Category: Learning, teaching and web services

April 13, 2015

A Vision for Open Educational Resources at University of Edinburgh

Splendid poster made by Stuart for use at conferences.

The University’s mission is the creation, dissemination and curation of knowledge. As a world-leading centre of academic excellence we aim to: Enhance our position as one of the world’s leading research and teaching universities and to measure our performance against the highest international standards; Provide the highest quality learning and teaching environment for the greater wellbeing of our students; Make a significant, sustainable and socially responsible contribution to Scotland, the UK and the world, promoting health and economic and cultural wellbeing.

As a great civic university, Edinburgh …. will continue to look to the widest international horizons, enriching both itself and Scotland. (University Mission)

‘Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.’ (Capetown Open Education Declaration)

During academic year 2013-14 an OER Short-Life Task Group was established to explore possible ways to take forward an OER strategy for University of Edinburgh and to report findings and recommendations to Learning and Teaching Committee. This paper includes a proposed vision, policy, guidance and support level.

The sharing of open educational materials is in line not only with University of Edinburgh’s mission but also with a global movement in which research- led institutions play a significant role. The proposed OER vision for University of Edinburgh has three strands, each building on our history of the Edinburgh Settlement, excellent education, research collections, enlightenment and civic mission.

‘For the common good’:

Teaching and learning materials exchange to enrich the University and the sector.

To put in place the support frameworks to enable any member of University of Edinburgh to publish and share online as OER teaching and learning materials they have created as a routine part of their work at the University (e.g handouts, teaching materials, lesson plans, recorded lectures, research seminar content, blended-learning content, datasets, problem sheets and tools).
To support members of University of Edinburgh to find and use high quality teaching materials developed within and without the University.

‘Edinburgh at its best’:

Showcasing openly the highest quality learning and teaching:

To identify collections of high quality learning materials within each school department and research institute to be published online for flexible use, to be made available to learners and teachers as open courseware (e.g. recorded high profile events, noteworthy lectures, MOOC and DEI course content).
To enable the discovery of these materials in a way that ensures that our University’s reputation is enhanced.

‘Edinburgh’s treasures’:

Making available online a significant collection of unique learning materials available openly to Scotland, the UK and the world, promoting health and economic and cultural well-being.

To identify a number of major collections of interdisciplinary materials, archives, treasures, museum resources to be digitised, curated and shared for the greater good and significant contribution to public engagement with learning, study and research (e.g. archive collections drawn from across disciplines, e.g. History of Medicine/Edinburgh as the birthplace of medicine/Scottish history/social change).
To put in place policy and infrastructure to ensure that these OER collections are sustainable and usable in the medium to longer term.

DISCUSSION

The expertise to deliver each of these strands exists within the University through partnership between Schools and Information Services. This vision builds upon work, custom and practice already in place within the University but offers an opportunity to take a strategic approach to publishing open educational resources at scale.

The delivery of this vision is contingent on several areas of activity. The University is well placed to adopt an open licencing approach to learning and teaching materials for which the copyright is already held within the University.

Information Services currently offer a limited copyright advisory service to academic colleagues and students, with additional resourcing this service could be enriched to provide an OER service including training, staff development and guidance to support colleagues in making informed decisions about licencing options for their OER.

It is proposed that the service is resourced by IS for 2 years in the first instance. Once the support service is in place the ‘Common Good’ activity will be supported as part of business as usual though guidance and training.

A new short-life task group will be established to consider the resource needed to deliver the other two strands of the vision.

RISK ASSESSMENT

Establishing a clear vision for OER at University of Edinburgh will mitigate the reputational risk which may follow as a result of colleagues referring to online learning materials as ‘open’ when they are available under closed or unclear licence.

The new support service in IS will mitigate the risk that colleagues are unclear about the decisions they should make regard to the licencing, sharing and use of online materials.

EQUALITY AND DIVERSITY

OER contribute to sector-wide initiatives on openness, access, equality and diversity by enriching the knowledge commons and promoting sharing and reuse.

March 7, 2015

my week as an international woman

Picture taken at The Oakland Museum. No rights reserved by me.

I am spending much of International Womens Day this year on an international flight. I have been in California for a week buzzing about at various meetings and gathering good ideas.

Last year on this day I wrote a blog post too.

This year at work, in my new role and new division I am involved in a new set of gender equality initiatives. I am the only female Director in Information Services, I am a mentor within the department and an Aurora role model for the Leadership Foundation. Information Services is exploring approaches to using an Athena Swan-like framework to improve the working environment for all and my teams are working hard to figure out how we can usefully make it a success.

In the last few weeks we have carried out a staff survey in my division to gather feedback from colleagues. I am very pleased to say that despite having gone through a number of restructuring experiences and quite a bit of change, the majority of LTW staff say they are are satisfied with their jobs; receive appropriate praise and recognition; are treated with equality and respect and understand their role within the organisation.

In my new role I have been at pains to ensure that I do not send email to my staff outside of working hours. This is a deliberate attempt to send a signal that balancing work with family or home commitments is expected and ok. When I travel I keep my wrist watch tuned to UK time to help me remember what time it is at home and to ensure that the experience of working for, or with, me is one based on mutual respect. I admit I have lapsed occasionally, mostly by mistake because the email conversation is interesting, so I apologise to my team leaders for that.

I feel like I am continuing to do my bit to ‘Make it Happen’. Do you?

March 1, 2015

open with care

Fine craft by Anne-Marie Scott. Image Creative Commons CC-BY

Next week is Open Education Week March 9-13th 2015.

Last week I was contributing to face to face (at Open Educational Practice Scotland OEPS steering group) and online discussions (comments on How Sheila Sees it) about the difference between open educational practice (OEP) and open educational resource practice (OERP). I imagine it will come up again this week when I am speaking at the Coursera Partners Conference.

The challenge for me, is that in discussions of OEP the ‘open’ seems very ill defined. It can encompass a full range of open approaches and does not necessarily involve any consideration of content licencing.

In OER, the open is more clearly defined. e.g Open definition, OER Commons, Open Education Week, as it relates to content, data etc. It is content made available to be shared, used and modified. This is why Creative Commons is doing so well; there is now a way for anyone to make their content explicitly open.

What I liked about the early JISC OER projects was the explicit challenge to release a significant amount of content from within your institution, and ideally for that process to become mainstreamed and sustainable. It meant the technologists and content owners ( academics) worked together with the lawyers and librarians/collections to release stuff at scale, either old stuff or really new stuff mostly.

Academic staff development people always tell me that teaching and learning isn’t about content, but I kinda think it is. That’s why we have libraries full of published content, and reading lists, and course packs, and slides, and handouts, and recordings,and datasets and we constantly produce and publish more as we research and teach. And we get promoted because of it. Our students produce a bunch too, and sometimes we assess it.

As an ex- academic staff developer myself, I’d say academic staff development people don’t produce much discipline content and are notoriously bad at using each others’ so they are not big OER producers. They are more into OEP now which is such a wide concept that their expertise is needed to develop it as an area of practice.

I like OER practice. I like the rigour of defining and working within something that ‘is’, knowing what ‘is not’. I think it is really interesting and challenging to help people to find , make and use resources, and to be literate in their use of open content. And I like to mainstream it in ways which lower the barrier to participation in OER production as much as possible. I like to put systems and workflows in place. The more wonderful, unique stuff gets out there on an open licence, the more there will be for me and others to use.

During Innovative Learning Week, we ran the first of our ‘Making open courses using open resources’ workshops at Edinburgh. In theory that task should be much easier than it was 5 years ago. There are 900 million Creative Commons-licensed works, up from 400 million in 2010.

We’ll present at OER15 about how we got on.

February 21, 2015

we can [edit], yes we can

We can edit and we can eat cake. Picture taken by me, no rights reserved, and no leftovers.

The ‘Women, Science and Scottish History editathon‘ series of events in Innovative Learning Week at University of Edinburgh was a great success. We ran sessions on 4 days, had plenty of new students, staff and friends join us, edited more than 30 articles and trained dozens of novice wikipedia editors.

Each day, the one-hour introduction to editing Wikipedia focused on offering tips and insight into different approaches as well as practical training. Participants were welcome to attend as many days as they would like: everyday we added something new. Our Wikimedia trainers (principally Ally, the Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland) was on hand to provide assistance, and our librarians ( Marshall, Gavin and Grant) provided specialised materials focusing on the subjects covered.

Knowledge was shared openly. Articles were created or improved. Networks of connections were made and shared topics of interest explored. Copious cake and cookies were eaten, and a fun time was had by all. We plan to do further events and some research to maintain and sustain momentum and support our fledgling crowd community. In December, at the EduWiki conf Ally reported that she had not seen much engagement from University of Edinburgh in Wikipedia projects . At least that’s changed.

The hashtag was #ILWeditathon. Read Our story in a storify

Articles improved

Articles created

January 27, 2015

immersion learning

University of Edinburgh Innovative Learning Week (ILW) 2015 #ILW2015 will take place from 16-20 February. Event booking is now open!

ILW 2015 is our fourth annual festival of creative learning and is a chance for students, staff and alumni to develop skills, meet new people and celebrate innovation in our academic community.

This year’s programme includes a fine spread of events hosted or facilitated by LTW in conjunction with friends and partners across the university.

“Shoot the Uni” – Photography Competition 11:00 – 13:00 Mon 16 Feb

Open Courses with Open Resources 09:30 – 12:30 Tue 17 Feb

Peer-Reviewing Online 13:00 – 14:00 Tue 17 Feb

Driving Seminar Room Technology Various times Tue – Fri

What no Chalkboard? An Insight into Electronic Various times Tue – Fri

Extending the Boundaries – Virtual Classroom Spaces 13:00 – 14:00 Wed 18 Feb

Women, Science and Scottish History – Wikipedia Editathon 14:00 – 17:00 Mon – Fri

Smart-data hack with Informatics Various times Mon – Fri

ILW 2015 Fair! 16.30-18.30 Fri 20 Feb

TedX 9.30-18.30 Thurs19 Feb

January 21, 2015

planning round

Le Notre, Andre 1679-83 Marly : general plan ECA Library Image http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/c8li5i Collection

The Learning, Teaching & Web Services Division (LTW) brings together the technology enhanced learning, digital education, website, web services and classroom technology teams to ensure that we offer a service to colleagues and students which meets the needs of Schools and Colleges.
LTW will support and engage with initiatives generated by our staff, students, alumni and those outside the University. I hope that colleagues across the collegiate university will engage with our services, case studies and events, give advice to our projects and invite us into ongoing discussions about how best to make use of the technology on offer.

Engaging with users
Since establishing the Division in August 2014 I have been out and about around the University, discussing the support needed for learning, teaching and outreach, and for an enhanced student experience. I have been delighted to find so many colleagues with enthusiasm for new ways of thinking and working as part of a University-wide conversation on digital innovation. Ongoing investment in this area will enable us to maintain excellent services within the University by providing a robust foundation for the enhancement of learning, teaching and communications. The University is moving towards an increasingly open presence on many digital platforms: open educational resources, open data, open science and open practice. Effective digital communications from the University will ensure that this digital shift benefits society on a national and a global scale. The success of massive online and distance learning courses demonstrates that we have found new audiences and collaborators from across the globe. Your help will be needed to make the most of the new website to ensure that those seeking knowledge about any area of academic activity discover relevant work carried out at Edinburgh.

Technology in the classroom
My conversations with colleagues have highlighted an increasing demand for digital skills training and for support to integrate technology into the classroom. The distinction between IT and AV is becoming increasingly blurred: it’s all digital now. For many colleagues it is the technology context – the technology available in the teaching rooms – which influences their choice of media to use. As you would expect in a research institution, colleagues are using the most up-to-date technologies every day in their research. Our challenge now is to find appropriate ways to model those activities in teaching so that students learn how professional researchers make use of the tools, methods and datasets in their field. The technology on campus should provide a flexible environment that lets students and staff experiment, co-create, build, share and learn from each other.

The digital estate
Digital content and tools which make up the university’s digital footprint, or digital estate are growing. Digital content and tools such as Learn, MyEd, Turnitin, PebblePad, mobile apps and webpages have a key part to play in equality and a consistently excellent student experience. Reviewing support for the digital experience requires us to look across the University at what systems and services we provide. It is important to assess how these are perceived, navigated and experienced by students and staff; what shortcomings and gaps there are; and what will be required of these systems and services in five years’ time. Should we invest as much in our digital estate as we do in our physical one?

I am looking forward to working with groups across the institution to identify the services that will help us to deliver what we need locally, nationally and internationally.

January 9, 2015

ambition, distraction and disruption

John Tenniel`s original (1865) illustration for Lewis Carroll`s “Alice in Wonderland”. Alice sitting between Gryphon and Mock turtle

Today, braving hurricane winds and winter storms, the FutureLearn Academic Network gathered in Edinburgh to discuss the extent to which MOOCs are (still) disruptive and suggest new directions for the future. A number of very interesting sessions were spoken.

Unfortunately for me I was distracted early on by mention of ‘The MOOC Turtle‘.

My concern stemmed partly from the fact that the Mock Turtle is a difficult, unhappy creature, being neither entirely one animal nor another; and partly from the fact that the speaker illustrated the phrase with a picture of a tortoise. What MOOCs have tort us is an altogether different research question.

If one were using the Mock Turtle as the basis for a discussion about online courses the pickings would be rich*. As you know, the Mock Turtle was a lifelong learner, schooled in Reeling and Writhing, and the different branches of Arithmetic– Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision, and Mystery- ancient and modern, Laughing and Grief, Seaography, Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils. Any of which could easily be new FutureLearn courses.

And if one were looking for new delivery models, what better than ten hours the first day, nine the next, and so on?

`That’s the reason they’re called lessons,’ the Gryphon remarked: `because they lessen from day to day.’

Learning analytics have nothing on this.

*Have i mentioned that I think the liberal arts are a good grounding for understanding technology?

January 7, 2015

where are your wearables?

Mask and Plastic Limbs. Graeme Magee. University of Edinburgh Art Collection http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/zx7wts

Apparently 2015 is the year of wearable technology. I got blue-tooth gloves for Christmas to match my hounds-tooth check handbag. One makes me look considerably cooler than the other.

The year begins with the launch of our ‘Glasses in Classes‘ competition. Get your best ideas in quick, active learning just got personal.

Some of this tech still costs an arm and a leg, and some of it moves so fast it is retro already, but is very good value for bloggers, punners and journalists. Expect to see blog posts from me entitled ‘She wears it well’, ‘Through glass darkly’ and ‘Wear the wired things are’ etc.

January 3, 2015

games changers

Did you get bored of games for Christmas?

On the 14th January I will be in Huddersfield speaking as keynote at the School of Art, Design and Architecture, Annual Teaching and Learning Conference. Doing my research, looking at their website I see that they also host a Conference on Serious Games.

It seems to me that games may be about to become seriously important in higher education in various ways. People I know have been researching this for years, and I wonder whether the time has finally come. There are many aspects to this , obviously. There is game design, gamification, serious gaming, research about people who play games, the people who design games, the potential for games to be learning environments, for children, for adults, for problem solving, for social skills, for violence, for misogeny etc. Certainly after #gamergate it seems like it is an area of activity with some dark sides which might beneft from having a bit more light shone upon them before activists are hung out to dry.

Universities, beyond their informatics and design departments, will I think, be paying more attention to games soon, if they are not already, because a generation of people for whom computergames and e-sports are commonplace are heading towards university now.

Several universities host major gaming conferences, Nottingham has declared itself Game City.

Some universities offer e-sport scholarships.

Some games lobby to be part of the Olympics.

E-sports attract enormous audiences.

The British Museum and British Library are using gaming platforms to promote engagement with their collections.

There are many MOOCs about gamification and game design, some about games, some which are games and some which have been gamely gamified.

There’s also a tasty Game Masters* exhibition at our National Museum of Scotland.

*Not to be confused with the Scottish Game Fair or seriously good game.

December 18, 2014

advent of technology

Eric Carle, Illustration of the farmer/Father Christmas in “Dream Snow” ECA Library Image Collection http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/yd2zm7

In previous years I have enjoyed making Christmas collections of curated open images and artifacts along various ‘Open Advent’ themes.

In 2011 OUCS had its first ‘Open Advent Calendar’, followed in 2012 by the ‘One-Horse-Open-Sleigh‘ and in 2013 by ‘Online Presents‘.

This year to save me from tears, I am touting the ‘advent of technology’ hashtag. (Not particularly successfully it has to be said).

My best festive themes feature ‘raise a glass for our Google Glass project’, ‘choose your tools carefully with our Christmas TREE‘ and ‘be careful of your digital footprints in the snow’. Jo gamely joined me with some sterling ‘elf sciences work.

However, today being REF day, and Edinburgh having done rather well, I can point you to genuine CHSS nuts boasting in an open flyer!