developing patterns in technical approaches for open educational resources r. john robertson (1) and...
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Developing patterns in technical approaches for Open Educational Resources
R. John Robertson (1) and Lorna Campbell (1), & Phil Barker (2)Presentation at OER 11, Manchester, May 11th 2011
1 Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement, University of Strathclyde,
2 Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Individual Images in this presentation may have different licences .
overview
• Some Context• Big and Little OER• Global Patterns• UKOER Patterns• Possible Trends
Context: JISC CETIS• JISC CETIS is a JISC
Innovation Support Centre. We provide advice to the UK Higher and Post-16 Education sectors on the development and use of educational technology and standards through: – participating in standards
bodies – providing community forums for
sharing experience about educational technologies and interoperability standards
– providing strategic advice to JISC and supporting JISC development programmes
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Context: UK OER and more
• UKOER programme: Phase 2 of the HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resources (OER) programme runs between August 2010 and August 2011 (£5 million funding)
• Other OER work in the UK and globally as well as other related technical developments
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Is there a sustainable and consistently successful technical approach to sharing
OER?
• Option A– Yes, use your
(institutional) repository and /or VLE
• Option B– Yes, use your
(personal) blog
Big and Little OER
• In the wider OER community there are two distinct approaches to sharing open content for education.
• Weller characterises these as Big and Little OER (http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2009/12/the-politics-of-oer.html)
Big and Little OER
• Big OER– Institutional effort– Often polished and high
quality– High reputation– Technical approach likely
to use centrally managed system; favours CMS/VLE/Repository
• Little OER– Individual effort– Often ‘as is’ or ‘work in
progress’– Personal and word of
mouth reputation – Technical approach likely
to use tools to hand which author can use; likely blogs, wikis, slideshare
Global patterns – ‘Big’
• Emergence of ‘support’ communities and beginning of consideration of accreditation (e.g. OpenStudy for OpenCourseWare; parts of P2PU; OERU)– Approach is web scale
hosted communities creating or supporting given courses
Global patterns – ‘Big’
• Federal US Government Initiatives around open content– Focus on sharing of content
to meet workforce needs– Interest in usage data –
Learning Registry work to aggregate and share data to support discovery services
– Point of interest: as yet unknown how particular discovery services deal with packaged content
Global patterns – ‘Big’
• OpenTextBooks– US and wider interest in
‘tangible’ OER– Services like
Flatworldknowledge (semi-commercial model) offering online adapt your own book tools
– But some initiatives such as opencourselibrary taking a very flexible technical approach
Global Patterns ‘Little’
• Use of blogs, YouTube, and other platforms to share resources and make tools– Professional networks
• OL Daily
– OSS• Open Attribute
Global Patterns ‘Little’
• Open Courses like:– Ds106 and other MOOCs
• Using existing tools• # and blogs• Innovative outputs,
process, and forms of feedback and assessment. Infrastructure not innovative
Middle OER?
• Initiatives like UKOER– model of institutional
support to allow individuals to release OER using institutional tools
– model of Institutional release of OER using 3rd party tools
Phase 1 technical overview
Phase 2 technical overview
Provisional differences in UKOER 1 &2
• Talking about tech issues less (Strand A+B)
• More concentration of platform and standards choices
• Many projects less concerned with tech choices – using whatever is to hand– In particular increased use of
institutionally supported systems
• Slight shift towards wordpress, drupal, rss– Lower use of externally hosted
web 2.0 platforms
• Less content creation (in scope of call)– Less focus on file format
• Much less use of QTI• Outside of collections strand
very little technical development
• Collection projects tending to build destination sites
• Development in collections stand largely around existing platforms not form scratch
Observations from OER hackday & bids
• What people worked on:– Wordpress widgets– 2 different Bookmarking
tools– Google CSE based course
catalogue– A windows install packager
for OERbit (drupal based OER production tool)
– Extracting paradata (attention metadata) from mediawiki
– Data visualisations
• Patterns– Mostly built in existing
tools and platforms– Lots of ideas that we didn’t
have time to work on
• Mini-projects– Open process– 2 bids funded
• a focus on users• online tools – bookmarking
and citation
Provisional Trends
• Beginning to see more examples of online and distributed educational or edu support opportunities outside of institutions or alongside course offerings – Web scale– Destination more than
‘sharing’
Provisional Trends
• OER release projects rightly focusing on content rather than dissemination mechanisms
• Accreditation is the coming challenge – work on badges and eportfolios likely to be of growing interest
Strategic Balance
• If you want to release content stick with safe technical choices– Plenty of existing tools;
whether taking a big or little OER approach, use what you already have or have access too
• If you want to innovate (increasingly outside of most institutional work)– Think web scale
• Xpert...
– Build on existing platforms where possible
• WordPress• Wikis• Office tools
Sustainability• Funded projects
– Tech innovation not sustainable as such but :
• funded to prove possible lower cost alternatives...
• funded to embed or demonstrate infrastructure
• working with existing tools potentially taps into existing community
• Self running projects– Small scale voluntary efforts to
address specific tasks can be very effective
• Open Attribute• working with existing tools can utilise
existing community
Questions
• http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/topic/oer
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