Twitter story from the Advances in open systems for learning resources workshop, hosted by CETIS as part of the Repository Fringe 2011 conference.
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Category Archives: educational content
IMS Global Learning Consortium announces release of Common Cartridge v1.1
IMS has announced the final release of Common Cartridge v1.1.
According to the press release: “The Common Cartridge standard provides a means for interoperability, reusability, and customization of digital learning content, assessments, collaborative discussion forums, and a diverse set of learning applications. The standard offers both end-users and vendors the possibility of greater choice in both content and platforms. This latest version of Common Cartridge includes support for Basic Learning Tools Interoperability which provides a standard way of integrating rich learning applications or premium content with platforms such as Learning Management Systems, portals, or other systems.”
The standard is available for download from the IMS website.
Design Bash update
Due to holidays etc I’ve been a bit late in reporting back on the Design Bash we held in conjunction with the 2010 European LAMS conference last month at the University of Oxford.
This is the third design bash I’ve been involved in organising, and they’re probably closest in style and structure to an un-conference. There is no pre-set agenda and the main aim of the day is to foster meaningful extended dialogue between delegates. In other words, just allowing people to speak to each other. This year, the groups divided along a number of lines. One group spent most of the day discussing the ” critical success factors for curriculum design”. Paul Bartholomew from the T-SPARC project at BCU, helpfully created a mindmap of the discussion.
In contrast to these more cerebral discussions, there were a number of mini-demonstrations of tools and systems including the GLO tool, ldshake, and compendium LD, and wookie. Again links to all the tools are in the available online from the Design Bash Cloudworks site.
James Dalziel demoed a number of new features of the LAMS system such as embedding which many of the delegates were interested in. At last year’s design bash, embedding and previewing of designs was a key theme of many of the discussions, so it was great to see how over the year the discussion has developed into an actual implementation.
Members of the LDSE project team attended and the day provided a great opportunity for the team to discuss and develop potential integrations from others. For example, Bill Olivier and Diana Laurillard had a very fruitful discussion about LDSE using the IDIBL framework that the University of Bolton have developed.
Unlike last year’s event there wasn’t very much activity around sharing of designs, and I’m not sure if that was due to the size of this year’s event – there were quite a few more people in attendance. Or, if it was simply down the the overriding interests of participants this year. If we run the event again next year, we may have a slightly more structured agenda and dedicated demo slots and a slightly more structured technical stream. We did also discuss the possibility of running a similar event online. This is something we may well investigate further, and certainly it has possibilities. The cloudworks site itself does allow for a level of interactivity, however I did notice that there wasn’t as much external contribution this year compared with last. However, again this just maybe down to fact that we had more people there in person.
Overall though, there was very positive feedback from delegates on the day. You can view (comment and contribute too) all the resources from the day from Cloudworks.
EC SIG OER Meeting 27 February
Last Friday the EC SIG met at the OU, Milton Keynes for a really interesting day of presentations and discussion around OER. The meeting was in part timed to to coincide with the JISC OER call and to give an overview of some current developments in OER from a range of perspectives from the institutional to the individual.
Andy Lane and Patrick McAndrew started the day with an overview of institutional impact of the OpenLearn project. One of the key institutional barriers was (unsurprisingly) trying get over the assumption that providing open content wasn’t “giving away the family silver” and the fear of not being able to control what others might do with your content. OpenLearn has fundamentally been about de-bunking these perceptions and illustrating how making content open can actually bring about a range of benefits to the institution. The ethos of the OpenLearn project has been to enhance the student experience and the student, not the institution has central to all developments. In terms of institutional benefit, perhaps the most significant one is that there is now a clear trail showing that a significant number of openlearn students do actually go on to register for a fee paying course.
Sarah Darnley, from the University of Derby gave an overview of the POCKET project which is using OpenLearn materials and repurposing/repackaging then for their institutional VLE. They are also creating new materials and putting them into openlearn. Russell Stannard, University of Westminster rounded off the morning’s presentations with his fascinating presentation of his multimedia training videos. To quote Patrick McAndrew Russell is a bit of a ‘teacherpreneur’. During teaching of his multimedia course Russell saw that it would easier for him to create short training videos of various software packages which students could access at anytime thus freeing up actual class time. Russell explained how the fact that his site was high in google rankings has led a huge number of visits and again increased interest in the MSc he teaches on. Although not conceived as an OER project, this is a great example of how just “putting stuff out-there” can increase motivation/resources for existing students and bring in more. However I do wonder as Russell starts producing more teaching resources to go with his videos and his institution get more involved how open he will be able to keep things.
The afternoon session started with Liam Earney of the CASPER project sharing the experiences of the RePRODUCE programme. CASPER has recently surveyed to projects to find out their experiences dealing with copyright and IPR issues when repurposing material. A key finding is that the within the HE sector there is generally an absence of rights statements and only 14% of the projects found it easy to clear copyright. Ambiguity abounds within institutions about who/where/what and how of content can be reused. Of course this is a key area for the the upcoming JISC OER call.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in discussion around the call. Four of the programme managers involved were at the meeting and we able to answer questions relating to it. It is important to note the the JISC call is a pilot and is not a means to an end. It will not, and is not trying to solve all the issues around OER, however what it will do is allow the community to continue to explore and move forward with the various technical and IPR/copyright issues in the context of previous experience.
Copies of the presentations from the day are available from the CETIS wiki, and also a great summary of the day is available via Cloudworks ( a big thanks to Patrick McAndrew for pulling this together).
Semantic Technologies in education survey site now available
The next stage of the SemTech project (as reported earlier in Lorna’s blog) is now underway. The team are now conducting an online survey of relevant semantic tools and services. The survey website provides a catalogue of relevant semantic tools and services and information on how they relate to education.
If you have an interest in the use of semantic technologies in teaching and learning, you can register on the site and add any relevant technologies you are using, or add tags to the ones already in documented. As the project is due for completion by the end of February, the project team are looking for feedback by 2 February.
It’s not what you share, but how you share
Scott Leslie has written a reallyinteresting post about some of the issues he has with institutional collaboration projects. I’m sure anyone who has tried to share any kind of “stuff” will find resonance in what he says.
The post is particularly timely for myself and others in CETIS as we are working closely with JISC colleagues who are planning the pilot OER call for next year. This is a major investment by JISC and the HEA with £5million worth of funding being made available.
We have been having extensive discussions around the types of architectures/sharing solutions that should be in place. Hopefully we can avoid the scenarios that Scott describes and allow as flexible an approach as possible, ensuring people can use existing tools and networks and that we don’t re-invent another un-necessary technical layer/network(s). However some decisions need to be made to ensure that any resources funded through the programme can be found and tracked.
We’ll be discussing these issues at the CETIS conference in a couple of weeks at the OER scoping session. If you would like to attend the session and haven’t had an invitation yet, please get in touch. Or just leave any thoughts about what you think here.
Content transcoder demonstration
Earlier in the summer I blogged about the content transcoder project CETIS and Knowlege Integration are developing. The idea is to create a cloudbased service which can convert the most common eLearning content formats.
At the SALTIS meeting yesterday (9 October) Neil and Hana from KI gave a demonstration of a beta version of the transcoder at the SALTIS meeting in Coventry.
Hana uploaded an OU Common Cartridge to the transcoder service, chose what conversion she wanted (in this case Common Cartridge to SCORM) and then the service went to work. She was notified via email with a url where the newly converted package was available for download. The whole process took less than 5 minutes (the network connection was a bit slow).
The project is still in the early phase of development and currently can only convert between convert to/from IMS CP 1.1.4, SCORM 2004 and IMS CC 1.0 however by the end of the project (March 09) the service will offer conversion to/from IMS CP v1.1.3; v1.1.4; v1.2; IMS CC1.0;SCORM 1.2; SCORM 2004. At this stage it looks unlikely that this initial development will be able to include platform specific transforms. However such transforms are possible within service architecture – as ever it’s really just a question of time and resources allocation. As the code is open source maybe someone else will want to pick up on that and develop further or you never know, we may even get a bit more funding to extend the project.
If you are interested in the project and have packages that you would like to convert, please get in touch as we are looking for as many testers of the service as possible. More information on the project is available from the CETIS wiki.
Update from JISC e-Learning programme meeting: open content call on the horizon
At the JISC e-Learning programme earlier this week, an outline of an exciting new call around open content was given by Tish Roberts (Programme Director, eLearning) and David Kernohan (Programme Manager, eLearning). A pilot phase will run next year (managed jointly by JISC and the HEA) and will investigate approaches for individual, disciplines and institutions towards making new (and existing) content open.
More information will be released in the coming weeks from JISC, so watch this space for more information. We are also running a session on open content at this year’s CETIS conference. So if you are interested, sign up for the session.
Some thoughts on the IMS Quarterly meeting
I’ve spent most this week at the IMS Quarterly meeting in Birmingham and thought I’d share a few initial reflections. In contrast to most quarterly meetings this was an open event which had its benefits but some drawbacks (imho) too.
On the up side it was great to see so many people at an IMS meeting. I hadn’t attended a quarterly meeting for over a year so it was great to see old faces, but heartening to see so many new ones too. There did seem to be a real sense of momentum – particularly with regards to the Common Cartridge specification. The real drive for this seems to be coming from the K-12 CC working group who are making demands to extend the profile of the spec from its very limited initial version. They are pushing for major extensions to the QTI profile (it is limited to six question types at the moment) to be included, and are also looking to Learning Design as way to provide curriculum mapping and lesson planning to cartridges.
The schools sector on the whole do seem to be more pragmatic and more focused than our rather more (dare I say self-indulgent) HE mainly research focused community. There also seems to be concurrent rapid development (in context of spec development timescales) in the Tools Interoperability spec with Dr Chuck and his team’s developments in “simple TI” (you can watch the video here)
On the down side, the advertised plugfest was in reality more of a “presentationfest”, which although interesting in parts wasn’t really what I had expected. I was hoping to see more live demos and interoperability testing.
Thursday was billed as a “Summit on Interoperability: Now and Next”. Maybe it was just because I was presentation weary by that point, but I think we missed a bit of an opportunity to have more discussion – particularly in the first half of the day.
It’s nigh on impossible to explain the complexity of the Learning Design specification in half hour slots -as Dai Griffiths pointed out in his elevator pitch “Learning Design is a complex artefact”. Although the Dai and Paul Sharpels from the ReCourse team did a valiant job, as did Fabrizio Giongine from Guinti Labs with his Prolix LD demo; I can’t help thinking that what the community, and in turn perhaps what IMS should be concentrating on is developing a new, robust set of use cases for the specification. Having some really tangible designs rooted in really practice would (imho) make the demoing of tools much more accessible as would starting demos from the point of view of the actual “runnable” view of the design instead of the (complex) editor view. Hopefully some of the resources from the JISC D4L programme can provide some starting points for that.
The strap line for Common Cartridge is “freeing the content” and in the afternoon the demos from David Davies (University of Warwick ) on the use of repositories and RSS in teaching followed by Scott Wilson and Sarah Currier demoing some applications of the SWORD specification for publishing resources in Intralibrary through the Feedforward tool illustrated exactly that. David gave a similar presentation at a SIG meeting last year, and I continue to be impressed by the work David and his colleagues are doing using RSS. SWORD also continues to impresses with every implementation I see.
I hope that IMS are able to build on the new contacts and offers of contributions and collaborations that arose over the week, and that they organise some more open meetings in the future. Of course the real highlight of the week was learning to uÊop Çpısdn ÇʇıɹÊ
New (Facebook) group for anyone interested in pedagogic planners
As part of the past two LAMS European conferences, James Dalziel and the LAMS team have provided an opportunity to bring together a group of people with an interest in developing pedagogic planning tools. During each meeting it has become evident that there is a burgeoning community developing around pedagogical planning – not least from JISC with the Phoebe and LPP planning tools. There has also been a general feeling of how can we continue these discussions? So, in an attempt to do just that, I’ve set up a facebook group called Pedagogical Planners. If you or anyone you know is interested in this area, please join the group and share your projects and ideas, events.