Tag Archives: oer

LRMI Implementation Case Study: MERLOT

Posted on by

Team leader: Barbra Bied Sperling, Manager of Technical Development.

“MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web pages, together with associated comments, and personal collections, all intended to enhance the teaching and learning experience.”

http://www.merlot.org/

MERLOT is a metadata repository containing records for 46,000 open educational resources covering a wide range of subjects and all levels of education. Users are able to comment on and aggregate resources to create personal collections. MERLOT resources are peer reviewed by members and each resource record includes a “Quality Tile”, which presents information on peer reviews, user ratings, comments and collections the resource has been added to.

merlot_page

Example of a MERLOT resource page

MERLOT also provides access to a wide range of additional facilities including APIs to integrate with learning management systems and other applications, mobile search apps for iOS, Android and Blackberry, a content builder for creating hosted online learning materials and various community building tools such as discipline communities, community discussions, and social networking facilities.

MERLOT uses Spring Framework as well as a number of Apache Commons java libraries and is served from CentOS (Linux) using Apache and Tomcat. Eclipse IDE, Vim and Notepad++ are used for editing, and Mozilla Firefox for testing. MERLOT applications are not open source.

MERLOT has developed a proprietary metadata schema, which covers a range of common fields including title, URL, description, material type, primary audience, language, keywords, subject category / disciplines, author information, technical format, technical requirements, mobile platforms, license, cost and accessibility.  Fields are stored in Oracle database tables. Metadata is created by users when a resource is added to MERLOT, and it is rarely modified beyond this point, other than to verify that all links still work.  MERLOT does not share metadata with the Learning Registry, and  MERLOT metadata records are not Creative Commons licensed.

A mapping (.xls) has been created between the proprietary MERLOT metadata schema and LRMI to enable the appropriate microtags to be added to resource description pages within MERLOT.

Merlot uses the following LRMI properties:

  • educationAlignment
  • useRightsUrl

Plus additional Schema.org properties:

  • creativeWork,
  • headline,
  • rating,
  • aggregateRating,
  • offer

The alignmentType of educationAlignment is educationalSubject, which maps to a proprietary vocabulary.

merlot_code

Sample of MERLOT LRMI markup

Since implementing LRMI MERLOT has not observed any measurable impact, although it is possible that the presence of LRMI and schema.org metadata on MERLOT’s resource description pages increases the discoverability of resources.

Links

MERLOT
MERLOT / LRMI mapping (.xls)

LRMI Implementation Case Study: Gooru

Posted on by

Project lead: Lisa McLaughlin,  Senior Director of Partnerships

“Gooru’s mission is to honor the human right to education. We are dedicated to engaging a community of teachers, developers, and supporters to unleash personalized learning with technology to educate all the students of the world.”

http://www.goorulearning.org/

Gooru serves as a personalized learning platform, incorporating a custom search engine, playlist creation tool, and content aggregator.  The system allows users to find standards-aligned, interactive learning materials that have been curated by teachers; share those materials in the form of custom collections, personalized to meet the needs of individual students; and measure students’ progress across collections and quizzes assigned to them.  Users can search over 2 million CC licensed learning resources, browse through collections, lessons and individual resources and filter search results by grade level, resource type, and Common Core State Standard.

Gooru resource search

Gooru resource search

Gooru is a repository of playlists, rather than a repository of content.  There are currently 18 million resources in the Gooru catalog; 180,000 of these are tagged to instructional standards such as the Common Core State Standards and 50,000 are collections created by teachers and students. Users can also build assessment features into their playlists and the system includes an assessment bank of 1.5 million items. Gooru resources carry a variety of different licences but all are open and free to use. Playlists are currently shared under a CC BY SA licence, however Gooru are in the process of transitioning to CC0 over the course of the next month.  Most content is aimed at the K-12 sector.

Gooru collection search showing CCSS classification

Gooru collection search showing CCSS classification

Gooru has developed an open source learning architecture licensed under the MIT Open Source Initiative approved licence, and a number of APIs that enable developers to build applications based on the Gooru infrastructure. The Gooru APIs are available here: Gooru APIs, and further information about the Gooru development community is available here Gooru Learning Developers.

A custom Gooru Metadata Schema (GMS) composed of 40 fields has been created from various metadata schemas. The Gooru Metadata Schema may be regarded as a variant of the LOM, though to date, GMS has not been mapped directly to LOM. Accessibility Metadata Project fields are used to describe the accessibility of content.

Content with high quality metadata is weighted more heavily in search results, though other factors also come into play, such as how many times a resource is included in other playlists.

Gooru does not ingest metadata through OAI PMH; some metadata is generated by users uploading resources and tagging them using the GMS, but the majority comes from web crawling. Domains are curated through a range of input, both internal and through Gooru’s wider network of partners, before pursuing crawls. Teacher-added domains are prioritized.  Basic metadata including title, author, publisher, description, etc is captured from each domain, and then passed to a QA cleaning team, who manually identify more nuanced characteristics, e.g. educational use, time required, etc. For subjective fields, such as educational use, a script has been created for cleaning the metadata. The QA team is currently focused on cleaning the metadata on all OER collections and Gooru recently launched an OER filter.

Metadata fields are currently stored in an SQL database, however Gooru will move to a no-SQL framework later in 2014.  Paradata is also  stored in similar SQL tables but is returned by different APIs. Only some of the Gooru paradata is currently exposed.

Components of LRMI have been incorporated into the Gooru Metadata Schema and a mapping can be provided from the GMS to LRMI.  Approximately 95% of the Gooru catalog is now tagged with LRMI.

The following LRMI properties and types have been implemented and the Gooru LRMI Metadata schema is available here (.xls).

  • educationalAlignment
  • educationalUse
  • timeRequired
  • typicalAgeRange
  • interactivityType
  • learningResourceType
  • useRightsUrl
  • isBasedonUrl

The GMS includes an Educational Alignment field with alignment types ‘subject’ and ‘educational level’.  Alignment type ‘text complexity’ may be added in the future.

In addition to Common Core State Standards, Gooru content is also aligned to  Texas Curriculum Standards and California Science Standards

Links

Gooru
Gooru Metadata Guide
Gooru LRMI Metadata Schema

LRMI Implementation Case Study: Jorum

Posted on by

Project lead – Ben Ryan, Jorum Technical Coordinator.

“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_results

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_record_2

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

LRMI Implementation Case Study: Open Tapestry

Posted on by

Project team: Justin Ball, CTO;  Joel Duffin, CEO

“Open Tapestry is all about discovering, adapting, and sharing learning resources, whether you’re a teacher, an instructor, a professor, a corporate trainer, a learner, or just a curious mind! We help you organize your content into categories–or Tapestries–that you create. Open Tapestry’s toolset allows instructors to develop course materials in a fraction of the time, while invigorating and enhancing learners’ experience. We give you the tools to mold and shape content already on the web to exactly how you want it.”

http://www.opentapestry.com/

open_tapestryOpen Tapestry provides tools to enable users to author resources and create and share modules, or tapestries, from existing content.  The system also has some repository-like  aspects in that it searches open content repositories, harvests metadata and enables users to upload resources. Open Tapestry pulls in all types of resources at different levels of granularity. There are currently around a million resources, mostly aimed at higher education, however Open Tapestry has also worked with online high schools and a few primary grades.  While Open Tapestry encourages use of open content, but users are also able to create closed instances for their own organisations.

Open Tapestry is a custom platform built on Ruby on Rails.  The platform uses a number of open source libraries and about ten APIs, but is not currently open source itself. The code used to detect and parse open licences is based on Open Attribute, and Gem is used to interact with Canvas.

Open Tapestry supports IMS LTI to facilitate learning management system integration.  This allows users to manage content outside the LMS and then present it inside the system.

Open Tapestry harvests metadata using OAI PMH, web crawlers and RSS harvesters.  The application tries to be as inclusive as possible; any format of metadata that is found, e.g. Dublin Core, LOM, LRMI,  will be parsed and stored internally. This internal metadata can then be transformed into any number of other formats.  The system also facilitates some cross walking.  All harvested metadata is retained and users are able to add to that metadata.  A small number of vocabularies are built into the system, e.g. licence.

The metadata that exists for any given resource depends on what has been harvested, or created by users, however if a page has no metadata, Open Tapestry will produce basic fields used for indexing and searching.  Open Tapestry has two main levels of content granularity;  resources and collections (tapestries) and metadata is applied at both of these levels. Collections can be combined from multiple sources and metadata is provided for each source.

Open Tapestry has fields for all LRMI elements but to date, users have tended not to fill them in.

  • educationalAlignment
  • educationalUse
  • timeRequired
  • typicalAgeRange
  • interactivityType
  • learningResourceType
  • useRightsUrl
  • isBasedonUrl

One way to encourage greater adoption of LRMI suggested by Open Tapestry is to focus on providing targeted search for a particular audience or usecase e.g. learning management systems.  LMS are currently grappling with how to integrate openly licensed resources with closed content and LRMI could potentially provide a solution to this problem.

Open Tapestry does not share metadata records with the Learning Registry as the system is primarily a metadata aggregator, very few new metadata record are produced by Open Tapestry.

One significant issue surfaced by Open Tapestry is how to track metadata assertions as resources, and metadata records are edited and aggregated.  This is particularly important for derivative works, where it is necessary to keep track of entire genealogies of who is making the assertions recorded in the metadata.  While cataloguers are aware of the necessity of creating and maintaining high quality metadata, content creators often have low awareness of the importance of metadata until they have a problem, e.g. concerns about who carries liability for a resource or assertion. Technical solutions are required to address this problem.

Links:

Open Tapestry
Open Tapestry Case Study Questionnaire

LRMI Implementation Projects Case Studies

Posted on by

As part of our work for Creative Commons on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), my colleague Phil Barker and I have been writing short case studies on a number of LRMI implementation projects that were funded between 2013 – 2014. Ten different OER platforms received small grants from the Gates and Hewlett Foundations to implement the LRMI specification and share their experiences with other developers. I’ll be posting the case studies here over the next couple of weeks and once all case studies have been completed we also plan to produce a high level technical synthesis of the projects’ outputs.

An early overview of some of the implementation projects was presented at the Cetis 2014 Conference at the University of Bolton in June.

LRMI Implementation Projects

Connexions / OpenStax CNX

Connexions, now OpenStax CNX, was launched in 1999 at Rice University to provide authors and learners with an open space where they can share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports. Today, 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. Tens of thousands of learning objects called pages, 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.

Curriki

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 is provides carry Creative Commons licences.

GooruLearning

GooruLearning an open and collaborative online learning community. Gooru enables teachers and students to find standards-aligned, interactive learning materials that have been rated by fellow teachers, share those materials in the form of personalized custom collections, measure students’ engagement, comprehension, and progress, and contribute to an active community of teachers and students by sharing your collections and best practices.

ISKME

ISKME is an independent, education non-profit company whose mission is to improve the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector. ISKME supports innovative teaching and learning practices throughout the globe, and is well-known for its pioneering open education initiatives. ISKME also assists policy makers, foundations, and education institutions in designing, assessing, and bringing continuous improvement to education policies, programs, and practice.

Jorum

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 1000’s of resources, all shared and created by those who teach or have been inspired in the FE and HE and professional skills community.

MERLOT

MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web pages, together with associated comments, and personal collections, all intended to enhance the teaching and learning experience.

Open Tapestry

Open Tapestry is a toolkit that enables teachers, instructors, professors, corporate trainers, students and learners to discover, adapt, and share learning resources. The Open Tapestry toolkit allows instructors to develop course materials and organise content into categories, or Tapestries, to enhance learners’ experiences.

Peer2Peer University

Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities.

Untrikiwiki

UntrikiWiki were funded to develop a MediaWiki extension to allow the use of schema.org markup in Wikitext. As part of this project, UntrikiWiki advocated the use of open-source extension HTML Tags on wikis.

Reusing Open Resources: Learning in Open Networks for Work, Life and Education

Posted on by

rorBack in 2003 I contributed a chapter to Allison LIttlejohn’s book Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to E-learning and I’m delighted to say that, together with co-authors Sheila MacNeill and Martin Hawksey, I have another paper in the subsequent book in this series Reusing Open Resources: Learning in Open Networks for Work, Life and Education edited by Allison Littlejohn and Chris Pegler.

“Every day, learners use and reuse open, digital resources for learning. Reusing Open Resources offers a vision of the potential of these open, online resources to support learning. The book follows on from Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to E-learning. At that time focus was on the creation, release and reuse of digital learning resources modeled on educational materials. Since then the open release of resources and data has become mainstream, rather than specialist, changing societal expectations around resource reuse. Social and professional learning networks are now routine places for the exchange of online knowledge resources that are shared, manipulated and reused in new ways, opening opportunities for new models of business, research and learning.”

~Littlejohn and Pegler

Our paper,  “Analytics for Education”, presents an overview of the development and use of analytics in the context of education through a critical analysis of current developments in the domain of learning analytics, and contrasts the potential value of analytics research and development with real world educational implementation and practice. The paper also focuses on the development of education content analytics, considers the legal and ethical implications of collecting and analysing educational data and highlights new developments including the exploration of data from massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Reusing Open Resources also includes papers on a wide range of current topics including European OER policy, workplace learning in informal networks, collaborate knowledge creation and, of course, MOOCs.

Several papers from this book, including ours, have already been published in a special edition of JIME, the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, Reusing Resources – Open for Learning.

#Cetis14 Open Education: From Open Practice to Open Policy

Posted on by

Last week Li and I ran a session at the Cetis Conference on Open Education: From Open Practice to Open Policy.  My initial plan had been to focus on questions such as:

  • What, if any, is the value of open education policy?
  • Do institutions need open education policies?
  • Should government agencies play a role in the development of open education policy?
  • Are there conflicts between commercial interests and market forces, and open education policy and practice?
  •  How can open education initiatives be nurtured and sustained?
  • And what do we mean by “open education” anyway?!

However after talking to David Kernohan he suggested:

“Why not invent a country and create an open education policy for it? We treat the delegates as the government of said country, and we each present what we have done making recommendations for the policy. At the end we ask the “government” to discuss and reach a conclusion.”

So we invited six speakers to talk about their experience of open education policy and practice and, if they felt up to the challenge, to present their policy recommendations for our fictional country.  Marieke Guy of the Open Knowledge Open Education Working Group attended the session has already written an excellent summary of the presentations and discussions here: Cetis Conference 2014 – Time to unhide open. I’m not going to attempt to duplicate Marieke’s great post, which I can highly recommend, so I’ll just highlight a couple of points raised by speakers over the course of the session.  I’ve also posted a Storify of the twitter discussion and relevant links here.

David Kernohan, Jisc

David Kernohan of Jisc kicked off by discussing what is and is not a policy and asking why we might want policy in any given area.

To provide explicit support for a particular practice or idea…
… but not to enforce either the practice or the idea.

To provide a scaffolding for proposed future work…
… or to reinterpret earlier work in the light of a later idea.

To bring a matter to wider attention…
… with a hoped-for result that more concrete steps are taken.

David went on to present a potted history of Jisc’s involvement in open education (he even unearthed a picture of the dreaded #Cetis08 conference “pudding”) and the experiences of the UK Open Education Resources Programme.  David suggested that the success of UKOER was that it was non prescriptive and that multiple, small projects gave agency for people to “work in the open space”.  UKOER encompassed many policies, many people, many practices but resulted in one community.

David Kernohan, Jisc

David Kernohan, Jisc

David’s slides can be downloaded here – Policy, Practice, Chance and Control

Paul Richardson, Jisc RSC Cymru

Paul discussed different meanings of open, and along they way suggested that “MOOCs are a way of turning OER into an experience.”  He also presented a number of Welsh initiatives in the open education space including OER Wales Cymru, the Wales Open Education Declaration of Intent , Y Porth and the Open and online: Wales, higher education and emerging modes of learning Welsh Government report which Paul himself made an invaluable contribution to and which I’ve already blogged about here and on the Open Scotland blog.

Joe Wilson, Scottish Qualifications Authority

Joe gave a lively and thought provoking talk which focused on the potential benefits of open education practice and open educational resources in the schools and further education sectors.  This is a challenge when many education authorities still actively discourage their teachers from sharing resources.  Tis illustrates the gap between policy structures and teachers practice.  Joe also discussed the issue of skills development and called for greater support in upskilling teaching staff and raising awareness of open education.  Finally Joe concluded by introducing Open Scotland and the Scottish Open Education Declaration.

Joe didn’t use any slides but he was wearing a rather fine Desperate Dan t-shirt which later resulted in this dreadful pun on twitter.

Desperate DanDesperate Dan – an important steak holder in open education?

Desperate Dan © DC Thomson & Co. Ltd.
Desperate Pun © Viv Rolfe

Suzanne Hardy, Newcastle University

Suzanne Hardy, Newcastle University

Suzanne Hardy, Newcastle University

Suzanne told us the story of open education developments at Newcastle University.  Being a Russell Group university, Newcastle is highly risk averse and pushing through new policies takes “forever”.  However despite legal concerns about copyright and licensing, Newcastle has embraced MOOCs and will be running its first Futurelearn MOOC shortly, Hadrian’s Wall: Life on the Roman frontier.  Suzanne noted wryly that MOOCs are seen as a good marketing opportunity, and that “marketing trumps the lawyers”. In conclusion, Suzanne warned of the danger of policy becoming a tick box exercise that stifles innovation before reminding us that “it’s people that sustain open education, not policy, not practice”.

Suzanne’s presentation is available here.

Paul Booth, North West OER and Manchester Metropolitan University

Paul presented his own experiences of engaging in open education practice and, like previous speakers, highlighted the gap between open policy and practice.  On the one hand he was praised and rewarded for his open pedagogy, but at the same time he was also threatened with disciplinary action by his own institution. Paul also discussed the challenges of developing regional OER policy and warned that awareness of openness is still low and more needs to be done to promote open education.  Finally Paul rose to David Kernohan’s challenge and announced that he had established a new breakaway open education territory “kind of like Pitcairn” called it Granadaland with it’s own national anthem, sporting heroes and religion.

Granadaland's official sporting team

Granadaland’s official sporting team

cetis14_pb1

Grandaland’s official religion

Tore Hoel, Nordic OER and Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.

Tore began by comparing the success of the Open Access movement to that of the open education movement adding “Why did open access succeed? It’s simple, there was a clear enemy.”  Tore suggested that much still needs to be done to raise awareness  and understanding of open education but added that OER can give organisations an opportunity to redesign their educational and financial models. Tore discussed the importance of multilingualism in developing open educational resources and also highlighted the Norwegian Government’s report on MOOCs.  In conclusion, Tore reminded us that “it’s not what you share it’s how you create it”.

Tore Hoel, Nordic OER

Tore Hoel, Nordic OER

Tore’s presentation can be downloaded here: CETIS14_OER.

Institute for Open Leadership – application deadline approaching

Posted on by

new-iol-logoEarlier this year Cetis were pleased to announce their membership of the Open Policy Network (OPN) launched by Creative Commons and partners in May.   One of the first initiatives to be announced by the OPN is the Institute for Open Leadership which aims to

“train new leaders in education, science, and public policy fields on the values and implementation of openness in licensing, policies, and practices.”

The first Institute of Open Leadership programme will run in January 2015 in the San Francisco bay area,   and applications are invited from

“Public and private sector professionals interested in openness and policy with the passion and potential to make a high impact at their institution and/or government through open policy. Emerging leaders in academia, the arts, cultural institutions, government, scientific labs, and others who are eager to become experts in open licensing, pursue new opportunities for open publishing of content and data, and directly influence policy decisions.”

Successful applicants will be required to develop an open policy project that will contribute to increasing openness within their institution and field of work.

Further information about the Institute of Open Leadership, along with details of how to apply are available here: http://openpolicynetwork.org/iol/

The closing date for applications is 30th of June 2014.

Open Education, Open Scotland – report & presentations

Posted on by

(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 recording of the event livestream, courtesy of Martin Hawksey of ALT, is available here: morning livestream, afternoon livestream, and there is a storify of tweets, links and presentations here: Open Education, Open Scotland Storify.

 Open Education, Open Scotland  – Joe Wilson, Scottish Qualifications Authority

The event was opened and introduced by Joe Wilson of the Scottish Qualifications Authority and the ALT Scotland SIG.  Joe suggested that universities in Scotland are currently in a very privileged position, but warned that the relationship between learners and institutions is changing.  Meanwhile the college sector has been comprehensively restructured but there is a danger of loosing the focus on the learner in the midst of restructuring.  Joe asked where are the attempts to look at new models of assessment?  Employers want to see that rich portfolio of experience that differentiates students as individuals.  He also asked, what can we do to encourage community learning and digital participation? A  citizen without a browser is now at a disadvantage as Government moves online by default.  Joe challenged delegates to think out of the box in terms of resources, assessment, and credentials and asked how can we open up access to resources to empower disadvantaged learners?

Open Scotland, Open ALT – Maren Deepwell, ALT

Maren provided an update on ALT’s collaboration, strategy and partnerships.  With a slide of Glasgow School of Art’s now destroyed Mackintosh Library, Maren gave us a timely reminder that not all we care about is digital, people are at the heart of what ALT do.  Maren also flagged up some good examples of sharing and open practice including ALT’s ocTEL online course and the Scottish Open Education Declaration from Cetis and Open Scotland.

Scottish Government Perspectives – Colin Cook, Deputy Director of Digital Strategy, Scottish Government

Colin introduced the Scottish Government’s Digital Strategy and focused on the role of the Digital Directorate to bring coherence to digital and ICT initiatives.  The Scottish Government has a policy commitment to build a world class digital Scotland and recognises that digital participation offers an opportunity to challenge ingrained inequalities. The Government wants to provide opportunities for people to move up the digital skills pathway, but it’s important to focus on learning, not just assistance. Third sector organisations have a huge role to play due to the position of trust they have with the digitally excluded.

The government is committed to driving forward digital transformation across the public sector and recognises the need for industry partnerships with education to develop a digital skills academy.  Colin acknowledged that wider use of data is critical to the Government’s long term vision of delivering effective public services, but added that safeguards are in place to promote public confidence so that people can be comfortable with how data is being shared.

SFC and OU update –  David Beards, SFC and Ronald MacIntyre, OU

Learning technology is high on the funding council agenda at the moment.  MOOCs currently dominate the policy rhetoric, but this is well understood and the importance of pedagogy is always there in the background.  Jisc is still the biggest thing that SFC funds and they are committed to the open agenda so it is up to everyone in the sector to let Jisc know what we want them to do.

SFC is providing the Open University with £1.27 million over three years to raise awareness of open education practice and support the sector’s capacity for online pedagogy.  The new “Open Project” will develop an online hub to share best practice, produce a small number of high quality OERs of particular benefit to Scotland, and evaluate various economic models for openness.  The outputs of the project will be very much in accordance with the activities undertaken by Open Scotland over the last year.

Open Badges, Open Borders – Suzanne Scott,  Borders College

Suzanne presented Borders College’s innovative use of open badges. Borders College’s journey started with a Moodle open badges pilot but following a chance discussion with the head of human resources, the initiative has now spread. Open badges are now used to engage with staff and have replaced all staff CPD paper certificates.  The use of badges for staff has increased loyalty and attendance at CPD sessions.

Phonar Open Courses – Jonathan Worth, Coventry University

Jonathan related his experiences of rethinking the business model behind photography and opening access to his Coventry University photography course.  The course, Phonar,  expanded from 9,000 to 35,000 people over a thirteen-week period prompting a mixed response from the university.   Institutions hear “open” and they think “free”, but talk about “connected” and they see business opportunities. Connections mean networks and opportunities.  Photographs are not the product, but digital fluency is an extremely valuable product.  Jonathan also warned “If you think your product as a teacher is information, you’re going head to head with the internet. Good luck with that!”  Jonathan also introduced Phonar Nation, “The biggest youth photography class in the world”.

Exploring the Digital University – Sheila MacNeill, Glasgow Caledonian University

After our scheduled speaker was unfortunately unable to attend,  Sheila kindly agreed to step in at the last minute to talk about research she and Bill Johnson have been undertaking on exploring the digital university. Sheila presented four key themes for digital universities: digital participation, information literacy, learning environments,  and curriculum and course design. She noted that universities’ civic roles can change quite profoundly through digital technology and urged us to think about the interface of digital and physical interaction.  Sheila also referred to Edinburgh Napier University’s Digital Futures project and talked about mapping digital literacy and residency across different university services.  Wrapping up her presentation Sheila questioned whether being an open practitioner was a “luxury” or a “daily necessity” for colleagues across the sector. 

Opening GLOW – Opening GLOW – Ian Stuart and John Johnston

GLOW initially started life as a national schools intranet in 2001, now Glow is about unlocking the benefits of the internet and providing learning opportunities.  For some time GLOW seemed clunky and unworkable but in 2010 wikis and forums were added.  Identity management should be core to GLOW services and accommodating BYOD has to be part of the GLOW landscape.  John and Ian acknowledge that there’s still lots of work to do with GLOW, but also plenty room to manoeuvre and to encourage teachers to become open educators. We need to encourage teachers to open up in as many ways as possible, the technology is the easy bit, culture is harder, and we need help from folk further along the road.

The Scottish Open Education Declaration – Lorna M. Campbell, Cetis

Lorna introduced the Scottish Open Education Declaration a community initiative launched by Cetis and Open Scotland. Based on the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration, the Scottish Open Education Declaration has a wider scope as it focuses on all aspects of open education practice, not just open education resources. The declaration also includes a clause on supporting the use of open source software in education. A key aspect of the declaration is the focus on education as a public good. The declaration is an open CC licensed public draft and all colleagues are invited to contribute.  A large number of comments have already been received, points that have been raised include, changing the focus of the declaration so that technology is viewed as an enabler rather than a driver, the need for an open culture shift and the necessity of capacity building, the importance of sharing and education sectors and stronger commitments to open licensing.  The first draft will remain open for comment for another month, then comments will be edited into the document, and a second draft posted for further discussion.

Open Scotland at CILIP Scotland Conference

Posted on by

Earlier this week I was invited to present about Open Scotland at the CILIP Scotland Conference in Dundee. This is the first time I’ve attended the CILIPS conference and it was a really lively and engaging event with over 300 participants and an inspiring keynote on “Challenges, Choices and Opportunities” from Martyn Evans, Chief Executive of the Carnegie Trust.  My Open Scotland presentations seemed to be well received and I was very encouraged to have a couple of questions about the potential role of public libraries in opening access to educational resources, particularly for the school sector.  When we held the first Open Scotland Summit in Edinburgh in 2013 it occurred to me that the education sector potentially has much to learn from the public library sector in terms of open practice.  My presentation session was ably chaired by Heather Marshall, Senior Librarian at Glasgow Caledonian University Library and in conversation with her afterwards I was struck yet again by GCU Library’s commitment to promoting open educational resources and encouraging open educational practice among their staff.

cilips14