OEPS Update

The event began with an update from the OEPS Project team outlining their progress in supporting a network of open education practitioners, developing a Scottish open education hub, collating case studies and supporting the development of new content and practice. There was considerable discussion as to the role of the hub, which has been revised following discussions at the first OEPS forum. Although the hub will facilitate aggregated OER search, it will focus more on being a community hub for open education practice. For a comprehensive update on OEPS progress, the project recently published their first report here: First OEPS Project Report.

 An international perspective on opening educational practices – Laura Czerniewicz

Undoubtedly the highlight of the morning, was Laura Czerniewicz remote presentation from Cape Town on international perspectives on opening educational practices. Laura spoke about how openness and the internet have reconfigured the post traditional education landscape and presented a series of case studies from South Africa. Laura went on to suggest that open education exists in an extremely contested and complex environment. In Africa there has been some scepticism about open education as it is seen as an extension of the commodification of knowledge, however Africa has a strong narrative culture of sharing which can be harnessed to encourage the sharing of open education resources and practice (Jane-Frances Agabu, National Open University of Nigeria). One of the most interesting and challenging points Laura raised in her presentation centred on the legitimacy of piracy as a means of sharing educational content in the face of rising text books costs.

“Is it unethical to want to be educated or is it unethical to charge so much for books? To have to pay that amount when you can’t afford it?”

A valid question indeed.

Towards the end of her talk Laura also discussed the potentially valuable role of open education policy, although she also cautioned:

“Policy is great, but policy without budget can be problematic.”

This is certainly a point I would agree with.  In order to make an impact, policy ideally needs to be backed up by adequate resources and funding, however this also begs the question of how to support unfunded policies that emerge from the community such as the Scottish Open Education Declaration.

The Scottish Open Education Declaration – the way forward

In the afternoon I presented two workshops on future directions for the Scottish Open Education Declaration. The second draft of the Declaration was published by Open Scotland in December 2014, after receiving a small amount of very welcome funding from the OEPS Project. Shortly afterwards, the ALT Scotland SIG forwarded the declaration to Angela Constance, the new Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning.  Although Open Scotland has not been in a position to actively promote and disseminate the declaration recently, primarily due to lack of funding, it was evident from participants at the workshops that there still seems to be real appetite across all sectors of Scottish education to continue taking the Declaration forward. Several participants said that they had found the declaration useful for raising awareness of open education within their own institution and for triggering discussions about open education at policy level. The Scottish Funding Council also appear to see some merit in the Declaration and during discussions with workshop participants and members of both Open Scotland and the OEPS Project, we were able to identify several steps to take the Declaration forward.

Evidencing the Declaration

While the Declaration may have some value as an aspirational statement of intent, clearly it will carry considerably more weight if each point can be evidenced by examples of existing practice in Scotland and further afield.   Examples of existing practice could be crowd sourced and collected via the Declaration Comment Press site and collated from evidence gathered by the OEPS Project.

Evidence of Impact

In order to highlight the value of both open education and the Declaration at government level it would be useful to be able to provide evidence of positive impact.  Assessing the impact of open education initiatives is always difficult as quantitative measures have a tendency to miss the bigger picture and, arguably, the ethos of open education.  Gathering qualitative user stories and case studies is likely to be a more useful way to provide evidence of the impact of the Declaration. The case studies being collated by the OEPS Project will hopefully be of particular value here, but continued efforts should be made to gather user stories from across the sector.

Harmonising the Declaration with current policy

When the first version of the Declaration was drafted in early 2014, we made a conscious effort to ensure that it tied in with Scottish Government policies and strategic objectives. Clearly the policy landscape has changed over the last twelve months and it would be useful to revisit the Declaration to ensure that it supports current policy particularly with regard of formal and informal learning, social inclusion and widening access.

Engaging Universities Scotland

A number of bodies and agencies have been identified that could potentially provide valuable support for the Declaration, one of which is Universities Scotland. Although an encouraging number of university colleagues have already made valuable contributions to the declaration, it would be beneficial to engage senior managers to ensure that open education is supported at policy level across the higher education sector.

Engaging schools, colleges and the third sector

It is important that the Declaration represents all sectors of Scottish education; therefore it is critical that we find routes to engage not just higher education but also schools, colleges and the third sector. We would welcome suggestions from colleagues as to how to raise awareness of the Declaration and encourage engagement with open education across all sectors of Scottish education.

The Scottish Open Education Declaration is an open community draft and we continue to encourage all those with an interest in open education in Scotland and beyond to comment on the document here http://declaration.openscot.net/

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I’m delighted to have been invited to Berlin later this week to give a talk at OERde14 – The Future of Free Educational Materials.   I’ll be talking about a range of contrasting initiatives that have aimed to promote open education policy and practice in Scotland, England and Wales over the last five years, including the UKOER Programme, Open Scotland, OER Wales, the Welsh Open Education Declaration of Intent, the Scottish Open Education Declaration and the Opening Educational Practice in Scotland project. I’ll also be reflecting on the different approaches taken by these initiatives and asking what Germany can learn from the experiences of open education practitioners in the UK.

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“Jorum is a Jisc funded Service for UK Further and Higher Education, to collect and share open educational resources, allowing their reuse and repurposing. Jorum’s free online repository service forms a key part of Jisc’s Learning and Teaching digital content offering. It is the first port of call for thousands of resources, all shared and created by those who teach or have been inspired in the FE and HE and professional skills community.”

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

The Jorum LRMI implementation project began in September 2013 and work is ongoing as the platform develops. Jorum is a DSpace repository containing a wide range of educational resources in many different formats, including a considerable volume of IMS Content Packages. The repository contains approximately 16,000+ resources, most of which are openly licensed. Jorum uses a combination of LOM, DC, LRMI, Jorum metadata, plus custom fields for different collection ‘windows’. LRMI properties are crosswalked to LOM education fields.

Jorum search returns page

Implementing LRMI in Jorum presented something of a challenge to the project team as DSpace only allows metadata to be added to ‘items’ which are collections of individual files.  Metadata can not be applied at the file level, e.g. an html page within a content package, and there is no way to add microdata to an individual page. If Jorum ingests a resource that already includes LRMI it can be cross walked to map to the LOM fields, however if a content package contains multiple pages that are marked up with LRMI it is difficult to extract this data as there is nowhere to store it in DSpace.  In addition, in order to enable a search engine to access a full set of LRMI metadata it is necessary to generate a page containing the LRMI which the search engine can hit. The default page generated by DSpace only includes title, author and description. To generate a page with a richer set of metadata it is necessary to create a custom theme, which is a non trivial task.

Jorum resource page

Despite the technical difficulty of implementing LRMI in DSpace, the Jorum project has made good progress and the team have plans for further development in this area including implementing the new Schema.org License property, implementing the alignmentObject and aligning it to the UK higher education Joint Academic Subject Coding Scheme.  The project team also plan to build a Google Custom Search engine to demonstrate how Jorum LRMI metadata can be surfaced.

Jorum has implemented the following LRMI properties and types, though this is dependent on what metadata has been supplied for each resource.

• educationalAlignment: plan to implement in the future
• educationalUse: yes,
• timeRequired: yes
• typicalAgeRange: no
• interactivityType: yes
• learningResourceType: yes
• useRightsUrl: no, but plan to implement License property

The Jorum project team have not yet shared their LRMI metadata with the Learning Registry as they are waiting to upgrade their platform to DSpace 4.0 before taking this implementation forward as DSpace 4.0 includes an upgraded OAI PMH interface providing a good flexible way to generate metadata from different schema.  It should be noted that Jorum have already undertaken a successful Learning Registry implementation project, the Jisc funded JLeRN Experiment ( which successfully built a Learning Registry node in the UK and developed a number of prototype services for LR ingest and querying. The same developer responsible for the JLeRN implementation has been commissioned to undertake the Jorum LRMI implementation and this work will be taken forward once the upgrade to DSpace 4.0 is complete.

Links

Jorum
Jorum Case Study Questionnaire
Jorum Blog: Implementing the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) in Jorum

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]]> http://lornamcampbell.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/reusing-open-resources-learning-in-open-networks-for-work-life-and-education/feed/ 0 http://lornamcampbell.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/open-education-open-scotland-report-presentations/ http://lornamcampbell.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/open-education-open-scotland-report-presentations/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:38:20 +0000 http://lornamcampbell.wordpress.com/?p=546 (Originally posted at Open Scotland) Last week the ALT Scotland Special Interest Group hosted the second Open Scotland event, Open Education, Open Scotland at the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh.  This free and open event was attended by sixty colleagues, and speakers represented every sector of Scottish education including schools, further education, higher education and government. A […]

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]]> (Originally posted at Open Scotland)

Last week the ALT Scotland Special Interest Group hosted the second Open Scotland event, Open Education, Open Scotland at the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh.  This free and open event was attended by sixty colleagues, and speakers represented every sector of Scottish education including schools, further education, higher education and government.

The post Open Education, Open Scotland – report & presentations appeared first on Cetis Blogs - expert commentary on educational technology.

]]> http://lornamcampbell.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/open-education-open-scotland-report-presentations/feed/ 0