Tag: OER

impact of football OER

Gerardi Mercatoris Atlas, sive, Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura (24696368309).jpg
By Centre for Research Collections University of Edinburgh – Gerardi Mercatoris Atlas, sive, Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47041923

A 17th Century map of Iceland became our most popular OER for football fans during Euro 2016. The image ‘Gerardi Mercatoris Atlas, Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura ‘ which belongs to our Centre for Research Collections was added to Wikimedia in February as part of our Wikimedian in Residence partnership project. It was then used to illustrate  an article about Iceland on English and German Wikipedia. It has now been viewed more than 2 million times.

Iceland’s Euro2016  matches were on 14 June (1-1 with Portugal), 18 June (1-1 Hungary), 22 June (2-1 victory over Austria), 27 June (2-1 win over England), and 3 July (2-5 defeat to France).  Around each of these events people all over the world were keen to learn about this surprising nation.  Viewing numbers ( numbers of hits) show appreciable spikes for the matches against Portugal, England, and France.

On German Wikipedia spikes against each of the matches regularly exceeded 100,000 page views.

The biggest spike was for the victory over England!

busy bees

Picture taken by me in the street in Galsgow. No rights reserved by me.
Picture taken by me in the street in Glasgow. No rights reserved by me.

You may be interested to know what the LTW teams have been doing to support you in the last 6 months.

To support the development of digital skills since January 2016, the Digital Skills Programme has delivered 136 face-to-face courses, to c.1400 attendees, across all Colleges and Support Groups, using 40 tutors from across ISG.

To support capacity building for online learning 25 staff across the University have signed up for the recently launched CMALT programme for learning technologists.

To support online learning at scale we have delivered 8 pilot Learning Design workshops with 21 programmes interested in holding workshops in the future.

To support sharing and use of video MediaHopper now holds more than 5,000 video items uploaded by staff and students. Around 10% using a creative commons license (OER). 200 people have been trained to use the new media tools.

To ensure that users can understand and engage with our University we have published 51,000 published pages on Edweb.

To ensure that our students can gain work experience alongside their studies we’ve employed more than 20 student interns.

To make you more comfortable we’ve upgraded 300 open access PCs  and refurbished 52 rooms and spaces.

To make the world a safer place we have launched MyLungsMyLife and Self-Help for Stroke web projects  at the Scottish Parliament.

And that’s all on top of maintaining, running, patching and upgrading all the major systems and services you use for teaching and learning every day.

sad loss of an open VLE pioneer

Photograph of lillies taken by me in my house. No rights reserved by me.
Photograph of lillies taken by me in my house. No rights reserved by me.

I am sad to hear that Professor Andrew (Aggie) Booth has died. Aggie was a VLE pioneer. His work influenced mine and that of many colleagues. This news, coming as it does so soon after the recent loss of Sebastian Rahtz reminds me how much we owe to the original thinking of these clever, quirky, open practitioners.

Aggie Booth was one of the first, maybe THE first ‘Professor of e-learning’.  If you have not heard of him, or perhaps have forgotten, here’s my story of Bodington at Leeds and Oxford:

Bodington was originally developed at University of Leeds by Jon Maber and Aggie in 1995. It was subsequently released as open source*.  Oxford was the first HEI outside of Leeds to offer it as an institutional VLE . The University of the Highlands and Islands also used Bodington.

Bodington was a VLE ahead of its time**. This history of online learning  lists the first scaled deployment of Bodington in 1997, the same year WebCT 1.0 was released and Blackboard was founded. A year later Martin Dougiamas began preliminary work on Moodle.  I joined the learning technology team at Leeds in 2002. The Sakai project began in 2004.

The design of Bodington was based around a metaphor of space, people and place. It was originally  developed as the ‘Nathan Bodington Building’. University of Leeds campus is full of buildings named for people. Sir Nathan Bodington was the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Leeds having been Principal and Professor of Greek at the Yorkshire College since 1883.  Jon and Aggie imagined that students would find/navigate to their materials and classes in ‘rooms’ on ‘floors’ in the virtual environment just as they did in the physical.  Similar to the design of later virtual worlds such as SecondLife.  When a proliferation of virtual buildings  emerged at Leeds the virtual environment was renamed as Bodington Common.

For the open sourcing of software to be effective it is necessary to build a sufficiently large and vibrant community so that the product can become self-sustaining and progressively develop to include new ideas. Oxford was an early adopter of Bodington and was a keen supporter of a wide range of developments including various marketing exercises and attracting external funding for innovations; however, whilst the system was adopted by a wide range of institutions, the number of those prepared to commit development effort never reached a sustainable level.

The teams met in Oxford in 2005 to  discuss development of Bodington in collaboration with Sakai. When Leeds University opted in 2006 to select a proprietary system for their next VLE, Oxford was left as the sole large-scale developer of Bodington and this situation was untenable. It was at this point that Oxford decided to seek an alternative platform (with a bigger and better community) and chose Sakai, deploying it as WebLearn in  2008.  By this time I had moved from Leeds to join Oxford.

Many good things came out of working with Bodington and Sakai, the Oxford developers and gained vast experience in open source software and community development. Oxford ran Bodington and Sakai in parallel for four years, Bodington become read-only in Sept 2012.

Personally, I enjoyed teaching using Bodington very much and there are pedagogical tools in there I still miss.

 

 

*On 3 October 2006 Bodington released version 2.8.0 on SourceForge. This brought good will with it from those in the open source community who may have felt Bodington had been trading on the open source moniker unfairly in the past.( OSSwatch)

** This became important when Blackboard much later filed their patent in the US for various VLE features which were on record as having been part of the Bodington functionality.

east for EDEN

http://www.eden-online.org/2016_budapest/
http://www.eden-online.org/2016_budapest/

This week I’ll mostly be in Budapest for EDEN16. The conference is called ‘Re-imagining Learning Environments’. It’s my first time to EDEN, and I’ll be keynoting in the theme: ‘Opening up education’. I’ll be talking about the initiatives , projects, examples of good practice and the new business models we are championing at University of Edinburgh.

 

FYI UOE UK EU OER MOOC CC BY SA

EU referendum MOOC https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/eu-referendum/1
EU referendum MOOC
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/eu-referendum/1

What’s your favourite  digital learning university doing in the face of the EU referendum? Another one of our just in time MOOCs, of course!

The EU can often be confusing and the UK’s relationship with the EU over the years has been complicated. This three-week course breaks down the key facts and guides you through the referendum.

We look at how the UK ended up having a referendum on EU membership. We then consider the campaign issues, public opinion and alternatives to being in the EU. After the vote, we reflect on what the result means for the UK and for the rest of Europe.

Course opens 13th June, join us as we explore one of the biggest decisions facing the UK in a generation.

reflecting forward with hindsight

Cover image of BITS magazine. BITS Issue 14, Spring 2016 http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/about/edinburgh-bits
Cover image of BITS magazine. BITS Issue 14, Spring 2016 http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/about/edinburgh-bits

I am impressed that ALT have found my CMALT portfolio in their archives. I will share it as an example with colleagues  engaging with our new CMALT programme.

When I wrote my initial CMALT application in 2008 I was just about to leave University of Leeds to embark on a new adventure in a new role as Head of Learning Technologies at University of Oxford. At that time there were so few CMALT persons in each university that the status of ‘University with the largest number of CMALT’ shifted from Leeds to Oxford when I moved. I stayed in that role at Oxford for 6 years, becoming Director of Academic IT as I expanded the teams, projects, scope and services.

Looking back at my portfolio submission from the time I am reminded of my commitment even then to blogging, learning design, VLEs, OER and my specialist subject: learning technology leadership.

In order to renew my CMALT portflio I am asked to reflect on how my career has developed over the past 3 years and how this relates to my work with learning technology.

I’ve been at Edinburgh for 2 years now. I know this because I’ve just attended my third elearning@ed forum. It’s been a vertiginous learning curve, and  I’ve had to make some serious changes in the leadership of the Division.  Grace Hopper said ‘ the most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘We’ve always done it this way’. I think that is *especially* dangerous for anyone in an industry like learning technology which requires, demands innovation.

As a woman who arrives from somewhere else to take over the management of a department, I hear it a lot.

The investment of time and effort is paying off though, Senior Vice Principal Charlie Jeffrey described us as ‘gripped in the throws of innovation’. Which is good, I think.   I’ve also just been appointed Assistant Principal for Online Learning.

Having an Assistant Principal as part of the senior management team in ISG will ensure that we can align even more closely the activities of ISG to the mission of the University. This will contribute to the success of our service excellence and digital transformation programmes as well as planning for learning and teaching technology.  My new role will bring added complexity for me as I manage the challenge of keeping my teams on track with these innovations while also giving a renewed focus myself to online and distance learning. Exciting times.

new support for learning technology professionals

Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic - http://www.aliceboreasphotography.com/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48410918
Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic – http://www.aliceboreasphotography.com/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48410918

If you are working in a learning technology role the University of Edinburgh is committed to supporting your professional development. I am delighted to announce a new university wide scheme supporting CPD for staff working with learning technology. Our aim is to support colleagues working in schools, colleges and ISG to become CMALT accredited.

CMALT is Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology – you submit a portfolio describing and reflecting on your work and linking to relevant evidence. The training and support you can access via the CMALT programme will ensure that you stay up to date with best practice and maintain strong links for career progression.

If you join our scheme now you will be supported to complete CMALT by:
*    discounted fees
*    regular meetings of the CMALT applicants group
*    mentoring and support as you put together your portfolio
*    access to organised writing retreats

For more information contact Susan Greig  in LTW now.

I completed my CMALT portfolio a number of years ago. I’m hoping my co-chairing OER16, judging the Learning Technologist of the Year competition and  supporting the roll out this scheme at University of Edinburgh will help me to maintain my good standing.

light reflections on OER16

Interpretation of my #OER16 keynote (c) Beck Pitt CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/40959105@N00/26658563491/in/album-72157667593223021/
Interpretation of my #OER16 keynote (c) Beck Pitt CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/40959105@N00/26658563491/in/album-72157667593223021/

It was lovely to see you all at #OER16 in Edinburgh.  It was a great personal pleasure to host the conference and to listen to the papers and speakers. For me it provided  an excellent excuse to have so many friends and colleagues here.

When Lorna and I passed across to next year’s chairs it was a relief to know that the conference will survive and thrive for another year.

I gave the last keynote, the one usually punctuated by the poorly stifled sound of wheely suitcases escaping from the back of the room. Jim, Catherine, Emma and John are hard acts to follow.

You can watch all the keynotes ( and many of the sessions) on MediaHopper, they are all excellent.

One of the benefits of being the last keynote is that the many flavors of openness had already been rehearsed and debated by other people in the room. And that many of my excellent Edinburgh colleagues had already covered the detail of our services and projects. The keynote offered me a chance to reflect on the themes of the conference and why it made sense to have it in Edinburgh.

I spoke about the Edinburgh vision for OER and the journey that brought us here. I spoke about technical and copyright debt and  the importance of doing your bit when we live in shared space.

If you get a chance to watch all the keynotes, which I hope you will, you will see 5 very different people in very different jobs/contexts taking different approaches to identifying the value proposition for open.  But none of them are doing it alone. That’s the beauty of the thing.

After you watch Emma’s talk know this: as well as her excellent Shakespeare credentials, Emma is also the woman who helped one of Oxford’s oldest colleges to rethink the power of the portraits on its walls -‘Dead white men’ make way for women at Oxford (Guardian, Sept 14)- and as such , one of my inspirations for The Playfair Steps.

big fish at #OER16

ticketMy keynote is mostly written, I know who I’m going to introduce and where I am chair.  I’m looking forward to see you all there. Got your ticket?

My presentation is called ‘Open with Care: contents may have shifted during flight’.  Emma Smith’s is called ‘Free Willy’. Last year Josie brought the dolphins, this year Emma brings the orca.  A whale of a time will be had.