wiley: Why do we need 'open'?

David Wiley: Why do we need 'open'?

Dublin City University – took the OER as marketing angle and did some extensive work on how to best brand OERs using product placement and advertising methodology – this presentation made me profoundly uncomfortable but it is the logical extension of some of the advice and case for OER that many of us (including me) have made. i’m going to have to read their paper and think about this.

Erik Duval said a lot of things but there’s something fundamentally important about not being afraid to disrupt learning – oers probably have more quality assurance than the rest of course delivery.

Erik Duval you can afford to disrupt learning

Erik Duval you can afford to disrupt learning

I can’t help but finish with the work of those I presented in the same session as: Julià Minguillón (UOC), Pieter Kleymeer and Molly Kleinman from University of Michigan- we all raised questions, limits and possibilities around the role of libraries in OER. It was great to find other people asking similar questions.

The use of Content Packaging and Learning Object creation tools in the UKOER programme

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Although it is possible to create learning objects or content packages within virtual learning environments (from which it may be possible to export them) there are also a number of content packaging or Learning Object creation tools which have been used in the UKOER programme.

As the discussion around the use of Content Packaging noted ( http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/johnr/2010/03/08/the-use-of-ims-cp-in-the-ukoer-programme/ and http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/sheilamacneill/2010/03/09/proding-around-curriculum-design-what-happened-to-content-packaging/) the perceived usability of available tools may influence the choice of packaging standard (whether the tools listed produce IMS CP, ADL SCORM, both, or something else is not noted).

Authorware

(http://www.adobe.com/products/authorware/)
In use by:

  • C-Change

Learning Object Creator

(http://www.llas.ac.uk/projects/2770)
In use by:

  • Humbox

Glomaker

(http://www.glomaker.org/)
In use by:

  • Evolution
  • Unicycle

Reload

(http://www.reload.ac.uk/)
In use by:

  • Simulation OER

eXe

(http://exelearning.org/wiki)
In use by:

  • Berlin
  • Evolution
  • Centre for Bioscience OER
    • “ Using eXe, in part as they had significant issues with using RELOAD and in part as eXe is JorumOpen’s preferred tool”

QuestionMark

(http://www.questionmark.com/us/index.aspx)

In use by:

  • brOME OERP
    • exporting materials from QuestionMark as QTI items to make more open
  • Centre for Bioscience OER

Xerte

(http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/)
In use by:

  • Berlin
  • C-Change
  • C-SAP OER – one mini project used Xerte to transform PPTs into Learning Objects

Open Education: project or process and practice?

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I’m new enough to the Open Education world that I can’t tell how unusual the closure of Utah State’s OpenCourseWare initiative is (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Utah-State-Us-OpenCourseWare/7913/ and http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/967). It’s probably the largest OCW initiative in the US after MIT and in a summary of its successes earlier this year the  Utah State University online news noted that it gets 50000 visitors a month http://www.usu.edu/ust/index.cfm?article=34468. To all extents and purposes it has been a success but it’s now a success that’s, at best, on hold.

At the risk of simplifying the undoubtedly difficult and complex issues behind this decisions, it strikes me that for USU Open Education has been a project. A successful project, and one that has been good for the institution, but a project nevertheless. But in academia and in recessions projects are always vulnerable – they are, almost by definition, additonal to institution’s core business.

For Open Education and for Open Access, USU’s decision reinforces the need for sustainable approaches – a need to embed the work of making things open into the normal processes and practice of the institution.

I’m not suggesting that Open Education can be done without any additional cost to the institution, that it’s easy, or that all those invovled in the initiaive at USU didn’t do all that they could (and way more than I could). There are plenty of things that you have to do on top of normal practice and process before you can make content freely available and higher costs if you want to maximise the benefits to your institution. Open Education like Open Access is not free to provide.

Unfortunately I suspect that most OER (and most OA) initiatives face the challenge that they have to start from the position that institutions aren’t actively managing their digital stuff and that staff aren’t always considering IPR when they create materials. I’m not sure how many institutions would be able to say that they have organised copies of all their lecture materials and research papers (irrespective of whether they want to be Open or not).  An OER initiative that tries to do all that work for the institution, without the instituion undergoing some  changes to the basic institutional processes of how we do education. runs the risk of remaining a project (irrespective of their funding source). I’d suggest that the sustainability of OER and OA initiatives is entirely dependent on if institutions choose to manage their digital stuff. [I also don’t know how much of an issue this was at USU]

I’ll finish with three quotes drawn from the USU example that I take as a warning to any project:
“In the tradition of land grant universities, Utah State University OpenCourseWare assures that no individual who is prepared and who desires the opportunity to advance his or her education is turned away. USU OCW provides an unprecedented degree of free and open access to the knowledge and expertise of our faculty for the benefit of every citizen of the state of Utah and every person in the world. As we enter the 21st century, services like OpenCourseWare will enable land grant institutions to more fully accomplish their missions.” (Stan Albrecht, President, Utah State University on http://ocw.usu.edu/)

“The cause? The effort ran through grant money from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and $200,000 from the state Legislature. It needed $120,000 a year to keep going. But it failed to secure any more state or university money, Mr. Jensen said, despite being the third-most-visited Web site hosted by Utah State University.
“It’s just a bad timing issue,” Mr. Jensen told The Chronicle this morning. “The recession hit. People wanted to keep us up, but the economy was just such that we could not find money anywhere.””( “Utah State U.’s OpenCourseWare Closes Because of Budget Woes”, Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Utah-State-Us-OpenCourseWare/7913/)

“2009-10 AUTHORIZED BASE BUDGET [of $] 226,327,800″ http://www.usu.edu/budget/documents/legislature/2009/budget%20summary_fy2009%20leg.pdf

Sadly this suggests to me that for USU, Openness was a project.

Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 3)

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The first two parts of this foray into metadata requirements for Open Educational Resources examined: 1) how the required information for the UKOER programme compared with the requirements for the Jorum deposit tool and the DiscoverEd aggegator 2) how the UKOER requirements compared to the information projects thought would be necessary for particular activities (find, identify, use, cite, manage, select). In this final part I’ll offer some personal reflections on the implications of these comparisons and comment on the role of educational metadata and annotations.

It was perhaps predictable, though not essential, that there would be close correspondence between the programme requirements and Jorum’s requirements but it was good to see that the UKOER’s metadata requirements were comparable to those of ccLearn’s aggregator. I’m glad to note that alongside The University of Nottingham initiative UNOW and the Open University’s Open Learn,  Leeds Met’s Unicycle project are also thinking about this (http://twitter.com/mrnick/statuses/3575276663 ). As outlined in part 2, what proved more interesting is that, when as a programme we thought about some of the information that the users of our resources would need, the programme requirements were a subset of that list.

One thing I’d highlight here, before I do that, is that the one piece of information that we agreed was essential to use an OER was clear licence information. I’m sure that this will get discussed a lot more but in the wider discussions going around the programme it is becoming clear that this information needs to be available as part of the asset for people to read (for example, as a cover page statement), in the metadata (to support licence specific searching), and in the RSS feed – so that it’s clear to aggregators.

Educational description

Part 1 noted DiscoverEd’s use of educational content and sparked some comments about the use of educational context – specifically focused on the issue of educational level; in part 2 information about  educational context emerged from our discussions aboutwhat we would want to know to interact with the OERs.

Developing best practice guidelines for eduational metadata in the UKOER programme is an ongoing process and one in which we’ll probably be tracking what the projects find useful as much as, if not more than, we make recommendations. CETIS has existing guides to metadata at http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Guides_to_metadata and summaries of relevant metadata standards at http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Educational_metadata_standards . We’re begining to gather specific guidance, links, and best practice information at http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Educational_Content_OER but these guidelines are very much just beginning.

As Phil and Andy L noted on part 1 -if you’re dealing with resources ranging from primary school to postgraguate or CPD, the ability to quickly filter by broad educational level is quite important and for the purpose of wider interoperability recording educational level allows a richer service in some aggregators (currently DiscoverEd). But it’s hard to know what an appropriate and useful granularity would be – especially given that the audience of an OER is global. Perhaps, stating on the resource what class or course something was used for is a good idea as it provides the user (though not the system) with an understandable point of reference. In terms of metadata – if Jorum uses UKEL (I can’t remember and can’t access it) this is probably the right vocabulary to use. Given the focus of the programme on HE the appropriate (multiple) UKELs may be able to be added to batches of project resources – though broad this would give aggregators with a wider remit something to work with.

In terms of wider educational description – intended use, context of use, requirements for use, instructional method, are a few of the candidates. However, providing this sort of information has the potential to rapidly move away from the light touch approach to metadata that has characterised the programme thus far, and significantly add to the ‘cataloguing’. A quick glance at the practice of many of the successful OER initiatives suggests limited educational metadata may be the way to go; OCW & MERLOT record the item type but with vocabularies geared to their collections.

The upcoming technical discussions with projects will begin to establish what educational information they are recording and help frame some guidelines.

Usage information

Some other types of information that our discussions suggested would be really helpful (especially in the context of managing OER collections) was usage information, user ratings, and comments. This presents somewhat of a challenge. As:

  1. Usage statistics are often application specific and not part of structured metadata.
  2. Annotations are a sort of metadata but they actually form resources in their own right and it’s both tricky and somewhat messy to include them in metadata – especially if the resource and metadata then move (as they are intended to). As I understand it one possible approach would be to use OAI-ORE to associate distributed annotations that you were aware of with a resource.

I’m not yet aware of best practice in this area, nor aware of what projects are planning to do about recording OER use or distribution, but suspect that:

  1. is beginning to move towards the bigger discussion about tracking of OERs.
  2. is going to depend a lot on the capabilities of the tools and systems projects are using and how they record anntoations or ratings.

More details of about both of these issues will again emerge through the technical discussions but I suspect best practice for statisitics or an investigation of tracking are getting outside of the scope of our work.

Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 2)

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In Comparing metadata requirements (part 1) I examined the required and suggested metadata for Open Educational Resources in the UKOER programme, for the Jorum deposit tool, and the DiscoverEd aggregator. In this second part of the comparison I’m going to try to capture some of our initial discussions fom the UKOER programme session about metadata and then very roughly compare the brainstorming we did as part of that event with the requirements of the programme and other initiatives.

To begin with let’s have a look at a graphical overview of the requirements from the three initiatives. The graph below displays an overview of the metadata requirements of the UKOER programme, the Jorum deposit tool, and the DiscoverEd aggregator service. Full height bars are manadatory elements, three quarter height bars are system generated elements and half height bars are recommended metadata elements.

Graphiical Overview of Metadata Requirements Relating to the UKOER Programme

Graphical overview of metadata requirements relating to the UKOER programme

In the elluminate session, we asked the participating projects to consider what metadata they would require to:

  • identify
  • find
  • select
  • use
  • cite
  • manage

a resource. Participants then shared their suggestions in the chat box. I’ve put the data together and were appropriate combined or split entries. The below graph represents the group’s suggestions of which possible pieces of information are important for each of the outlined functions. (Some caveats are in order. The exercise was not rigorous, the number of participants answering at a given time varied; the first question ‘identify’ had a higher broader repsonse rate – this may relate to how we explained the exercise. The answers were free text and not from a prior list. Unless specified the idea of a date is counted for both creation/ initial use and upload/ publication. It also became clear that for functional purposes rights mostly collapsed in to licence (thus it was dropped from the graph).

Condensed outputs of metadata responses

Graph displaying a summary of metadata requirements for functions from brainstorming in 2nd Tuesday Session

Graph displaying a summary of metadata requirements for functions from brainstorming in 2nd Tuesday session

The idea of educational level is implict in educational description /context and so it should probably be included with that category (this has not been done in this graph however, as educational level is singled out in the requirements). It is not entirely clear what was intended by some of the descriptions – e.g. coverage.

Examining the graph it is clear that there are some key pieces of infromation for particular uses. Across the entire set of functions the key information appears to be: author, date of publication, subject and description, educaitonal description/ intended use (if combined with educational level) and usage data.

The key information for each function was:

  • identify – subject
  • find – description
  • select – licence
  • use – licence
  • cite – date of publication
  • manage – usage data

By way of enabling a comparison with the metadata requirements, the top three responses for each function where collated (and then taken as factor of one) – this was done to provide an approximate indication of overall importance that could be compared to the requirements data.

OER required metadata compared to brainstorming

OER required metadata compared to brainstorming

From this comparison it is interesting to note the following:

  1. Of the two contentious mandatory metadata elements: file format/ mime type was actually considered to be functionally important.
  2. Recording the Language of an OER was not considered to be critcial for any of the functions – though all the initiatives consider it important (this may be attributable to the programme-based context of our discussion).
  3. The institution/ publisher is surprisingly unimportant functionally (unless you are, like Jorum, hosting materials).
  4. Licence is probably the most important piece of information for an OER.
  5. Usage data and user ratings are considered to be critical pieces of information – they are not however included in metadata profiles – however, it is likely that this information would be generated over time by the relevant host services

There’s probably more to say about this data and more to do with it but for now at least – that’s plenty to reflect on.

Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 1)

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In our elluminate session on metadata and aggregation for Open Educational Resources, Phil and I spent some time  gettting everyone to think through the information required to interact with an educational resource in certain ways  (such as: (re-)use, cite, find, identify, manage). this produced a lot of responses prioiritizing different bits of information that are needed. I’ve not gone through my notes thoroughly yet but on the whole particapants agreed that the metadata which the programme asked for was needed (the main element of contention was file format and size which thankfully are probably the most automatable of metadata).

With this in mind I was interested to read about ccLearn’s developments in developing a tool to provide an enhanced search of aggregated OERs and their metadata reccomendations for sources.

“DiscoverEd is an experimental project from ccLearn which attempts to provide scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. Metadata, including the license and subject information available, are exposed in the result set.” http://wiki.creativecommons.org/DiscoverEd_FAQ

There’s a lot more to be said about their work as I’m still trying to figure out how it is similar to and differs from all the previous work done on aggregating repositories (at first glance – it’s got the advantage of web friendly syndication/ transport standards but potentially less robust/ standardised descriptive standards). Today however, I thought it would be interesting to compare minimum metadata sets for OERs that I’m aware of and that are intended for multi-organisation/ insitutional use (i.e. not just what a given organisation has decided as a minmimal set for its metadata).

UKOER Mandatory Metadata:

from: http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/lmc/2009/03/30/metadata-guidelines-for-the-oer-programme/

  • programme tag
  • author
  • title
  • date (uploaded/ creation)
  • url
  • file format
  • file size
  • [I’m fairly sure rights is on some versions of this list but it doesn’t appear on this one]

Suggested metadata

  • language
  • subject classsifications
  • keywords
  • tags
  • comments
  • description

DiscoverEd metadata

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcLearn_Search_Metadata

All the metadata is optional but the following is highly recommended :

  • title
  • summary
  • language
  • education level
  • licence
  • subject

Jorum’s OER deposit tool

Gareth Waller summarized the Metadata requirements of the the Jorum OER deposit tool in comment on http://repositorynews.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/musing-about-metadata-for-oer/
“The profile is as follows:

Mandatory metadata set:

  • Title
  • Overview (Description)
  • Keywords
  • Author Name
  • Licence

Recommended metadata set:

  • Project name
  • Creation date
  • Classification (JACS subject classification)

System Generated metadata set:

  • Publisher
  • Contributed Date
  • Language
  • Identifier

The ‘keywords’ metadata is currently user generated and does not use a controlled vocabulary.”

Comparing the lists it’s obvious to see some of the reasoning behind the chosen metadata sets. For example, that Jorum’s deposit tool can take advantage of information from Shibboleth and user profiles. It is also very encouraging to see their overlap but I think for me these sets raise a few issues:

  • Knowing a file size is important, but are we reaching a point when this information is part fo the programme/ browser?
    • I think we still need to record it but am not sure as  I’m fairly certain that often when a file size is displayed to someone selecting/ downloading it’s being generated from the file/ by the browser not from the metadata.
  • Educational Level…
    • I’m surprised to see this in ccLearn’s list – for all it’s simplicity it’s thus far proved a nightmare to agree on educational levels. not only is is nightmarish cross culturally but even within countries it’s not easy. I’ll pass over UK Educational Levels quickly and point out a project I’ve mentioned before Standard Connection – an NSF project trying to map curricula within the US. I’m not sure what progress they made but do know it certainly wasn’t straightforward.

The inclusion of educational level does however point to the difference between what educators think is necessary and what is easy to provide. I’ll come back to this in part 2 when I’ll try to wrangle some sense out of our elluminate session surveys.

I’ll note two things in passing by way of interim conclusion:

  • that OCW are discussing if they should have a minimal metadata set (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/1493).
  • that the suggested basic metadata for ccLearn is similar enough to the required and suggested metadata for DiscoverEd that there’s no reason that UKOER projects can’t (at no extra cost :) ) publish their collections there too. The University of Nottingham initiative UNOW is doing this already. [edit: the Open University’s initiative Open Learn is there too]

Open Educational Resources, metadata, and self-description

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If we share learning materials, do we have a professional responsibility to describe them?

At the CETIS conference Open Educational Resources / Content session in the midst of the discussions about metadata someone, I think John Casey, made an offhand comment about embedded metadata. As valuable as his next statement was, it was the notion of what information is contained within an object that caught my attention.

There is a basic principle of identity and authorship in a world of distributed information that we don’t seem to be talking about – what elements of self-description is it reasonable to assume from an academic sharing their resources? What constitutes good practice for labelling the digital stuff we want to be professionally associated with? Let’s be clear – I’m not talking about academics creating metadata or the debate about whether metadata is embedded or bundled – I’m talking about the equivalent of title pages and referencing (for want of a better way to put it).

Most university courses include modules on how to write an academic paper, including how to put together the parts of a paper. Departments produce templates so that assignments/ term papers, and theses have a standard title page, format, and way of citing things. The front parts of a paper help: manage the process of attribution and avoid accidental plagiarism; promote more careful writing; assert authorship and/or rights over a work; navigate the work; and help manage collections of such papers. A title section typically contains the following information: a title, author(s), date (usuallly of submission or acceptance), and frequently a course and/or institutional affiliation. This provides the reader with enough information to know what something claims to be, and begins to allow them to judge if they should read it.

I’m not suggesting title pages should be standard for everything, or that everything casually shared needs all this information, but in the context of deliberately shared educational resources surely we should regard providing information of this type as a professional responsibility. Whether we see it as an obligation of the ‘guild’, an opportunity to self-publicise, or compliance with institutional branding requirements, this information should be as standard for educational resources as it is for theses and articles. Of course not all learning materials lend themselves to a title page but: text documents and presentations do and web sites allow for home or about pages. Audio and video files can support introductions but the editing process is more complex. Independent images and some other forms of learning material are not as suitable for title ‘pages’ – but i strongly suspect more than half the learning materials shared in through call will be document, presentation, or web site.

I guess I’m suggesting that, for relevant materials the following should be assumable: Title, Author, Date (of some relevant kind), Institution, Course (code or name).

There are good and valid debates about what, if any, metadata academics should be asked to create, but there is a more fundamental question about professional self-description and good practice. Our conversation about what metadata is needed and who should create it should start from the premise that basic bibliographic information should be contained within the resource.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting resources should not have ‘title pages’, I just think we need to be clear, before we start talking about metadata, that it is reasonable to expect this type information be there. It’s just good practice

Next Generation Environments

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I was at the JISC Next Generation Environments conference. http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/u-and-i

Much of the day revolved around how university-based users use tools (in particular social/ web2.0 ish tools) and the challenges that they bring to the environment. A few things that I found interesting during the day:

Peter Hartley’s articulation of challenge of using web 2.0 tools in learning and teaching looked at the tensions between authority / control and freedom / expression. These tensions were illustrated in the existence of three concurrent learning spaces, for which the following metaphors were suggested:

  • Formal public controlled (the Museum)
  • Collaborative informal exploratory (the Playground)
  • Personal private exclusive (the Refuge)

These metaphors provided a good discussion point. I like them but I think the playground has too much of an advantage (everyone likes to play…); the museum misses the potential interactivity of formal space (e.g. official fora can be the best place for some types of discussion); and the refuge is too calm/ structured/ isolated to represent private ‘learning’ spaces as such spaces are likely to be tied into wider use of web2.0 tools in other areas of life and anything but a refuge.

Dave Cormier’s presentation (Edtechtalk http://www.edtechtalk.com/) discussed the University of PEI’s Virtual Research Environment (VRE) development. They developed this in response to the challenge of too much knowledge – information overload effect everyone except über geeks who are also really really organised as well. They are working to create virtual spaces for scientific collaboration – specific environments which aim to be:

  • a sacred, dedicated space
  • supports filtering content for relevance
  • is able to offer security (different levels of publicness)
  • provides space for collaborative efforts

Two related observations were:

  • Within this environment the library has a key role – when something is stable and worth keeping the library should be given ‘ownership’ of it in the system. Librarians have the skills to make it findable and sustainable it in the longer term, so let them do their job rather than trying to get the scientists to become experts in another field.
  • There is a need to move the functionality users require into the browser – integrate with academic practice (not add new systems to learn).

An slightly off-topic one: Second life represents the pacman of the virtual environment development

Linda Creanor and Ross Graham offered some reflections on the learner’s experiences; these tied in with ongoing discussion throughout the day. In brief (and without the references offered):

  • Students want a clear distinction between personal and university space (and are at a stage of life were they can keep this distinct in a way that tutors may not be able to)
  • Students want to choose, and personalise tools (and retain control of them)
  • If the university supporting use of tools in course tutors have to be able to be engaged with those tools
  • How do we prepare and support tutors working in this environment? (and give them the space to use their own tools)
  • Podcasts may be suitable for some types of teaching (e.g. kant 101)

StandardConnection – an interesting NSDL project

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StandardConnection:Mapping NSDL Educational Objects to Content Standards.
PHASE II: An Achievement Standards Network Architecture
Standard Connection is a NSDL service project.

http://www.thegateway.org/asn
http://projects.ischool.washington.edu/sasutton/NSDL/StandardConnection/
The short version:

Following on from a project examining automatically matching learning resource descriptions with curriculum components, StandardConnection Phase2 is developing a machine addressable registry and repository of content standards and tools to use it. A content standard may perhaps be equivalent to a national curriculum programme of study in the UK. For example, in fifth year Jimmy will study algebra, one of the modules will be on quadratic equations.

Among other things the tool would allow a user to compare and match syllabi in different school districts or for different exam boards.

The longer version:

During a trip to Seattle I had the opportunity to have a chat with Stuart about some of the projects he’s working on. In the course of our discussion he talked a lot about this current project and noted that, irrespective of all the interesting and useful projects he has worked on, this project will probably be the one that has the biggest impact in the real world. If the automatic tagging works it will certainly be great, but in my opinion what it has already done is quite significant.

The project aims to “define and create:

  1. A machine-addressable repository of state and national organization academic content standards;
  2. A machine-addressable registry of alignments that relate or align those standards to each other;
  3. A cataloging specification using internationally accepted technical standards for metadata tagging for describing and locating NSDL and other resources according to state and national organization academic content standards: and
  4. A set of protocols, schemas, and program interfaces that will enable these services to communicate and resolve queries against the repositories.”

As interesting as the investigation of automatically assigned metadata in phase 1 may have been, the really cool part about this new phase is that they have put together a system that supports machine addressable mappings between different content standards – and they have some 450 such standards already stored.

This supports users if they want to compare and match standards – to translate the example into British terms: how does Kelly’s Higher compare to the first year of Mike’s A-level? And in the longer term this means that teachers dealing with young people switching between schools which follow syllabi from different different courses of study can gain an overview of what they should have studied up to that point.

A real world use Stuart cited related to a difference between a regional and federal standards for a certain grade. In the US, most schools are certified by the state and their syllabi (standards) set by state or district. If they want to receive federal funding however, the pupils progress has to be assessed at different grades (say in their 4th and 8th year) by standardised testing against a federal standard. Looking at one subject area, schools in one district where consistently performing very well against the state standard but poorly against the federal one. The registry supported a detailed comparison of the standards and demonstrated that the teaching was fine – the standards were just out of sync. If the assessment had been held at the end of the 5th year the pupils would have covered the same ground in both standards – they just covered material in a different order. The level of detailed comparison required to carry this out was made significantly easier by the registry.

In a highly mobile society this sort of development should make it much easier for pupils moving between school systems and those trying to teach them.

As an aside: Stuart’s also working on NSDL Registry: Supporting Interoperable Metadata Distribution.