Tag Archives: cetis

Learning Resource Metadata Initiative Webinar

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Later this week my colleague Phil Barker and I will be giving a webinar on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) as part of the ASIS&T DCMI webinar series.  The webinar takes place on Wednesday 19th at 15.00 UTC and you can register here.  Registration costs $25 and a recording of the webinar will be made freely available after the event.

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) is a collaborative initiative that aims to make it easier for teachers and learners to find educational materials through major search engines and specialized resource discovery services. The approach taken by LRMI is to extend the schema.org ontology so that educationally significant characteristics and relationships can be expressed. In this webinar, Phil Barker and Lorna M. Campbell of Cetis will introduce schema.org and present the background to LRMI, its aims and objectives, and who is involved in achieving them. The webinar will outline the technical aspects of the LRMI specification, describe some example implementations and demonstrate how the discoverability of learning resources may be enhanced. Phil and Lorna will present the latest developments in LRMI implementation, drawing on an analysis of its use by a range of open educational resource repositories and aggregators, and will report on the potential of LRMI to enhance education search and discovery services. Whereas the development of LRMI has been inspired by schema.org, the webinar will also include discussion of whether LRMI has applications beyond those of schema.org.

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EduWiki Conference 2014

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Last Friday I went along to the EduWiki Conference in the distractingly beautiful St Leonard’s Hall at the University of Edinburgh. I have to confess to being a bit of a Wikimedia fangirl; I’m not a Wikimedian myself, but I’m a huge fan of Wikimedia’s work in the education domain and I believe Wikimedia has an important role to play, not just in disseminating open educational resources, but also in developing open education practice. This was highlighted by the recent Wikimedia Deutschland OERde14 Conference I went to in Berlin, which brought together over 300* participants from all sectors of German education. This is the first time I’ve managed to get to the EduWiki Conference in the UK and it certainly lived up to expectations.  I’m not going to attempt to summarise the entire conference, but I do want to pick out a few highlights

The Conference was opened by Peter McColl, Rector of the University of Edinburgh and editor of the progressive blog Bright Green. McColl highlighted the venerable tradition of the Commons, describing Wikipedia as a perfect example of the Commons, a resource that we come together to create and which we can all share and use.

The morning keynote was presented by Floor Koudijs, Senior Manager of the Wikipedia Education Program who introduced just a few of the 70 education projects Wikimedia funds world wide. These include Wikipedia School (Athens), which teaches Wikipedia writing to adults as part of the Greek Ministry of Education’s Education for Lifetime programme. Several countries also include Wikipedia editing skills as part of their initial teacher training programmes.

By Tflanagan (WMF), CC BY SA

Floor’s presentation provoked an interesting discussion about the potential importance of Wikipedia in engaging the public with research and demonstrating academic impact. Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the University of Edinburgh suggested that citing open access articles in Wikipedia should result in increased evidence of impact while at the same time helping to change attitudes to Wikipedia in in academia. Toni Sant, Wikimedia UK Education Organiser, added that Research Councils UK are starting to show an interest in Wikipedia and that EduWiki was mentioned positively at the 6th international Conference on Integrity and Plagiarism earlier this year.

Marc Haynes, Wikipedian in Residence at Coleg Cymraeg, spoke about Welsh Wicipedia and Porth Esboniadur, a reference resource for Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol. Training in wiki skills is provided as an ongoing part of Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol’s academic staffing programme. Marc noted that colleagues are not keen on using CC BY SA licenced content due to the perceived difficulty of mixing it with CC BY content.   This is an issue that Cable Green actually addressed on twitter recently, advising that resources that mix licences should state

“Unless otherwise noted, all content in this (content type) is under a CC BY 4.0 license”

Martin Poulter, Jisc’s former Wikimedia Ambassador gave a highly engaging talk about the benefits of “Wikimedia comprehension exercises” to educate colleagues and overcome misconceptions. He then challenged us to locate various tools and useful information, such as quality ratings and translations, around Wikimedia. Even with such a knowledgeable audience, I could hear lots of people commenting, “Ooh! I didn’t know that was there!”

One word sums up Martin Poulter’s experience of promoting the use of wikipedia in education…

Greg Singh, Lecturer in Communications, Media & Culture at the University of Stirling, also touched on Wikimedia misconceptions, telling us that his students often ask ‘Why doesn’t wikimedia act more like amazon?’ – because it’s not a social media platform and it’s not a bookseller!

Cetis’ Brian Kelly and Filip Maljković of Wikimedia Serbia gave a whistlestop tour of Wikimedia projects in the UK and Serbia which I’m not even going to attempt to summarise, but you can find their slides here.

In the afternoon I went along to the “Wiki*edia Projects in Schools” workshop led by Daria Cybulska and featuring thought provoking contributions from John Johnston, Ian Stuart, Ally Crockford and others. Several themes emerged from the workshop including the use of Wikimedia to enhance digital literacy, the possibility of working with Gaelic medium educators to develop Gaelic wikipedia entries for use by teachers and the pros and cons of integrating wikipedia resources with lesson plans. The discussion also drifted into GLAM territory, with several participants mentioning teachers’ fear that they will be caught using licensed content. At this point John Johnston suggested that what we really need is a “wee weans licence” i.e. a licence that allowed children to use content in the course of their education without fear of copyright infringement.  John also advised that we shouldn’t be too ambitious when introducing Wikimedia in schools. Don’t dive straight into editing, start off by demonstrating how to use Wikipedia as a source and how to reuse content with appropriate attribution. Iain also suggested that making Wikipedia available in a closed environment, such as a usb stick or a closed network, might encourage its use in schools. Sadly I had to leave before the workshop ended, but I left participants cheerfully discussing how to harness the power of “love and happiness and guilt-tripping” to promote use of Wikimedia in schools 🙂

I’ve put together a Storify of my tweets from EduWiki here: https://storify.com/LornaMCampbell/eduwiki and Brian Kelly has posted his Storify here: https://storify.com/briankelly/eduwiki-2014-conference

* I’m guessing. I don’t know how many people were actually there but I vaguely remember someone mentioning 300!

Open Education Consortium: Open Education in Scotland

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(Cross posted to Open Scotland)

Last month’s Newsletter from the Open Education Consortium focused on open education in Europe and featured the following article on Open Education in Scotland written by Joe Wilson of SQA and I.  Many thanks to Igor Lesko for inviting us to contribute!

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“The use of technology in our future learning framework will continue to grow and be supported by the growth of open educational resources, providing greater learning opportunities without barriers.”

– Michael Russell, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning

Open Scotland[1], is a cross sector initiative led by the Centre for Education Technology, Interoperability and Standards (Cetis)[2], the Scottish Qualifications Authority[3], the Jisc Regional Support Centre in Scotland[4] and the Association for Learning Technology’s Scotland Special Interest Group[5]. The aim of this unfunded initiative is to raise awareness of all aspects of open education and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education. Scotland has a distinctive and highly regarded tradition of education, however policies to support and embed open education are in their infancy and, to date, there have been no open funding calls to support open education across the sector.

Despite the absence of top down strategic drivers, a considerable number of open education initiatives have emerged across the Scottish education sector including MOOCs[6], OER repositories[7], OER guidelines for staff and students[8], and adoption of Open Badges[9]. Building on these developments, and experiences gained from supporting open education programmes elsewhere in the UK, Open Scotland aims to encourage the sharing of open educational resources, embed open educational practice and lobby for policies that support open education at the national level. In order to achieve these aims Open Scotland has hosted a number of events including the Open Scotland Summit[10], which brought together senior managers, policy makers and key thinkers to explore how openness can help to address key strategic priorities including curriculum change, knowledge transfer, quality assurance, change management and articulation; and Open Education, Open Scotland[11] which provided a platform for practitioners from all sectors of Scottish education to share their experiences of adopting and promoting open education practices.

Inspired by the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration, Open Scotland has also launched the Scottish Open Education Declaration[12], which builds on the principals of the UNESCO declaration, but expands its scope to encompass all aspects of open education practice. The Scottish Open Education Declaration, http://declaration.openscot.net/ is an open community draft, which we encourage all those with a commitment to open education to contribute to and comment on.

In a parallel development to the grassroots Open Scotland initiative, the Scottish Funding Council has allocated £1.27 million to the UK Open University to establish the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project[13], which aims to facilitate best practice in open education in Scotland. The OEPS project launches on the 13th of September and we anticipate that it will engage with other open education initiatives across Scotland. We hope that all those with a commitment to open education can work together to develop Scotland’s unique education offering to support social inclusion and inter-institutional collaboration and sharing, and enhance quality and sustainability.

References

[1] Open Scotland, http://openscot.net
[2] Cetis, http://cetis.ac.uk
[3] Scottish Qualifications Authority, http://sqa.org.uk
[4] Jisc RSC Scotland, http://www.jiscrsc.ac.uk/scotland
[5] ALT Scotland SIG, https://www.alt.ac.uk/get-involved/special-interest-groups/scotland
[6] MOOCs at the University of Edinburgh, http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/online-learning/moocs/moocs
[7] Re:Source, http://resource.blogs.scotcol.ac.uk/
[8] Glasgow Caledonian University Library Guidance on Open Educational Resources, http://www.gcu.ac.uk/library/usingthelibrary/copyright/openeducationalresourcesandlibraryguidance/
[9] Borders College Case study, http://www.rsc-scotland.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/23042013bordersOB.pdf
[10] Open Scotland Summit, http://openscot.net/event-reports/open-scotland-report-and-actions/
[11] Open Education, Open Scotland, http://openscot.net/event-reports/open-education-open-scotland-report-presentations/
[12] Scottish Open Education Declaration, http://declaration.openscot.net
[13] Opening Education Practices in Scotland, http://oepscotland.org/

Thoughts on #OEPSforum14 and the Battle for Open

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(Cross posted to Open Scotland.)

This rather crowded map of open education in Scotland is the product of a brief ten minute brainstorm I took part in at the launch of the Open University’s Opening Education Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project in Edinburgh last week.

open_scot_map_3

Open Education in Scotland
Contributors:  Linda Creanor, Natalie Lafferty, Heather Gibson, Peter Cannell and Lorna M. Campbell

My scribbles may not be very legible, and the geography is questionable, but even if you can’t read the text, this map does give a good impression of the sheer breadth of open education practice already taking place across all sectors of Scottish education. And it also gives a good impression of the significant task facing the OEPS project if they are to effectively engage with existing open education initiatives in Scotland. This is a point that Sheila MacNeill and Joe Wilson have already raised in two thoughtful blog posts (Stuck in the middle with…open and #Oepsforum14 #Openscot Reflections.) Though supportive of the project and enthusiastic about its potential, both Sheila and Joe have raised valid questions about how OEPS plans to support existing open practice in Scotland, and how it will construct a distinctly Scottish narrative of open education.

During a typically thought provoking presentation on The Battle for Open, Martin Weller warned us that if we don’t engage with open education practice now, we’ll be sold a packaged version of what it is. To my mind, engagement with existing open education initiatives in Scotland will be key to the success of the OEPS project. It is critical that the project engages practitioners in creating a Scottish narrative of open education, rather than delivering a packaged alternative.

 I’m not going to attempt to summarise the entire meeting, you can get a good flavour of the event from Sheila and Joe’s blog posts, this storify put together by Heather Gibson of QAA Scotland and Martin Hawksey’s TAGS archive. There are a couple of points I want to reflect on however.

The OEPS Online Hub

One of the objectives of the OEPS project is to build an “online hub to encourage and share best practice in open education”. This hub, which will be based on the OU’s existing OpenLearn Works platform, is being developed by members of the OEPS team based at the OU’s Open Media Unit in Milton Keynes. In a parallel session focused on the hub, we were asked to prioritise user stories and requirements, devised by the project team, from the perspective of practitioners and learners. The group I was part of went a bit off piste with this task and in the process raised some valid questions regarding the role of the hub.   There was some confusion as to the exact nature of the online hub, and whether it was intended to be an OER repository. One participant questioned whether there was a real need for another online repository in Scotland when we already have Jorum and Re:Source, and the uptake of centralised repositories generally is notoriously low. The project team explained that although the hub will aggregate resources from other OER collections and enable users to export content, it is not intended to compete with existing OER repositories such as Jorum and OER Commons, it’s aim is primarily to support a community of open education practitioners. While there was a suggestion that this approach sounded a little bit “if we build it they will come”, it’s reassuring to know that OEPS will be focusing on supporting practitioner communities rather than on building another platform in what is already a very crowded space. Questions were also raised regarding the users stories and requirements drafted by the project team, with one participant asking whether a requirements gathering exercise had been undertaken in Scotland to determine the sector’s specific need for an online hub.

The Thorny Issue of Funding

The second point I want to reflect on is the rather thorny issue of funding, or more precisely, the relationship between funding and open education. This is an issue that Martin Weller touched on during his Battle For Open presentation. Martin pointed out that most battles are about money, and that there is a lot of money at stake in open education. This is certainly a point I would agree with, in some quarters at least. Martin also introduced the concept of “guerrilla research” which he contrasted with traditional research as follows…

guerilla_research

from The Art of Guerilla Research by Martin Weller

While this is an attractive model, (and I <3 Beaker) I can’t help wondering how guerrilla research is supported; after all, it’s hard to “Do research” without funding at some level. And the same applies to open education, we all know that open doesn’t equal free, and that funding is required to support open education practice. Sheila MacNeill has written compellingly on this subject in her earlier blog post Open education practice, luxury item or everyday essential?  I’m not going to re-hash Sheila’s arguments, but I think there are a lots of undercurrents relating to the relationship between openness and funding that we still need to surface.

Which brings me back to the scribbled map at the top of this post. Many of the open education initiatives in Scotland are unfunded, voluntary, or funded on institutional shoestring budgets. It’s commendable that Scottish education has done so much with so little, and perhaps this is what sustainable open education practice looks like, but it does make me wonder how much more could be achieved if funding was available to support open education right across the sector. While it’s hugely encouraging that the Scottish Funding Council has made a significant investment in open education by funding the OEPS project, and I have every confidence that the project team will make a significant contribution to supporting open education practice in Scotland, I can’t help holding on to a glimmer of hope that at some stage in the future SFC will launch an open education funding call that is open to all sectors of Scottish education.

LRMI Implementation Case Study: ISKME OER Commons

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Co-authors & Project Team:   Michelle Brennan, OER Information Services Manager; Lisa Petrides, CEO ISKME.

oer_commons_square_smallerISKME’s OER Commons offers a comprehensive infrastructure and suite of services for educators globally, including groups of curriculum specialists, administrators, content providers, teachers, librarians, and technology and resource decision-makers who seek to implement high quality and adaptable curriculum through the use, evaluation, and improvement of open educational resources (OER).

Launched in 2007, OER Commons serves as a digital library and collaboration platform for content providers and emerging open education practitioners at all levels. Engaging with over 500 OER content providers from around the world, ISKME provides the open scaffolding necessary for knowledge sharing and access to teaching and learning materials, strategies, and curricula online. The site has over 35,000 registered users, 55,000 resources, and millions of visitors from 193 countries.

– www.oercommons.org

ISKME first created OER Commons in 2007 as a digital library and content hub to support OER discoverability, use, and reuse. Together with OER content providers and educators, OER Commons aggregates content collections, enriches resource metadata, and curates and organizes rich metadata to support the use and reuse of collections. Resources cover all subject areas and levels of education. OER Commons resources span a wide range of formats including html, ebooks, pdf, video, audio, games, courses, lesson plans, lectures notes, and search tools to enable users to find resources for different contexts of use.

The OER Commons platform today features Open Author, an inclusively designed authoring and remixing environment to support the creation and adaptation of media-rich OER, hosted locally on the platform. The authoring environment produces OER that are accessible using a broad range of assistive technology devices such as screen readers. Open Author resources can be downloaded as PDF or SCORM, or as a “teaching bundle”, a zip file containing PDF and media components. The OER Commons infrastructure also supports the evaluation and improvement of quality OER with embedded Common Core State Standards (CCSS) alignment tool and Achieve OER Rubric tool and EQuIP Rubric evaluation tool, developed by several states partnered with Achieve to support collaborative review of CCSS-aligned content, as well as the ability to align content to the Next Generation Science Standards.

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OER Commons resource page

The system uses the Django Python framework, which powers OER Commons Platform and Learning Registry application. OER Commons authored content uses Creative Commons licenses, while aggregated resource collections from around the web contain a wider array of applied licenses. OER Commons displays all licensing data in a clear and concise way, making licensing information accessible to all users, regardless of previous experience with OER content.

OER Commons uses an internal metadata profile based on modified LOM, which includes additional fields added to support different projects and initiatives e.g. CELT, A11y and LRMI. As an early adopter of the LRMI specifications, ISKME has mapped all 55,000 OER Commons resources to LRMI-compliant metadata. LRMI and A11y markup is included in the HTML of resources so it can be found by search engines and other applications operating on top of the OER Commons platform. Metadata can be exported as HTML or XML. OER Commons metadata does not use the exact terminology of LRMI, but a mapping has been created from the internal metadata schema to LRMI.  The alignmentObject is used to align to NGSS and Common Core state standards. Some Schema.org properties are also used.

The full OER Commons metadata profile is available for collection providers to download. In addition, ISKME provides a metadata sample template for providers to build and export their metadata for inclusion in OER Commons.

 

oer_commons_lrmi_sample

Sample of LRMI and Schema.org markup from OER Commons

OER Commons features a number of different metadata workflows:

  1. Content can be submitted to OER Commons by collection providers and cataloguers who work directly with the OER Commons digital librarian. Collection providers send a CSV file to a metadata technician who reviews the data, normalises it, and uploads it in bulk.
  2. Individual users can upload content and metadata via a web form. All resources and metadata are reviewed before submission.
  3. The content authoring tool also allows users to create metadata. Some metadata is computed e.g. licensing, as many people are not familiar with different variations of open licenses. The system walks them through the licensing process step by step and computes the appropriate license based on their response.
  4. Users can interact with resources once they have been catalogued and have had basic metadata added. Free text can be added by users which then becomes keywords and resources can be aligned with a range of standards including Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and other specialized standards.

Metadata is kept consistent internally by digital librarians to ensure all works well within the application to support search and discovery. OER Commons is committed to maintaining a rich metadata ecosystem with robust checks and balances to ensure high quality metadata.

Metadata that is shared with the Learning Registry is largely in the form of Dublin Core, though some LRMI and Schema.org properties are also used. All resources that have been evaluated using the Achieve OER Rubrics are shared with the Learning Registry.  These rubrics help users determine the quality of OERs and the degree to which they align with Common Core State Standards. When uploading to the Learning Registry, LRMI and Schema.org markup is taken from the internal metadata schema and mapped across to Dublin Core. Getting resources back from the Learning Registry has proven to be problematic due to the difficulty of filtering resources.

ISKME brings its OER Commons infrastructure and tools to address organizations’ curriculum needs and facilitate team workflows in customized areas of the site. Network Hubs are a key component of ISKME’s comprehensive solutions for hosting and indexing content and facilitating collaboration and collection development for a specific audience. In terms of future developments, OER Commons continues to build tools to additional alignment standards, e.g. National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies, as well as modified state-specific Common Core standards.

Microsites are comprehensive solutions for hosting and indexing content for a specific audience, and can be located at subdomains of oercommons.org, or be distinguished by a customizable URL at the domain level. Microsites contain all features available on the main site, but house their own collections as well as special curated collections of the full OER Commons database of resources. Microsites on OER Commons can be structured as one or more “network hubs”, in which a single microsite is the organizing umbrella for a number of sub-collections or networks. Within a microsite, resources are presented in the context of customized taxonomies and our digital librarians work hand in hand with partners and content providers to identify, categorize, and describe relevant content.

Additionally, ISKME serves as a thought leader around content and metadata interoperability, is a launch partner for the Learning Registry, serves on the LMRI Advisory Board, and leads a project for the US Department of Education’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) on the creation of cloud-based learner profiles for accessibility. ISKME is part of the GLOBE consortia of repositories from around the world that seeks to build common ways to share and federate educational resources and metadata.

LRMI Implementation Case Study: OpenStax CNX

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Project lead: Daniel Williamson, CNX

cnx_logo_small“OpenStax believes that everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to teach. OpenStax CNX is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes. There are tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime.”

http://cnx.org/

OpenStax CNX is a repository of open education content which enables users to create, modify, share and reuse resources. The majority of OpenStax CNX resources are college level text books, however the platform has hosted a wide range of resources including  K-12 curricula from South Africa and picture books from India.

Content is stored as both modules, small “knowledge chunks”, and collections, books or courses composed of multiple modules. Content can be downloaded in PDF, EPUB and HTML formats.  Most content is created and stored as HTML5, though users can also share PDF and Word documents  too.  The latest release of CNX does not feature video streaming, however video content can be embedded from YouTube instead. All content is licensed CC BY.

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OpenStax CNX search results

OpenStax CNX has recently undertaken a major rewrite to convert the system to HTML5.  Most CNX code is built in house and all is open source and available on Github: Connexions.

Previously CNX used a metadata schema, Connexions Markup Language (MDML), and stored metadata as XML.  CNX no longer uses this schema since moving to HTML5.  LRMI has not yet been implemented in the new HTML5 platform, however a mapping exists between MDML elements and LRMI properties, which represents CNX core metadata fields. In the future, CNX plan to use selected LRMI properties.

The following metadata is recorded for each resource: name, ID, language, summary, subjects,  keywords, license, authors, copyright holders, maintainers, latest version, publication date, latest revision.

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Sample OpenStax CNX metadata record

Metadata is generated by resource creators and users.  There is no metadata cleaning process, metadata is accepted as it is entered.  Metadata can only be edited as part of the content, which must be republished if the metadata is to be updated. CNX archives a record of every version of metadata published.  The new CNX system encourages resource creators to use existing keywords to ensure consistency.

Links

OpenStax CNX
Connexions on Github
LRMI CNX Mapping (.xls)

OERde14 – The view from Scotland

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[Cross posted to Open Scotland]

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.

ETA My interview from the conference is now available on the OERde14 Videos page.

Abstract

The first and largest open education initiative in the UK was the UKOER Programme. Between 2009 and 2012 the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) invested over £10 million in UKOER, and funded over 80 projects at universities throughout England. UKOER proved to be hugely successful, however only English universities were eligible to bid for funding. As a result, there was arguably less awareness of the potential benefits of open education across other sectors of UK education. That is not to say there have been no significant open education developments in other parts of the UK, simply that approaches to open education have followed different paths.

In September 2013 universities in Wales issued the Wales Open Education Declaration of Intent, which announced Welsh Universities commitment to work towards the principals of open education and in direct response, the OER Cymru project was established. In a parallel initiative, the Welsh Government established an Open Digital Learning Working Group in early 2013, which published the report Open and Online: Wales, higher education and emerging modes of learning.

Meanwhile north of the border, interest was growing around the area of Open Badges, and MOOCs had also caught the attention of Scottish Higher Education.

In order to raise awareness of open education policy and practice more widely, Cetis, SQA, Jisc RSC Scotland and the ALT Scotland SIG, came together to launch Open Scotland in early 2013. Open Scotland is an unfunded cross-sector initiative that aims to raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education. Among other activities, Open Scotland launched the Scottish Open Education Declaration, based on the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration.

Open education in general, and MOOCS in particular, also caught the attention of the Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council, and in early 2014 the Funding Council announced a £1.3 million investment in open education. Rather than issue an open funding call similar to the UKOER programme, SFC allocated their funding to the Open University to establish the Opening Education Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project, which aims to facilitate best practice in open education in Scotland.

These diverse programmes represent just some of the open education initiatives that have emerged in the UK; they provide a wide range of exemplars that may be of interest and benefit to open education practitioners in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

Marvellous Monsters – thoughts on the #altc 2014 keynotes

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I wasn’t able to attend the ALT Conference this year, but what with the faultless online coverage and following the back channel on twitter, I think I caught more of the conference than I often do when I’m actually there in person. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve heard all three keynotes, and I’m very glad I did, as they were all excellent.  Congratulations to the ALTC committee for putting together such a thought provoking programme.

Jeff Haywood’s opening keynote, Designing University Education for 2025 began by focusing on the positivity of open education, while adding the caveat that

“Without vision at policy level, at government and senior management level, the system will not transform.”

He acknowledged that changing higher education takes time and needs both persistence and patience, and he concluded by calling for more modest, purposeful pilots and experiments with learning technology that are designed to scale. That final point seemed to resonate with many listeners and was tweeted many times on the conference hashtag. I could help thinking that this is exactly the kind of experimentation that the Jisc development programmes used to facilitate so successfully; we need such purposeful and experimental innovation now more than ever.

Catherine Cronin’s keynote Navigating the Marvellous explored the potential of openness to bridge educational divides. Catherine framed education as a political and ethical act, urging us as educators to use our voice, and exhorting us to “Always speak, always vote.”  A timely reminder, if ever there was one.

Quoting the inimitable Jim Groom, Catherine reminded us that “openness is an ethos not a license”. Open means sharing and building community, however the restrictive nature of both space and technology can inhibit open practice; lecture theatres privilege the lecturers voice, and the privileged position of lecturers in VLEs works against building communities and mutuality.

Taking her inspiration from Seamus Heaney’s Lightenings viii, Catherine explored the different formal and informal educational and social spaces we inhabit as learners and educators, asking

“Have you ever found yourself in a learning environment so strange you are unable to breathe? Many students have.”

Open practices and the use of social media can enable us to cross educational boundaries, to overcome “othering” and to “minimise the differential in power between educators and students”.

This latter point raised an important question for me and when I asked on twitter

altc_2014

a lengthy discussion followed, with Helen Beetham arguing that while open practices may democratise participation they can not extend equal participation if learning and digital capital is unequal. Furthermore, while online spaces can disguise or level some kinds of difference and otherness, surely they amplify others? David Kernohan also suggested that social media just holds a mirror up to existing power structures.  To my mind, this is one of the most important points Catherine raised in her thoughtful and astute keynote; there are a lot of issues that need further exploration here and I very much hope we can continue this debate.

It’s hard to know what to say about Audrey Watters keynote that could begin to do it justice. We were very lucky to have Audrey present a keynote at the Cetis conference earlier this year and, if I’m honest, I did wonder how she could top such an inspirational talk. It’s fair to say that with Ed-Tech, Frankenstein’s Monster and Teacher Machines Audrey exceeded even her own high standards. Her talk was personal, inspirational and insightful and covered everything from her own grandfather, an alumni of Bletchley Park, Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, Frankenstein’s monster, the Luddites, Skinner and Rand, by way of fairytales, poetry, storytelling and pigeon-guided missiles. I’m not even going to attempt to summarise the points Audrey raised, if you haven’t heard it already, go and listen to her keynote yourself, it’s worth an hour of anyone’s time. After all, as Audrey reminded us, quoting Hannah Arendt

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.”

Links

ALTC 2014
Designing University Education for 2025: balancing competing priorities (video) – Jeff Haywood
Navigating the Marvellous: Openness in Education (video) – Catherine Cronin
Navigating the Marvellous (Storify)
Ed-Tech, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Teacher Machines (video) – Audrey Watters
Ed-Tech’s Monsters #ALTC (transcript)
Ed-Tech’s Monsters (Storify)

LRMI Implementation Cases Study: Untrikiwiki

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 Project team: Maximilian Klein, Untrikiwiki and Yoran Koren, WikiWorks

untrikiwiki_logo_small“The purpose of this project was to allow MediaWiki-based Open Educational Resource (OER) communities to adopt LRMI. This was done in two ways. Firstly, we built the technical infrastructure necessary for MediaWiki-based OER communities to implement LRMI. Secondly, we approached MediaWiki-based OER communities in attempt to convince them to use LRMI.”

LRMI Untrikiwiki Exit Report, p.1

The primary aim of the Untrikiwiki LRMI project was to build a Mediawiki extension to enable WikiMedia based open education communities to adopt LRMI and schema.org.  At the time the project was funded, September 2012, Mediawiki did not alow the arbitrary HTML markup required to embed LRMI and schema.org properties. This extension, HTML Tags, was developed by Yoran Koren, technical developer of WikiWorks. The open source HTML Tags extension is fully documented and available here Extension:HTML Tags  Further documentation on implementing LRMI using HTML Tags is available here Extension:HTML Tags/Implementing LRMI

In order to make is as simple as possible to embed LRMI properties in wiki pages, the project developed a series of MediaWiki templates to enable uses to write LRMI using wikitext markup.  These templates were also integrated into MediaWiki’s GUI, WikiEditor, so that users do not have to remember the full syntax of the template (LRMI Untrikiwiki Exit Report, p.4).  The MediaWiki extension does not include the ability to link out to external vocabularies.

lrmi_html_tags

HTML Tags LRMI Template
(LRMI Untrikiwiki Exit Report, p.4)

Although developing HTML Tags was not difficult, gaining the necessary approval to launch a new MediaWiki extension proved to be very difficult. Schema.org and LRMI were not widely used at the time so people were unwilling to gamble on a new web technology and had a tendency to see the extension as an unnecessary complication for little benefit.

The project approached a number of Wikimedia Foundation initiatives including English Wikibooks and the English Wikiversity, before the extension was adopted by the German Wikiversity.  Other initiatives that the project liaised with in order to raise awareness of LRMI include English Wikisource and Wikieducator.  The LRMI Untrikiwiki Exit Report presents a full appraisal of the project’s engagement with these communities and evaluates their successes, challenges and lessons learned.

The project outputs were also picked up by Brian W. Carver, University of California, who installed HTMl Tags and implemented LRMI on his Cyberlaw wiki.

brain_carver_lrmi

Sample of LRMI markup from Brian’s Cyberlaw Wiki

 Shortly after the end of the UntrikiWiki project in May 2013, MediaWiki started to support Schema.org markup, however arbitrary HTML markup is still not supported so HTML Tags still provides valuable funcationality.  By the end of the project, 27 different non-Wikimedia Foundation Wikis were using the MediaWiki extension and it is still being widely used, though often for HTML rather than LRMI markup. The project team concluded that

 “With our successful communities we were able to tap into pre-existing enthusiasm about metadata and Creative Commons in ways that meant communities were more likely to adopt LRMI than they would otherwise had been. LRMI’s goals match up well with the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation; both LRMI and the WMF aim to increase worldwide accessibility of knowledge.”

LRMI Untrikiwiki Exit Report, p. 13.

Links

Untrikiwiki
LRMI Untrikiwiki Exit Report
Conclusions from the LRMI Project
Lessons Learned From the Implementation of LRMI on Wikimedia Wikis
Extension:HTML Tags
Extension:HTML Tags/Implementing LRMI

LRMI Implementation Case Study: Curriki

Posted on by

Project team – Joshua Marks, Chief Technology Advisor, Robert Greenawalt, Chief Technology Officer, Paul Libbrecht, Developer.

curriki_logo“Curriki provides peer reviewed open educational resources, curricula and instructional materials to support teachers, professional educators, students, lifelong learners, and parents, primarily in the domain of K-12 education. Curriki is a nonprofit organization and the majority of the resources it provides carry Creative Commons licenses.”

http://www.curriki.org

Curriki is an OER repository containing over 32,0000+ openly licensed K-12 resources including files, URLs, wiki-pages, videos, scenarios and collections.  The system aims to be format agnostic and to support a wide range of content types; tools have been created to support different types of content.

Curriki provides content creation tools and a custom search facility based on seven metadata properties (subject, media type, educational level, language, reviews & ratings, instructional type and special filters).  Users are able to browse for resources that have been aligned with  Common Core State Standards, and Curriki has also created a Google custom search engine for Computer Science curriculum resources: Curriculum Search.

Curriki search

Curriki search

Curriki has been developed according to Java open source software community principles and has adopted java.net project workflow processes.  Curriki is designed to enable open community practices and can be thought of as “Github for educators building curricula.”  Applications are based on XCLAMS, the XWiki Collaborative Learning Asset Management System and the Curriki source code is available at GitHub: xwiki-contrib/currikiorg

Curriki has its own internal metadata schema. Metadata is generated by users and reviewed by volunteer subject matter experts who review resources using a four point rubric.  Part of this review process focuses on the quality and alignment of the metadata.  Registered users may also comment on resources. Curriki metadata is not static, it develops as resources are used.

XWiki object properties are stored in an SQL database and indexed into a SOLR index.  LRMI properties are exported from Curriki properties and a fork of Curriki also exports to LOM using OAI-PMH.  A mapping of Curriki metadata to LRMI properties is available.

Curriki resource information

Curriki resource information

Curriki metadata maps to the following LRMI properties:

  • educationalUse
  • typicalAgeRange
  • interactivityType
  • learningResourceType
  • useRightsUrl
curriki_code

Sample of Curriki LRMI markup

The project team intend to implement the “educationalAlignment” LRMI property in the future as Curriki has an internal application that could be employed for this using American (and Finnish) standards. Some additional schema.org properties are also used, see mapping for further details.

Curriki accepts all forms of Creative Commons licences and other variants of open licences. The default Curriki licence is CC BY NC. Business rules are implemented to disallow incompatible licences in Curriki collections. Contributors are encouraged to make their content freely available worldwide for non-commercial use, and to grant Curriki the right to use the content commercially.  This helps to generate revenue to keep the project running.

Links

Curriki
Curriki Case Study Questionnaire
Curriki LRMI Mapping