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Research into OERs and librarians – we need your help

As a librarian and/or someone with an interest in open educational resources, I am inviting you to participate in our research, which is investigating how people think about and use different types of online resources.
This research is being carried out by The Open University (UK) in collaboration with Co-PILOT (https://delilaopen.wordpress.com/project-co-pilot/), and is funded by the Hewlett Foundation in order to support future excellence in open education. The research data produced by the project will help people around the world make more informed decisions about online teaching and learning.
We would very much value your participation in our research. To find out more about our project, and to take part in the questionnaire, please visit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/OERRH_Librarian
Thank you in advance for taking the time to tell us about your use of online resources.

Best wishes
Beck Pitt

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Survey on use of open educational resources

(sent on behalf of Dr Beck Pitt, OER Research Hub, Open University, UK)

As a librarian and/or someone with an interest in the Co-PILOT project and open educational resources, I am writing to invite you to participate in our research, which is investigating how people think about and use different types of online resources.

This research is being carried out by The Open University (UK) in collaboration with Co-PILOT (https://delilaopen.wordpress.com/project-co-pilot/),  and is funded by the Hewlett Foundation in order to support future excellence in open education. The research data produced by the project will help people around the world make more informed decisions about online teaching and learning.

We would very much value your participation in our research. To find out more about our project, and to take part in the questionnaire, please visit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CoPILOT_OERRH

Thank you in advance for taking the time to tell us about your use of online resources. 

Best wishes

Dr Beck Pitt
Research Assistant: OER Research Hub (http://oerresearchhub.org/)
Institute of Educational Technolog
The Open Universit
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA, UK

Jorum’s Information Literacy collection needs your help!

Recently Jorum created a new and customised Research Data Management (RDM) collection within their collection, which was announced last week. The Jorum team has realised the existing collections were not an adequate location to host these resources, and that the same is equally true for resources relating to Information Literacy and Skills. Therefore, Jorum is planning to create an equivalent Information Literacy and Skills collection that will sit alongside our other collections.

To do this, Jorum need the input of the IL-OER community and beyond to create collection-specific description options. The new RDM collection has its own description fields in addition to the existing fields that we offer for normal Jorum deposit:

Existing Jorum fields:

•  Title
• Description
• Type
• Language
• Keywords
• Resource duration
• Data of Creation
• Author
• Publisher

RDM extra fields (full list attached):

• Subject (Based on the 20 JACS 3.0 subject classifications plus a non-subject specific option)
• Audience (e.g. Postgraduate Researcher; Research staff; Librarian/Information Professional; Tenured researcher; support staff and more)
• Skills (based on the Researcher Development framework these included e.g. Project planning; Creation and collection; Ethics & Data Protection; Storage and preservation and more)
• Ability level (Introductory; Intermediary; Advanced)
• Delivery (Classroom-based courses; Individual tuition; Online courses; Training materials)
• Range (e.g. Department; Discipline; Institution; National/regional and more)

These extra fields are intended to improve description and hence discoverability of these resources and Jorum wants something similar for the new Information Literacy and Skills collection. The new RDM fields fit well in an Information Literacy and Skills collection but IL terms would be needed for each. Some terms will be relevant, but some will not, especially for the Subject, Audience and Skills fields. The Sconul Seven Pillars of Wisdom could be the basis for the Skills options. But the Audience is likely to be much wider and would certainly include more than just Higher Education, which will impact the Subject choices offered.

Siobhan Burke from Jorum has therefore requested that you get in touch with her for suggestions regarding the fields and their possible options and/or changes to the fields.  You can use the  spreadsheet with IL Suggestions for Metadata fields and terms to indicate which terms seem sensible or not as well as adding any new terms you think are relevant. The numbers should be similar for reasons of efficiency and usefulness when it comes to depositing in Jorum, so please do bear this is mind.

We hope this will spark a lot of discussion but also we hope we can come to an agreement so that Jorum can make this collection available to you all as soon as possible.

Taking off with CoPILOT: our first workshop at the University of Surrey

The first (of many, we hope) CoPILOT workshop took place on the 30^th May at the University of Surrey.  This was the first event aimed at the community of practice we’ve set up in the UK to encourage and support librarians to share their information literacy teaching material.  More information can be found on our wiki at http://iloer.pbworks.com

This workshop was designed to introduce participants to CoPILOT, with some background information on the projects and surveys we’ve run and our aims as a group. Various members of the CoPILOT Committee ran the sessions.   Vivien Sieber then introduced the group to Creative Commons licencing and we had a short activity (run by Anne Pietsch and Marion Kelt) to look at how ‘open’ our library and information literacy teaching practice is.  This was a really useful way of self-auditing practice and getting people to think about how they could improve the way they work with open educational resources.

We also had Sarah Currier from Jorum (www.jorum.ac.uk) talking via Adobe Connect about updates to the repository.  She joined us again later in the hands-on workshop to talk through both finding resources on Jorum and uploading your own content.

Another CoPILOTer, Helen Howard, also joined us remotely to talk through how her institution, the University of Leeds, has introduced an Open Educational Resources policy, which was developed in the library.

We had around 35 participants on the day and we’re now collecting feedback from them.  It was our inaugural event, so we’re looking to tweak the programme and make improvements for the next iteration later in the year.  Verbal feedback on the day was positive and it was great to meet so many like minded people from all over the South East of England and beyond and to hear their thoughts on sharing their teaching material openly.

Please go to the CoPILOT SlideShare page http://www.slideshare.net/UKCoPILOT to see some of the slides from the day.  For further information you can follow us on Twitter @CoPILOT2013, visit the wiki or join our mailing list at IL-OERS@jiscmail.ac.uk

CO-PILOT strategy for sharing IL resources as OERs

As part of the CO-PILOT project Nancy and I have written a strategy for sharing information literacy resources as OERs internationally. This document is now available online and is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. It is based on our experiences of developing an online community of practice and includes tips for success.

Finding, sharing and creating OERs for information literacy – a free workshop

The CoPILOT committee have organised their first event on the 30th May which will be at the university of Surrey. It’s a free workshop on finding, creating and using open educational resources for information literacy. Places are booking up fast so if you would like to come see the booking page for more details. The event is being organised by the CoPILOT committee who are now a sub group of the CILIP Information Literacy Group.

CoPILOT workshops

Nancy and I gave two workshops before Easter at the LILAC conference at the University of Manchester and at the OER conference at the University of Nottingham. Nick Sheppard wrote up our session at OER13 on the official blog. Our slides from LILAC13 are on their website. In both cases we wanted to find out from participants how a community of practice for sharing IL resources might work in practice. The findings will feed into the work of the CoPILOT committee who are working to set this up in the UK. CoPILOT is now a sub-group of the CILIP Information Literacy Group and we have an enthusiastic group who are helping us with this endeavour. More soon but do have a look at the IL-OER wiki we have set up.

CoPILOT Project case study now complete

Nancy and I were asked to produce a case study as part of the JISC / HEA funded project CoPILOT, which we worked on from October – December 2012. The project looked at whether we could build an community of practice to share information literacy OERs. We used some of the resources we converted to OER as part of the DELILA project.

The platform we chose was the UNESCO WSIS Knowledge Communities platform. We have a community for sharing information literacy OERs, which is on going, so if you are interested then please do sign up.

The CoPILOT case study is now available online and is also on the HEA website.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 4,200 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 7 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.