Cambridge 2012

Cambridge 2012 took place at Queens' College Cambridge, UK and combined the forces with the OpenCourseware Consortium to form a truly global conference. The conference's theme was, Innovation and Impact: Openly collaborating to Enhance Education. However, below I have listed the main themes for me and the presentations that illustrated them. 


1. Philanthropic approaches, community sharing and empowerment 


It takes two - Delivering public health education to students in low/middle income countries: the effects of OCW/OER on teaching practices People's Open Access Education Initiative, UK - a project in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, where open source and open courseware has been used to develop a Masters in Public Health, for public health practitioners in remote and disadvantaged areas across the world. This is taught by volunteers and  learning outcomes and assessment are based on learning using asynchronous discussions

An overview of the challenges of the Bridge To Success project that takes UK open content to targeted US students - a partnership between The Open University (OU) (UK), Anne Arundel Community College (AACC), the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA), focusing on learner capability, confidence and motivation through the acquisition of learning skills and core maths. . The Bridge to Success (B2S) content aims to allow remediation and practice, accelerate time to completion and open up pathways to skill as well as prepare for college placements.   B2S is contributing to the American Graduation Initiative outlined by President Obama in 2009 which aims for all US citizens to obtain at least one year of post-secondary education or career training.

We'll always have PARiS…. (Promoting Academic Resources in Society) – extending OER into non-traditional areas - Nottingham Trent University & The Ear Foundation, partnership project has developed OERs to improve the education of parents, teachers and care givers specifically focusing on cochlear implants

2. Student skills development, digital literacy & user generated content

Exploring OER rich media reuse through social media content communities - 

Film and audiovisual media open archives as OER: Sarah Atkinson - The Sp-ark archive is an interactive online project based on the multi-media archive of filmmaker Sally Potter. Users are able to view and annotate materials using the sites ‘pathways’ feature, other users are then able to access the annotated pathways, which lead to a deeper engagement with the materials. This lends itself to the critical and analytical study of primary materials intrinsic to both undergraduate and postgraduate study within numerous disciplines. This provides an opportunity to create a user community around the resources. To examine its potential this case study uses groups to demonstrate, explore and evaluate the potential of the archive as a teaching, learning and assessment device. The groups also collaboratively generate, develop and share open educational resources around the content of the archive.

Found Footage and the ready-made: Chris Follows - Addressing the challenge of developing complex media rich content, through media content communities within practice based Art and Design subjects including SCORE research, ALTO UK (JISC UK OER programme), http://process.arts.ac.uk and the DIAL project (digital Integration into arts learning) part of the JISC UK Developing digital literacies programme.

How OERs can help a Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subject Area - Quantitative Social Science - Jackie Carter - Use of real data to develop students' statistics skills 

E-Assessment, OERs and Learning: exploring a relationship of dependence and mutual benefit Hatzipanagos, S. This was a comparative study of using assessment in distance learning. It argued that assessment needs to be integrated into learning and teaching in distance learning courses and that assessment in the context of OER is the process of evaluating knowledge skills and competencies gained through OER. However, the presentation observed that OERs are quite transmissive and that there is an absence of formal and informal assessment practices either formative or summative. The challenge is how e-assessment components and tools can be embedded effectively in OER, there is a need to look at establishing disciplinary approaches in OERs and how they relate to the context of e-assessment. There is also sometimes the issue that integrated OERs are linked to proprietary resources. The research found that self assessment is prominent feature together with wrap around activities.

3. OER Scholarship & Research 

UNESCO Chair in OER  established in 2010 at the Open University of the Netherlands (The Netherlands)

OER Knowledge Cloud -  has been established to identify, collect, preserve and disseminate available documents of enduring value to researchers, industry, government, scholars, writers, historians, journalists and informal learners.

Open Education Evidence Hub - the building of a living map of the OER world  

4. Resource, creation, discovery, delivery & promotion 

Connecting the Dots will cover the Saylor Foundation’s open content aggregation process for free college-level courses - To address the content issues generated by navigating the OER landscape such as, disaggregation, lack of context, narrow subject range, varied quality, reinvention and reproduction, the Saylor Foundation, has developed a structured content curation process where practitioners vet,contextualise and add existing resources. 

Using Open Technologies to Support a Healthy OER Life Cycle - Vivien Rolfe, De Montfort University, UK - Simon Griffin, Griffin Internet Marketing, UK - Strategies for promoting OER resources such as, search engine optimised websites, social networking, mediated by  https://posterous.com/, which were used to promote the Virtual Analytic Laboratory  SCOOTER; Sickle Cell Open and Health and Life Science Open Educational Resources (HALS). Also taking into account producing files in  multiple file types to aid reuse. 

The Evolvement of Open Educational Resources Ming Nie, University of Leicester, UK - the findings of the EVOL-OER Project, reveal that improving the quality of teaching materials, saving time and scarcity of resources are key drivers for reuse. Changing academic culture and practice, time investment and lack of support are considered key challenges in reuse. Initial evidence also shows that reusers tend to make minimum changes to the original OERs. Their reuse behaviours range from use ‘as is’ to minor changes, such as changing branding, adding acknowledgements, creating an index, removing or replacing activities, and updating content and context. Size, granularity, format of the OER, lack of technical skills and support have so far been reported as the key factors affecting the level of modification. Differences in motivation, challenges and strategies for reuse have been found in different countries. For example, in African countries, lack of access to quality resources is prominent. Limited access to computers and poor internet connections present difficulties and have an impact on the way the reused resources are shared back to the community.

What HumBox did next: real stories of OERs in action from users of a teaching and learning repository for the humanities Kate Borthwick, University of Southampton, UK - The evaluation of the use of Humbox  Southampton's Humanities repository, has found that being part of a sharing community is an important driver for delivering OERs  

All the resources can be found on Cambridge 12 web site and I would like to acknowledge the authors of the abstracts from the above presentations from which I took some of the content. For me this was one of the most welcoming  conferences I have been to, I particularly liked the international perspective and meeting individuals from such varied educational backgrounds, as well as, hearing the stories of how integrating OERs into practice has helped communities overcome significant challenges and barriers. For me, we should never lose sight of the the potential of democratising education via OER and finding ways to enfranchise the disenfranchised, I leave the last words to Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education University of California "Imagine a world in which everyone could learn anything, anywhere, anytime for free".

Authentic activities rule OK!

I attended our institutional Annual Learning and Teaching Conference last week and it was interesting to see a variety of authentic formative and summative assessment activities. In an attempt to move away from just focusing on essays and final reports lecturers are considering different ways students might communicate in the real world, both verbally and in writing, and have tried to address this by integrating authentic assessment practices. Here are some of the examples presented:

• Psychology: submitting articles to a trade magazine; writing a journal digest; organising a student conference with student presentations
• Sociology: constructing a book proposal and submitting to a publisher 
• Art & Design: contributing content to an open web site & sharing under a creative commons license 

These examples appeared to illustrate, Meyers and McNulty's 2009, 5 curriculum design principles

To maximise the quality of student learning outcomes, we, as academics, need to

develop courses in ways that provide students with teaching and learning materials,

tasks and experiences which: 

(1) are authentic, real-world and relevant;

(2) are constructive, sequential and interlinked;

(3) require students to use and engage with progressively higher order cognitive

processes;

(4) are all aligned with each other and the desired learning outcomes; and

(5) provide challenge, interest and motivation to learn (Meyers

 and Nulty, 2009 p. 566)

- which they say were guided by Biggs 3 Presage-Process-Product, 3P, model which, was developed to express the interactions between lecturers and students from the point of view of the expectations that both would have of the teaching and learning process:

http://inclusive-teaching.wikispaces.com/Biggs's+work+1 

As on e-learning developer I think these guiding principles are particularly apt within an online environment where it is so easy to take a transmissional approach to learning and teaching and deliver students with masses of content, colleauges sometimes forget that activities that are undertaken in a face-to-face environment could be transferred to online, in particular the excellent examples listed above.  


References

Noel M. Meyers & Duncan D. Nulty (2009): How to use (five) curriculum design
principles to align authentic learning environments, assessment, students’ approaches to thinking and learning outcomes, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 34:5, 565-577
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02602930802226502

Inclusive Teaching Wiki http://inclusive-teaching.wikispaces.com/

Staff Engagement with e-Learning Support

Staff engagement with e-Learning support I think is one of the biggest challenges to e-Learning practitioners, from a resource perspective it appears to be managing the balance between face-to-face support and online guidance. 

Academic colleagues understandably like face-to-face support as it gives them an opportunity to unpack the issues they want addressing and for those providing support, it gives them the opportunity to illustrate approaches either verbally or by providing specific examples online. However, sometimes providing a solution that somebody can take away within them and use unsupported, can occasionally be difficult and one consultation meeting can turn into many. This has a resource implication for any e-Learning support units, although the outcome will be a very satisfied customer, which is what we are always trying to aim for? Increasingly, e-Learning support is tasked with engaging the many not the few, with limited resources, this means that there needs to be consideration with respect to addressing the issue of  providing good customer support in an efficient manner.  On top of this increasingly, e-Learning support units are developing online guidance with the hope that this will help to ebb some of the face-to-face traffic, however, the challenge here is how to signpost this support and how design it a way that colleagues can easily find what they want.

e-Learning support has to be multifaceted, it may involve a number of services and a number of resources. A couple of years ago I did a masters dissertation  on  the "Influences on the Use of Blended Learning within Learning and Teaching" these were my recommendations. 

Recommendation	Rationale
The University should develop a rewards framework that includes recognition of innovative practice in blended learning:	Presently academic rewards within the University recognise mainly staff research, despite the Dearing Report emphasising the importance of good teaching. Hence, there is more pressure on staff to build their research portfolio than to evidence innovative learning and teaching.
The University should provide business models that relate to teaching staff developing blended learning approaches, which includes consideration with respect to staff time.	The University should provide clearer guidance on how Faculties can facilitate the structuring of staff workloads to integrate the development of blended learning approaches.
The University should focus staff development on the pedagogic approaches to using blended learning.	The University should use a range of mechanisms to enable this, such as, workshops, online training, bespoke training, events and e-learning champions. This should also include easy access to examples of best practice.
The University should provide clearer guidance on how to access support with respect to the use of technology within teaching and implementing blended learning approaches.	The University should clearly disseminate the range of support that is available to staff and how to obtain this support in order to manage staff expectations .
Faculties should carry out an annual skills and attitude survey with respect to the use of technology within learning and teaching and the adoption of blended learning approaches	This should help Heads of Learning and Teaching to develop a picture of how staff are progressing within the Faculty together with identifying attitudinal barriers.

SCORE Workshop New Models for Education and Training built on Open Educational Resources

This is an overview of the presentations at Score's 1 day workshop Anglo-Hispanic "New Models for Education and Training built on Open Educational Resources"  which illustrated how UNED (National Distance Education University) in Spain and the Open University in the UK, are exploring the issues of accreditation and badging via the use of OERs within the context of Open Learning. The main issues that arose from the day were enabling accreditation via the use of OERs, something that is being addressed by the OER University and developing open flexible learning processes within universities that address the challenges that individuals currently face in a complex and unpredictable society.

Innovation in practice at UNED and Centro Superior Para  La Ensenanza Virtual Presenter: Daniel Torres, Director of CSEV

The CSEV purpose is to provide access to its online learning activities to other universities and institutions. To address needs and demands of business and society, via a portfolio of courses and services, which are either open or can be purchased. The CSEV manages educational innovation projects for universities and training insitutions, taking an open and collaborative approach. Stakeholders are involved in each project depending on their availability and interest and innovation is core, their key philosophy with respect to an "Open Innovation Community", is that any community member can be trained, and can contribute and and enrich the community by the adoption of new roles. There are multiple pathways and participants have access to skills that can improve their professional skills, build their businesses and in some situations help them become tutors. The areas that it focuses on are:

• Digital world skills
• Digital skills for entrepreneurs
• Digital skills for teachers 
• Digital skills for internationalization 

Using:

• Open self directed learning
• Massive Online Courses MOOC
• Social Learning
• LMS 

Impact of Open Educational Models On Institutions Antonio Moreira Teixeira Universidade Aberta (Portugal)

The LECH-e Project, Lived Experience of Climate Change E-learning focuses on open educational practices. The presentation argued that there was a limited reuse of OERs, because of quality issues associated with user-generated content, with respect to integrating it within course content. Additionally, there is the challenge of integrating learner generated learning so that it can be included in the formal and qualification processes. The presentation challenged that open educational practices "imply a radical transformation in higher education organisation cultures", such as:

•  de-regulating teacher practice
• looking at new forms of assessment, more outsourcing of teaching and technical work
• establishment of sustainable systems that include low cost education for all 
• the establishing a community of trust with respect to cross-boarder online learning. 

It introduced the concept of an institution without time or space open to anyone who needs to learn and suggested that the challenges educational institutions needed address were:

• linking with a global network of knowledge production, reproduction and transmission - recycling rather than regenerating
• moving away from a factory producing graduates to a learning shop provide access to various types of certification and accreditation and learning outcomes  

New Models at the OU Andrew Law 

The OU is bringing together its services such Learning Space, OU programme web sites e.g Frozen Planet iTunes U etc. so that users can access these resources from one point, Open Learn. The OU's Open Learning/Learning Space is important to the OU and its business model as it ties the social mission of the OU with the business, as it provides users with free access to learning content as well as promoting the OU. The presentation, also, provided an overview of how google search optimisation raised the profile of the OU and the OU's use of analytics for identifying potential students. It concluded by introducing the potential of an incubation service for a small fee where learners can get a taster of a course before signing up. 

Resilience Thinking, Social Learning and Open Innovation Platforms Simon Buckingham Shum, Senior Lecturer in Knowledge Media 

Lord Puttnam OU chancellor has asked if it is time to admit that the current education system is not working and whether there should be a change of emphasis to inspiring children so that they can inspire and challenge us (Introduction to the Learning Futures Programme www.learningfutures.org). Referring to Claxton and Lucas (2009) which questioned the epistemic mentalities and identities that can help people thrive in a complex, changing, ambiguous world, it suggested the problem is that individuals have limited capacity to deal with unprecedented complexity and uncertainty and proposed that society is in a transitional period. It offered an approach to dealing with this situation by changing one element, using OERs as learning resources within the context of open social learning as they are sustainable and resilient. However, even though OERs and open social learning can offer flexible learning opportunities, there is a need to address the issues of credible accreditation and poor feedback on published resources. It suggested that these issues could be addressed with badges initiatives, APEL and the development of a sociaotechnical infrastructure to tie evidence of impact back to an OER, author and consumers. The presentation, also, introduced the soon to launched the OU's Social Learn platform that has the key features of:

• aggregated user profile
• activity-based user defined toolkits
• the look and feel of social media platform 
• is open and interoperable

Learners and educators can make contributions at different levels, such as asking and answering questions, building paths to answering questions, adding reflections, and integrating resources at any of these points. 

The OER University: collaborating, innovating and educating Presenter: Gabi Witthaus, SCORE Fellow, University of Leicester

The OER University  aims to provide free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials with pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognised education institutions. It is rooted in the community service and outreach mission to develop a parallel learning universe to augment and add value to traditional delivery systems in post-secondary education. Through the community service mission of participating institutions it will open pathways for OER learners to earn formal academic credit and pay reduced fees for assessment and credit. (taken from the web site) The founding partners are  Athabasca University, OER Foundation, Otago Polytechnic and the University of Southern Queensland, all the partners are accredited by national accredited bodies. The university addresses the issue of providing access to OERs that do not provide accreditation and as identified by UNESCO,  the large number of adults which are eligible for university but cannot afford it.  The OERu students are, international, a large proportion are in the US, some are potential future fee payers and some are “under-served” adults in the local community. The OERu curriculum sources are produced by individual partner institutions, or via partner collaboration or found elsewhere e.g. Saylor Foundation.  Assessment is delivered via a variety of methods such as, portfolios, challenge exams, assignments and essays, monitored at home exams, workplace assessment and APL. Accreditation and credit transfer, range from learner agreements between partners, which is fairly open to identical outcomes which is less so.  The business model,  for the participating partners includes  increased enrolments;  it is less than 0. 5% of the institutional offerings; cross-subsidising from elsewhere in the institution; government funding or sponsorship; capping the number of students; providing grants for learners.  A range of student support approaches have been presented such as, fee paying one-to-ones; FAQs; social networking platforms; using existing outreach support; workplace mentors; support embedded in the materials and possibly the emergence of student support industry. When asked why partners had joined OERu a number of reasons were given, including, social inclusion, staff development, collaboration,  meeting employer needs and institutional marketing.  

Space the Final Frontier

I may be ranting on about my smartphone for a few posts so be patient with me, I will be just venting until I have completely bonded with it.

Last week I blogged on the purchase of my Wildfire S and getting consumed by the Android's Apps market, over the last week I have managed to drop my rose tinted spectacles. The two most important things about any smartphone is memory and battery life and unfortunately, this phone lacks in both departments. This means it needs charging everyday, my old phone lasted about 3 days so this is a bit of a shock. I have read many an HTC forum and there are some reassurances that this will calm down a bit without having turn everything off that makes the phone a smart phone - which some forums have recommended!

However, my most frustrating battle has been excavating phone storage space. Episodically I have had to free up the cache, contemplate whether I really need Google Docs as it uses 5mb and/or Tweetdeck - which I use on the a daily basis and was excited about accessing on my new phone. My additional frustration is not being able to remove apps to memory card to free up phone storage or even delete the app completely because it comes with the phone...rrr...rrr.... So much for my aspiration for new phone being my 3rd work station after the office and home.

You are all probably scratching your head and thinking why did she not go for a more powerful phone or even the iPhone. I still have an issue about buying into expensive contracts but I do wonder if I should have gone for the Samsung Galaxy S2, but it was too late and I didn't really like the thought of having to carry around something the size of a family size chocolate bar, although that is a slight exaggeration as they are not that big. Also, I had quite a scare a couple of months ago trying to synch my friend's iPhone in an attempt at showing her how easy it is and getting thrown into back-up hell.

I may have bitten off my nose to spite my face. On the positive side dealing with problems enhances your knowledge and having to deal with these issues has meant I have become pretty familiar with the phone's workings in the last week and smartphones in general.  And I did have a bonding moment at the weekedn when I watched Project Runway All Stars on YouTube.

Interestingly, I was listening to the Archers on Sunday heard Pip getting a smartphone for her birthday, which she gleefully received, saying lots of people at college had one and you can get loads of apps for it. The first thought that entered my head was, which smartphone is it, does it have enough memory for all the apps Pip wants, will there be an Info-Archer next week that enlightens the listener to the considerations of buying a smartphone...it could go something like

Ruth: How's your new phone Pip?
Pip: It's great mum...it's just that I can't really download all of the apps I wanted because I don't have enough internal storage on the phone and some apps you can't put on your memory card, so I have had to really think about which apps would be nice to have and which ones I really need...but that's ok it is still a great present
Ruth: I think that's something to remember in the future your dad and I did quite a lot of research on what would be the best phone within our budget but nobody mentioned that some apps would clog up your phone's memory...Josh is now hassling us about a phone for his birthday so I suppose we will be more knowledgeable next time

...Another thought that also entered my head if it is a high spec phone how could they afford it with their slurry problem!

Entering the Smart Phone World

So my Sony Ericsson final died on me, my attempt to fix it failed, the phone repair person said it was a problem with the operating system and too difficult to repair. After procrastination, research and decision, I finally opted for a HTC Wildfire S on contract - still not being sure what side of the Apple fence to stand on and wanting to gently wade into the Smartphone water - also, historically I have been a little bit clumsy with phones and didn't want something too big and expensive.

I have spent the weekend familiarising myself with the phone and have already found out I cannot access BBC iplayer - which I moaned about for 1 hr, but would I want to watch programmes on such a small screen? I then started to do my Android app shop - I was a bit disappointed I could not find one for Google Scholar, but stocked up on my usual diet of  Google docs and reader, Tweetdeck and Grooveshark. I have yet to try out viewing office docs and pdfs but that's next. It's odd once you start entering the App market it is cognitive chain reaction with respect to what you should get next, and then you start thinking about how do you create an app and how useful an app for feedback, assessments would be.  

I presume once you enter the smart phone world there is no going back as you start to think how creative you can be with mobile learning in general. The challenge is developing mobile learning that is not exclusive, using flash that is not supported by cheaper models, providing apps that are only Apple compatible. It is a challenge eLearning Developers have had for some time - how many media formats to do you provide and which ones, when do you stop supporting a format, ensuring that learning is inclusive.  

eLearning Models Out of Fashion?

Presently I am participating in a online course on emoderating, the course refers to Salmon's eModerating model and it got me thinking about eLearning models, in particular the e-Learning desk study in 2004 and a face -to-face course I ran and helped todesign about 6 years ago on Designing for eLearning. So I excavated my original slides.

The JISC Deskstudy said:

There are really no models of elearning per se…only e-enhancements of models of learning…that is to say using technology to achieve better learning outcomes

In other words the models were based on existing learning theories. I presented three models:

    Laurillard's Conversational Framework
    Salmon's Etivities Approach
    Collis & Moonen's Contributing Student Model

This seems like such a long time ago and although the work within these models is excellent I did wonder whether calling them models was a way to give eLearning an academic back bone. The word model at first to me seems inflexible, the definition of model according to the online oxford dictionary is " a thing used as an example to follow or imitate". But this has certainly been the case with Salmon's 5 step model (and Salmon does call it a model), I have certainly seen successful application in online course design but mainly in courses about eLearning less so in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in other disciplines. I do think Salmon's "model" does illustrate the skills teachers need to have to effectively moderate an online discussion even if the model is not implemented in its entirety and you could also argue if you are only using it to identify skills, you are not really using the model at all, and this is an affordance of the model.

I  then thought maybe template is a better term but the dictionary definition of this "is something that serves as a model to copy and illustrate" so we are back at square one again. Framework was my next choice "a basic structure underlying a system, concept or text" - but is that just a model again?  Then finally I thought pattern which is, an "example for others to copy" - another model? Then I started to think about whether I would use the word model in my professional practice now, I certainly have done in the past but I am not sure this engages academic colleagues, who usually present you with a problem and want you to come up with a solution, or want an e-learning solution that addresses learning and teaching outcomes and a pedagogic approach. I would only introduce a model if I thought it was congruent with the learning and teaching strategy, as is the case with any e-learning activity, which goes back to the JISC Deskstudy statement:

There are really no models of elearning per se…only e-enhancements of models of learning…that is to say using technology to achieve better learning outcomes