The following paper was produced to act as a background briefing to the Open Scotland Summit , which Cetis is facilitating in collaboration with SQA, Jisc RSC Scotland and the ALT Scotland SIG. The Benefits of Open draws together and summarises key documents and publications relating to all aspects of openness in education. The paper […]
MOOCs and Higher Education: What is next?
I gave a presentation on “MOOCs and Higher Education” at the SCONUL annual conference in Dublin last week. In the presentation, I examined the potential of MOOCs as a disruptive innovation and an emerging technology in higher education, and explored the concept, business model and trends of the MOOC phenomenon. The full presentation is available […]
Inuagural Open Badges (Scotland) Working Group Meeting
Bill Clinton isn’t the only one creating a buzz about the open badges movement at the moment. Perhaps with slightly less coverage than the Clinton initiative, yesterday saw the first (Scottish) open badges working group meeting. Organised by Grainne Hamilton at RSC Scotland, following the success and interest shown at their recent Open Badges Design […]
ePub metadata what gets shown?
One of the issues around eTextBooks is how to describe them, specifically by way of educational metadata in ePub. That’s something that on the face of it shouldn’t be too difficult to address (at least to the extent that we know how to describe any educational resource). One thing that would be useful in demonstrating […]
ALT Scotland SIG Meeting
The ALT Scotland SIG, which both Martin Hawksey and I are involved in, is holding a meeting this week on Thursday the 20th at Glasgow Caledonian University from 10.30 – 15.30. Registration for the event is now closed, however there are still a few places available so if you would like to come along please […]
Meanwhile back in the real world . . .
We’re all very guilty of getting caught up in our “own wee worlds” and sometimes it we all need to just “step away from the computer”. I recently did just that. I had a week’s annual leave, and came back to the usual overflowing in-box. In one sense I felt I’d missed a lot, but […]
Three levels of design and innovation
An electronics company has just won a patent claim against another electronics company. It’s not relevant to this post which companies and what patent were involved, it just served to remind me once again of the different types of innovation that are subject to these patent claims–where there is a patent there is at least […]
What do FutureLearn’s Terms and Conditions say about open content?
ETA If you want to review yesterday’s twitter discussion about FutureLearn’s Terms and Conditions, Martin Hawksey has now set up one of his fabulous TAGSExplorer twitter archives here. The appearance of FutureLearn’s new website caused considerable discussion on twitter this morning. Once everyone had got over the shock of the website’s eye-watering colour scheme, attention […]
An interactive employability event, some notes
Last week at the University of Bolton we put on a workshop for final year students that were about to embark on a job hunt. While the workshop was held in conjunction with the careers advice service and there was chance to give students a hand with practical things such as CV writing and interview […]
IT departments – the institutional fall guy for MOOCs?
(Image from IMDB http://www.imdb.com/media/rm782014464/tt0081859) As Martin Weller pointed out earlier this week there are a growing number of MOOC metaphors being created. As I’ve been following the tweets from today’s “#moocapalooza ” (a hashtag I think invented by David Kernohan) a.k.a. Open and Online Learning making the most of MOOCs and other Models Conference I […]