Category Archives: ukoer

An OER manifesto in twenty minutes

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A brief rapid response to @Tore ‘s request for a ten point manifesto on OER (& ok it was 25 minutes)

Andy Powell makes the key point: “@tore open, open, open, open, open, open, open, open, open, open – no need to mention ‘e’ or ‘r’ #nordlet” RE http://bit.ly/nwgIYE

But if I was writing a manifesto on OER it would start with/ cover some of this:

  1. openness is a way of working / state of mind not a legal distinction
  2. openness needs to be integrated into your way of working retrofitting is too expensive
  3. value of open is potentially greater than the value of closed
  4. open content affords new forms of scholarship and enterprise
  5. stop having to ask permission: remove barriers with open licensing
  6. use a common open license or don’t bother (lawyers read licences, users and machines don’t)
  7. you need a good reason to keep publicly funded work closed
  8. open content should allow you to build commercial services if you want
  9. open content shifts the $ focus onto what is really valuable: expertise, support, and ‘accreditation’ [for various dftns]
  10. open content has the potential to improve access to education (and consequently benefit society)

I’d also want to say something about

  1. openness does have costs – budget for them [edit (for clarity): costs here are not just £$ costs]
  2. you don’t have to be open all the time with everything – mixed economies may be practical
  3. the transition to openness is unsettling
  4. the (re)development of new business models, organisations, and practices challenges existing business models, organisations, and practices

The above is written without appropriate sources and without consulting existing manifestos but as an exercise in trying to quickly capture what I’ve absorbed and thought working in the OER community. If I’ve reproduced your work without realising it please comment ;-)  Doubtless a more considered version would look a bit different but as a discussion point in this amount of time that’s what I’d throw into the ring.

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.

OER Hackday: initial reflections

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On Thursday and Friday CETIS and UKOLN ran OERHack

Wordle: OERhack1

last time I counted we had a little over 250 tweets.

Once we take ‘OERHack’ and RT out of the picture we see:

Wordle: Oerhack 3

250 tweets isn’t that many for 2 days and ~40 people but that’s cause everyone was busy

Beforehand the event we had some discussions on blogs.

OER Hack day Wiki

Ideas that we outlined but didn’t develop fully:

  • PORSCHE thoughts
  • Document Import/Export Service
  • OER Playlist picker
  • Additions to OERbit
  • Prototyping a new OERca

Things that got hacked (and more or less documented)

  • Extend the utility of WordPress as a host / presentation vehicle for OER collections.
  • Bookmarking tools for OER
  • Generating Paradata from mediawiki pages
  • Hacking a Google CSE for course directories
  • Metadata Extraction Tools
  • SWORD desktop app
  • Email-based deposit plugin for SWORD
  • JS widget to Wookie widget (Jorum and OER Recommender)

These are described in more detail on the wiki as well as some notes about other things we tested and a useful list of wordpress plugins for learning resources. A fuller write-up about the event will be forthcoming but we (CETIS OERTIG, UKOLN DEVCSI, and everyone else) had a productive, fun, and busy two days.

workflow and deposit tools for learning materials

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A while back I reported on a workshop discussion about developing SWORD deposit tool for e-learning – a discussion that was useful but veered towards developing much more than a deposit tool. At the time our short list of key features was:

  • richer user profiles both for depositors and users
  • resources to include a link to the source/ master object
  • import asset plus usage info (such as which courses it’s used for) from VLE
  • import asset plus usage info (such as comments and tags) from Web 2 tools
  • need support for instituional management and release of assets

The other key feature for deposit tools which we wondered about was the possibility of tools recording ongoing interaction between content and users and what this might enable. At the time not much developed from that discussion but a year and a bit later it’s interesting to see elements of that discussion are (completely independently) coming to the fore in other initiatives.

Firstly there’s the work JISC has funded to develop the SWORD specification to

” push the standard towards supporting a full deposit lifecycle for all types of scholarly systems by specifying and implementing update, retrieve and delete extensions to the specification. This will enable these systems to be integrated into a broader range of other systems within the scholarly infrastructure, by supporting an increased range of behaviours and use cases. (http://swordapp.org/category/sword2/)”

Admittedly the development focused on scholarly works but extending the profile to support CRUD functionality and ongoing interaction around content and use of content between users and repository is an important step towards richer tools and services.

Then there’s the work Nick Sheppard has been doing with the ACEREP project looking at multiple deposit (and search) of learning materials with sword and the joys of trying this across repositories using various combinations and profiles of of IMS CP, METS, LOM and DC. I look forward to seeing how this project works out;I’d write more but Nick does a better job of explaining the details than I could and I expect that this project will produce one of the first SWORD-based deposit tools specifically for learning materials.

And there’s also an interest from the UKOER Ripple project at Oxford in exploring a possible use or extension of the OERca tool from Open Michigan . I want to provide a little more detail about this option because I think it’s the next step beyond a simple deposit tool and a step toward an interactive tool.

I first saw some of the details of the OERca tool last summer and got a trial account on Open Michigan’s test server – it is a workflow tool for managing basic metadata copyright clearance and licensing. The basic approach is that content is uploaded, assigned basic metadata and each component part (eg images in a powerpoint) is identified and flagged for rights clearance. The interface has a clear mechanism for assigning content to courses, work to users (dscribes), tracking the clearance progress of component parts of content, and replacing component images for which the rights aren’t clear. In a sense it’s a simple rights focused workflow tool but as Ripple point out it’s perhaps four fifths of the way to being  a deposit tools for learning materials, more than that as a concept -it is a step towards the ‘plug and play’ environment Ripple are thinking of.

Here’s an example of OERca in action from Open Michigan’s YouTube channel.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwkfVUjsm1c[/youtube]

OERca is open source software and I’d like to see it hacked at the OERTIG/ CETIS & UKOLN Hackday but I’ll note that [as I understand it ] Open Michigan have pointed out that as a tool OERca probably needs a rewrite prior to the addition of more functionality. So I hope that if we’re going to play with it we can coordinate a little with Open Michigan and think about how to work in the same direction.

considering OAI-PMH

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OAI-PMH is a odd thing:

  • a protocol almost universally implemented in repositories and consequently (usually) publishing metadata about repository contents to the world
  • a protocol frequently reviled by anyone trying to aggregate feeds from different repositories and build discovery tools and services on top of that aggregate.

I’m not going to repeat OAI-PMH’s problems in detail (PERX, the experience of the NSDL with metadata quality, Andy Powell, Jim Downing and many others have done that), suffice to say their are issues about how protocol was implemented by software, how it is used by metadata creators, and how not web-friendly it is and niche it remains.

However,  I realised recently that I’d begun to think that it must be better by now – surely the teething problems are done with – implementations more mature, record quality better, and aggregation more stable. This is, in part, because it remains the standard for sharing repository metadata and because in a number of settings it works well – there are plenty of communities using it to establish and provide services either by creating ‘closed’ controlled conditions through communally enforced ways of recording information and application profiles, guidelines and ‘political’ agreements in additional to the protocol or by creating tools that simply hack their way around whatever data they get and offer good enough services.

So it was with interest that I picked up on a discussion on twitter about what’s wrong with OAI-PMH and an upcoming paper on using Atom .[edit: I’m updating this list with fragments of conversation about OAI-PMH if I see them, and the odd link or two] It’s not the first time I’ve caught fragments of conversations on the use of feeds – for example the earlier RSS and repositories discussion.

There are a slew of issues around trying to standardise feed types (as we discovered in the discussions organised around RSS as a possible metadata deposit mechanism). See for example Feed Deposit , OER, RSS, and JorumOpen , and the two later review articles (1 , 2) as well as the email list discussions ). Given the increasing use of RSS or Atom in some of the OER discovery tools, the work listed above, and the wider promotion of it in the UKOER pilot projects, why am I so interested in this discussion about OAI-PMH and about another effort to use Atom/ RSS?

I’m happy to see this debate crop up again in the wider (library) repository community for two reasons:

1) perhaps obviously it reaffirms the issues with OAI-PMH, that they haven’t changed, and the possibilities RSS/Atom offers,

2) more importantly it’s bringing the discussion about the feeds produced by repositories into the library/ scholarly works communities. Like it or not those are the communities who are most using repositories and the communities who can to some degree shape the development of repository software and specifications. Few repository platforms natively support much customisation of the feeds they produce and until the wider repository community wants that type of functionality or control and begins to think how update or move beyond OAI-PMH* there’s little reason for repository developers to work on the problem.

Without those changes anyone wanting to manage learning materials in a repository still has to hack their own fixes, build their own repository – or not use repositories (but that’s another question).

*I should note: I like OAI-PMH – I can play with in a browser, repository explorer is a good tool, and using OAI-PMH I can get and interact with someone else’s ‘raw’ metadata. – I’m just no longer convinced it’s the right tool to share metadata – in part by how few successful discovery services there are which use it.

Don’t forget the public domain

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Context

As OERTIG and the discussion about the oer hackday kicks off on the oer-discuss list, here’s a quick note about one small thing that might be of interest to anyone developing/hacking oer discovery tools – it’s probably too minor to get into at the hackday but – you should look at how the tool handles public domain materials.

An aside during a Learning Registry discussion mentioned the interaction between public domain [rights] and creative commons licensing (I think it was Steve Midgley and Nathan Yargler) – the LR specification needs to deal with public domain materials as much of the content produced by the US Federal government is in the public domain. In a UKOER context his got me thinking about how discovery services deal with the public domain. This isn’t something that crops up a lot at the minute as it’s actually quite hard to put stuff into the public domain but it is something which is an issue and will crop up eventually.

As part of Scott Wilson’s work on the Ensemble demonstrator and our more general CETIS support for  UKOER we’ve provided some advice about handling licence info in feeds so that discovery services can easily use it to support additional features.

I had a brief chat with the OER IPR Support folk yesterday to help my understanding of public domain (rights) and licensing and from a category purist’s point of view it’s going to be a bit of a mess – but one with a hack. The following is though only my understanding and IANAL.

Challenge

the basic issue is -there’s lots of good tools offer support for restricting your search to CC-licensed content but how do they handle Public Domain stuff?

  • Creative Commons is a license the owner can apply to copyrighted works to extended permissions around their use.
  • Public domain is a rights status. As I understand it public domain stuff cannot be licensed as it no longer has an ‘owner’.

A complication – CC0 is a way of of licensing content that you own which is still in copyright to permit use as if it were in the public domain. It does not put something into the public domain. [Update: CC0 is  waiver rather than a license , but one that defaults to the most permissive license if waiver doesn’t apply – I have no idea if a waiver is legally a license or a change in rights status]

The Hack…

Thankfully Creative Commons have come up with one way to address this issue-  the Public Domain Mark.

Public Domain Mark uses this form of description  <a rel=”license” href=”http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/”>

Technically I have to say it’s a hack (PD is rights not license and I don’t think you can ‘license’ PD), but  rel=”license” or the equivalent is where someone will look for this information and given how badly dc: rights and dc: license are used i don’t think anyone has much justification for complaining about it too much…

The challenge for developers is when they support searches that support usage rights don’t forget to code in CC0 and Public Domain.

Open Education and OER is like …?

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One of the interesting things about CETIS10 and OpenEd10 was seeing and hearing the different models and metaphors around Open Education and OER Initiatives. After a while though, it became clear that not only are there an abundance of metaphors and models – some of which inspire seemingly unquestioning adherence while others appear to have become clichéd already – but they are also applied a little haphazardly and there is rarely any consideration of how they do not apply, or what the limits and drawbacks of a given model or metaphor are. [edit: for a sample discussion please see Lorna’s post from CETIS10]

As the list of examples below indicates there is a great deal of confusion around the use of models and metaphors and it is often not clear if a particular model is intended to offer an business case, an analogy, or simply be inspirational. In what follows I’d like to offer some caricatures of these models and metaphors as a starting point for discussion. No criticism or critique of the potential relevancy of these models and metaphors themselves is intended – I’d like to provoke a little thought about their use… [and try to add relevant comments into the discussion and images if i get a chance (or any are suggested); i’ll note that i’ve been OSS development has a fair few issues highlighted – it’s probably one of the more developed and therefore easiest to question ]

Some models and metaphors:

  • The Music Industry
    • usually this seems to be talking about the free/ cheap music model with profits being made on concerts and swag.
    • model benefits: make money from related stuff give content away for free
    • model drawbacks: will the swag pay for the content? will they want your swag?
    • metaphor benefits: educators want to be rockstars – right?
    • metaphor drawbacks: established successful bands and internet-found wonder children only?
  • Open Source Software Development
    • via @scottbw “2 different models: for individuals as contributor to OSS (e.g. CLAs) -> little oer; open development process -> big OER” [there was a much wider discussion of this at the Open Innovation session at CETIS10 ] See also Andreas Meiszner “The Emergence of Free / Open Courses – Lessons from the Open Source
      Movement      ” [which i’ve not read yet]
    • model benefits: some highly successful software developed in this way, motivates lots of volunteer effort, community recognition and reward possible, added value services, highly distributed
    • model drawbacks: failure rate? (what this means may vary); often those who contribute time are well paid by related jobs so they’ve got the time (and time investment may help job) – this is not true for education outside of this domain; student participation may rapidly veer towards survival of the fittest; possibly intense competition and elitism?
    • metaphor benefits: appeals to ed tech developers, easy to point to success
    • metaphor drawbacks: very geeky; not obviously about education/ students
  • Open Access Initiatives
    • Open access is a relatively established way to share open content (research articles) in a university context
    • model benefits: about sharing open content, involves academics and librarians, increasingly backed by institutions
    • model drawbacks: research articles and learning materials are very different; articles have a known longevity and value to university; the systems and procedures for open access have a link to citation rates, research funding and by extension the RAE and related metrics. Success of Open Access is patchy& not yet a given.
    • metaphor benefits: supports clear message – ‘it’s good to share’ & ‘open licenses promote use/reuse’
    • metaphor drawbacks: the danger of implication that tools, process, and related issues are sufficiently similar that what has worked for OA should/ will work for OER
  • The Shop Window/ Loss Leader
    • Display and/or give away some of your content to entice students to study at your university
    • model benefits: showcase the learning experience offered through free samples; can attract more students and may support retention of them
    • model drawbacks: others might use your content or your content may put students off.
    • metaphor benefits: the ideal of public display and loss leader is demonstrably effective in other contexts so it’s may appeal
    • metaphor drawbacks: implicit focus on stuff/content not process. Commodifies education?
  • The Free Market
    • Used in a couple of ways: either in a similar manner to the ‘loss leader’ i.e.  OER provides a competitive advantage or OER providers compete and the best open content rises to the top
    • model benefits: will appeal to some institutions and organisations. reflects state of competition between  institutions
    • model drawbacks: will put many academics off. unclear if there is a OER market, and the impact of OER on wider HE market likely to only be a factor within certain limits/ in certain sections of the ‘market’
    • metaphor benefits: may be seen as realistic
    • metaphor drawbacks: may be seen as negative view; commodifies education?
  • The Commune
    • Academics would do what they do anyway; a sustainable cooperative (local or distributed) is a possibility
    • model benefits: offers sustainability through changing paradigms
    • model drawbacks: does it offer much by way of job security or the ability to get a mortgage?
    • metaphor benefits: appeals to some classic ideals about teaching and/or political structure
    • metaphor drawbacks: may be treated with suspicion; may implicitly raise questions about individual academic recognition
  • The Charity
    • A benefactor pays for the release of OER or the running of programme / institution
    • model benefits: an approach that has kickstarted a lot of OER initiatives; there are numbers of foundations interested in the area
    • model drawbacks: many funders want to move beyond the model of paying for content release; ongoing funding unreliable and only for some
    • metaphor benefits: easily understood, one approach to education should be free
    • metaphor drawbacks: underlying question is it really free/ open/ unbiased?
  • The Lifetime Members’ Plan
    • Students/ alumni pay an annual fee to an institution; get degree and ongoing access to courses/ credit/ CPD)
    • model benefits: ongoing income; fits with promotion of  lifelong learning and university involvement in professional training
    • model drawbacks: does it create enough revenue to pay for courses; does it interfere with running more lucrative professional training opportunities
    • metaphor benefits: clear, fits with alumni relations, comparable services already offered (sports club or library access etc.)
    • metaphor drawbacks: perhaps quite culturally specific, unclear value to student
  • The Cute Kitten
    • OER are like cute kittens everyone likes them
    • model benefits: makes point about costs of free
    • model drawbacks: for OER costs are before not after realease; for Open Ed is the kitten too transactional?
    • metaphor benefits: internet friendly, easy to see appeal and costs associated
    • metaphor drawbacks: they’re not, costs also likely to be more start up than ongoing
  • The Reformation
    • OER is revolutionising education like the reformation changed the church/ western society
    • model benefits: clear picture of systemic radical change with unintended consequences sparked by  a few individuals.
    • model drawbacks: not exactly clear or uncontentious outcomes; parallel somewhat arbitrary (? ok I was a church historian and it makes me grimace).
    • metaphor benefits: many people will have some familiarity with it and it conveys systemic change
    • metaphor drawbacks: will put some people off, agreement about what metaphor means unlikely (see previous comment)
    • [as an aside I think there are some interesting questions around what models of distributed education arose around in this historical context but that’s another post]
  • The Internet
    • The internet has revolutionised the world and made lots of new things possible it can revolutionise education
    • model benefits: lots of things can happen at scale and in a distributed manner, freemium possibilities, volunteerism
    • model drawbacks: danger of reducing education to content; do interaction opportunities favour the ‘strong’ and those who know what they want to do?
    • metaphor benefits: everyone know the internet has changed many of the day to day processes of life, ‘internet’ting education seems like the next logical step
    • metaphor drawbacks: the metaphor is perhaps too vague to be useful.
  • The Home Brew (ok I made this one up for DIYU)
    • a lot of talk around the DIYU type of idea, self-regualted self-taught learners picking up content, support, and assessment as they need and can afford
    • model benefits: lots of pieces loosely joined if one piece drops out it can be substituted; can be customised for specific contexts
    • model drawbacks: accreditation and assessment parts of the model are uninvented/ untried; unclear why OER would continue to be released and questions around commercial use.
    • metaphor benefits: flexible, free, independent
    • metaphor drawbacks: value unknown, what benefit to OER creator?

This really only a first pass at thinking this through and it’s not really meant to be too serious, but there’s something about how we throw models and metaphors around that’s worth thinking about.

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.

Notes from the web: badges, governance, and opentextbooks

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I’ll be honest and admit that these are the things I planned on blogging about last week, but time got away from me and I had a few days of vacation this week so this is perhaps a brief reminder of some of the interesting things other people pointed out to me last week.

Free to Learn Guide by Hal Plotkin

I heard Hal Plotkin speak at OCWC10 and it was clear that he was passionately involved in promoting the uptake of OER and was seeking to do so through shaping policy as well as practice. It’s great to see him create and release this guide to to OER for those involved in the governance side of education (it’s US-focused but certainly a useful point of reference in other contexts).

Badges

At the fringe event Matt Jukes organised before UKOER, a presentation from P2PU led to fragments of interesting discussion around badges and peer assessment and the thornier issue of accreditation. It’s great to see that P2PU are looking at badges some more part 1 and part 2 and it’ll be interesting to hear a bit more about that work at the Drumbeat Festival.

OpenCourseLibrary and Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)

I’ve been thinking a little about open textbooks as one approach to reuse some of the content released under UKOER – although funded development of open textbooks is something that seem to have largely passed the UK by thus far (in perhaps a striking parallel to the relative lack of Open Access journals started in the UK). It was encouraging to come across two US initiatives and a related global one: Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources the OpenCourseLibrary initiative in Washington State. I’ve not looked into the projects in too much detail but open textbooks do present one compelling use for granular OER content typically produced by UKOER projects.

Babelona

Over on the Open Nottingham blogs, Pat Lockley (XPERT/ XERTE) has been outlining his emerging approach to metadata http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/learningtechnology/2010/10/05/babelona-the-tower-of/. There’s some of this I want to say has been tried before but knowing Pat I suspect that his plans may involve more of a skilled hack that might work well enough rather than more careful precision that won’t scale – so I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Other stuff I need to read soon:

Libraries and OERs: Survey results and preprint

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Thank you to all of you who replied to the survey. The results were interesting and, although the initial analysis is done and the paper submitted, I’m aware that there’s a lot of analysis that I’ve not done – hopefully not, yet, done.

Here are a few of the outputs from the survey:

  • The preprint of my paper for Open Ed is available in Strathclyde’s repository and (as an experiment) on Slideshare.
  • The annonymised survey data is available as a Google spreadsheet
  • Some expressions of interest in taking the work further – I’ll contact those who have expressed interest to figure out a way to take this forward that will allow us to coordinate our respective work in this area.

A few highlights…

Library involvement in OER release

Library involvement in OER release

Library involvement in OER use

Library involvement in OER use

Involvement of librarians in OER use

Involvement of librarians in OER use

Reported current involvement of libraries in OER initiatives

Reported current involvement of libraries in OER initiatives