The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.
Today I spoke at the 25th Heron User Group meeting with June Hedges (UCL) and Donya Rowan (university of Derby) about our experiences of working on an OER project. We focused on the copyright issues that arose during the projects, which were all turning existing content into an OER. We came up with a number of issues including the difficulties of third party content in teaching materials. I spoke about DELILA and the experience of removing content from our digital and information literacy resources due to copyright. There were a number of common themes that arose in our talks, such as the time consuming nature of clearing content which is often largely decorative. It was also suggested that librarians could compile a list of databases that allow screenshots to be used and licensed under creative commons. This sounds like a useful subject for a wiki to combine our knowledge in this area. Finally we concluded that OERs were a good way of engaging academics about copyright issues. They are also a great way of finding resources to improve your teaching and I have actually made use of some of UCL’s resources when teaching on our PGCert.
Today I’m at Senate House for the Centre for Distance Education conference. I’ll be running a workshop on OERs based on experiences of the DELILA project with colleagues from Kings and UoL. We are looking at the opportunities and challenges of OERs specifically in a distance education context. I’ll add the presentation to this blog later.
At the OER programme meeting the 2nd session was a ‘World Café activity’ in which there were 5 areas of discussion, and participants circulated. A few ideas which stood out:
1) Benefits and evidence of OER use and re-use
- Benefits include multi-use, richness, reach etc
- It’s easy to get download data but what does that tell us?
- There might be a dichotomy between encouraging open practice, and trying to record and formalize the collection of data on use
2) OERs across sectors
- HE is generally perceived as an authority stamp
- Sectors have v different business models eg in FE local competition is critical; in cultural heritage OERs can be perceived as a threat – as content can be commercialized
- When OERs are used as promotion – snippets to draw people in, there can be a tension as an institution seeks to ‘control’ OERs.
3) Institutional support practices
- Reward and recognition is critical to further development
- OERs not viewed as business as usual
- Institutional policies can be a barrier as developments become too formalized – and can have negative influence on sharing and networks
4) Benefits and business models
- It is possible to open up degrees eg level 1
– pay for the exam only; level 2
– pay for the course content; level 3 – pay for tuition and support – Social benefit? Life-long learning
5) Features of OERs
- Creators need to consider multiple formats etc; to make re-use as easy as possible 1-click access
- Creators need to consider discoverability, metadata levels etc
– users don’t care how they find it
Overall I felt we didn’t get much chance to find out what the other projects had done (apart from what could be gleaned from informal conversations), so I’ve begun to look through the websites of the projects – lists at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer to draw up a table of interested projects with possible OERs for re-use / further investigation. It will be quite subjective, but I will add it to the web-site when finished, and welcome your thoughts on OER projects that particularly stand-out.
Ann-Marie
It was interesting to attend the OER programme meeting last week with about 40 others all involved in phase 2 projects. The day began with a talk by David White (Oxford Brookes) who has just published a study on ‘The value of re-use (of OERs)‘
Some of the things I picked up:
Overall, David suggested that we should continue to evaluate and collate digital resources to scaffold learning; that support in information skills areas should cover using non-conventional sources; and that we should continue to foster a culture of voluntary use and re-use.
Ann-Marie
I’m pleased to announce that the repository that holds all the resources we’ve converted into OERs at LSE is now available. Known provisionally as Learning Resources Online, it has a range of information and digital literacy resources available, for free to download. We’ve used the same code as Birmingham to customise the Eprints software and still have a few teething problems with getting the document preview screen to work, but I couldn’t wait any longer to shout about it. Another nice feature is you can browse the collection by the SCONUL 7 pillars, which we updated to the 2011 pillars last week. Do let us know if you find any resources that you plan to download and use! We hope to be adding more resources in the next few weeks too.
Liz Cleaver and Catherine Robertson presented a paper on DELILA at AISHE 11 (All Ireland Society for Higher Education) in Dublin last week. Numbers at the conference were down this year, but there still about 50 or so people there, and this actually made it easier to chat to colleagues in an informal way. It was a two day conference with a wide range of presentations and there was something for everyone to enjoy.
The conference focuses on teaching and learning and so we had decided to concentrate on speaking about work package 2 – mapping the material to the various frameworks – to show how we had tried to make the material as relevant as possible to the education community. We also talked about the challenges we faced – mostly IPR – as we wanted to inspire discussion. The session was very useful and the audience had very useful comments and had lots of thoughts about IRL issues, both that we encountered and from experience in their own institutions. This was reassuring to hear as at least our IPR challenges weren’t exclusive to UoB and LSE.
The other sessions were also useful as, although not directly related to OERs, it was good to hear about teaching practice from a point of view outside that of the UK and we found. The attendees were all enthusiastic and always interested to hear about DELILA. All in all it was an extremely interesting two days, and a conference which Liz and I would highly recommend to anyone with an interest in teaching and learning
