Open Education, Open Educational Resources,

and their impact on research led teaching in

Classics.

Simon Mahony (University College London)

s.mahony@ucl.ac.uk

With thanks and acknowledgements to

Ulrich Tiedau (University College London)

Davor Orlič (Knowledge for All Foundation Ltd)

Overview and background

• UCLDH approach

• MA/MSc in Digital Humanities

• Open Education Resources in DH

• Changing practices

• Changing culture

• Possible ways forward

• Questions about discipline specific approaches

• Focus on Classics

• Note: the URLs are all live in the screenshots if you wish to follow any.

UCLDH

What we do:

Teaching & Learning

• A new interdisciplinary degree

exploring the intersection of digital

technologies, humanities scholar-

ships and cultural heritage

• MA/MSc Digital Humanities,

launched in 2011/12

• Substantial amount of the

core materials released as

Open Educational Resources

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dhoer

OER Digital Humanities (DHOER)

• The DHOER project is creating Open Educational Resources

(OER) from a comprehensive range of introductory materials

in Digital Humanities, making them freely available to anyone

• As well as supporting the Digital Humanities, the DHOER

project will benefit many cognate disciplines, including the whole

spectrum of the Arts and Humanities, Cultural Heritage, Information

Studies, Library Studies, and Computer Science.

Open Agenda

‘Open access stands for unrestricted access

and unrestricted reuse. Paying for access to

content makes sense in the world of print publishing,

where providing content to each new reader requires the production of an

additional copy, but online it makes much less sense to charge for

content when it is possible to provide access to all readers anywhere in

the world.’

Public Library of Science (www.plos.org/about/open-access)

Milestones in OER development

• 1998 – Open Content Initiative

• 2000 – UNESCO conference

• 2002 – MIT OpenCourseWare

• 2002 – Creative Commons (licences released)

• 2006 – OU OpenLearn [UK]

• 2007 – Cape Town Open Educational Declaration

• UK JISC/HE Academy OER

• 2009/10 – Pilot Programme [UK]

• 2010/11 – JISC/HE Academy OER phase 2 [UK]

• 2011/12 – JISC/HE Academy OER phase 3 [UK]

Milestones in Open Access

2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)

2003 Bethesda Statement on OA Publishing

2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to

Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

OER Digital Humanities (DHOER)

• UKOER II new release strand, HE Academy and JISC funded

• Teaching and learning materials from a range

of existing modules

• Introductions into the field, topics and methodology of DH

• Emphasis on the acquisition of practical and professionally relevant

skills

• JISC strand

• Also looking at the impact of digital resources on society

• User studies

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/oer/projects

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/alternative-languages/OER/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/support/cpd4he

DHOER: Digital Humanities OER

• Creating OERs

• Range of teaching materials

• Relevant to Digital Humanities and beyond

• Each available as full module or individual objects

• Granular approach

Packaging teaching resources

Levels of granularity

• Full module

• Individual lecture

• Seminar with discussion topics and readings

• Learning objects

• Practical exercises

• Worksheets and handouts

DHOER

Open Educational Resource

versus

OERs as learning objects

Introducing ‘Micro OERs’

Sustaining OERs

• Investment

• Academic culture

• Format suitable for re-purposing

• Size suitable for re-purposing

Widening the reach of OERs

Making OERs free online does NOT make

them available to all.

‘It is not technologies with inherent pedagogical qualities that

triumph in distance education but technologies which are

generally available to citizens’

(Keegan, How Successful Is Mobile Learning? 2008)

Further issues

• Context of a single OER?

• Adequate and relevant metadata

• Discoverability

• No standard for classification

• Assessment: credit-bearing module?

• Localisation

• Cultural differences

• Learning styles / layouts / graphics / symbols

• Ownership / relationship

• Sustainability

Growth of knowledge

• Teaching materials are improved

• Becomes and iterative cycle

• Peer review of materials

• Returned with improvements and acknowledgement

• Digital Humanities methodology

• Equal partnerships in research and teaching

• Arts, Humanities and Technology

http://itunes.ucl.ac.uk/

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/courses

VideoLectures.NET

A global web portal for

high-definition academic videos

United Nations and UNESCO award

for the Best Educational Product of the Decade

'one of the most outstanding examples of creative

and innovative e-Content in the World in the last

decade’

VideoLectures.NET

‘The largest OER free and open access digital library of

academic talks’

Content built up via European research projects based in Computer

Science fields. Other content from OCW partners.

850 events

15,236 lectures

17,503 videos

Licenses: CC-NC-ND

http://videolectures.net/

With thanks and acknowledgement

Davor Orlic

davor.orlic@ijs.si

Knowledge for All Foundation Ltd

Languages & the Media, Berlin

November 23rd 2012

http://www.languages-media.com

Coursera MOOC (Winter 2011)

‘Introduction to Databases’

108,000 accounts

475,000 assignment submissions

3,150,000 video views (heavy use of video)

(Jennifer Widom, Stanford. Module coordinator))

LEARNERS PREFER VIDEO?

YouTube (100 hours uploaded per minute)

MOOCs (3 million accounts)

INITIATIVES AROUND VIDEO?

Open content: OCW (20,000 courses)

Massive lecture capture system: Opencast Matterhorn project (700

Universities)

Massive portals specialized in video lectures: VLN, Polimedia (25.000

academic videos)

transLectures

To develop innovative, cost-effective solutions to

produce accurate transcriptions and translations in

VideoLectures

Make educational repositories truly accessible both to

speakers of different languages and to people with

disabilities.

transLectures status

•TRANSCRIPTION (EML)

•the complete transcription of English lectures took 45000 hours

(2 months running parallel)

•TRANSLATION (XRCE, UPV, RWTH)

•different segmentation strategies for transcription and translation

being considered

•INTELLIGENT INTERACTION WITH USERS

•experimental protocol to evaluate intelligent interactive approaches

for users

•INTEGRATION

•first steps on integration software into VL, Polimedia, Matterhorn

•EVALUATION

•human evaluations for the second round of evaluation

The tools as getting there: Develop open tools for transcription and translation

Deploy the tools in the Opencast Matterhorn system

Think of a business plan and ideas on a spin-off

Provide optimisations for existing languages

Plan to extend the language set to Chinese, Hindi and others

Is intelligent interaction a realistic concept?

More focus on English into Slovenian translations (Davor)

Building a community of students for evaluation

In the context of OERs:

• Videos that can be cut and mashed up

• Small bite sized videos

• Display in any platform

• Freely and openly available

• Text translated into many languages

http://blog.videolectures.net/micro-open-educational-resources-micro-oers-are-a-novel-concept-in-online-education/

OER and Open Resources for Classics

The two main UK repositories:

Jorum

Jisc funded repository

HumBox

Jisc/HE Academy OER Pilot Programme

http://find.jorum.ac.uk/find?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=classics&button=

http://humbox.ac.uk/

http://humbox.ac.uk/cgi/search/simple?q=classics&_action_search=Search&_order=bytitle&basic_srchtype=ALL&_satisfyall=ALL&_default_action=search

http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Educational_Resources

Community approach

Digital Classicist

Jiscmail-hosted email list

Classics more generally

Classics (Liverpool) Jiscmail

OER-DISCUSS Jiscmail

Social media

Classics International (Facebook)

Twitter

Broad based vs granular approach

OpenCourseWare (OCW)

MIT

Coursera

OERs

‘Micro OERs’

OER as Learning objects

vs

Open Learning Programmes

Not a competition, just different things.

MIT OpenCourseWare

Coursera

OpenLearn

Open Access resources

http://search.mit.edu/search?site=ocw&client=mit&getfields=*&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet=http://ocw.mit.edu/search/google-ocw.xsl&proxyreload=1&as_dt=i&oe=utf-8&departmentName=web&filter=0&courseName=&q=classics&btnG.x=0&btnG.y=0

http://search.mit.edu/search?site=ocw&client=mit&getfields=*&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet=http://ocw.mit.edu/search/google-ocw.xsl&proxyreload=1&as_dt=i&oe=utf-8&departmentName=web&courseName=&q=classical+studies&btnG.x=0&btnG.y=0

http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/classical-studies

OpenLearn

Sign in an register for courses?

There is much more.

Many resources freely available CC BY NC SA

Particularly language learning

Taster Materials for Classical Studies

Ancient Olympics

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/classical-studies/tasters.shtml

http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/classical-studies/getting-started-on-classical-latin/content-section-0

OER Search engine?

Xpert: http://xpert.nottingham.ac.uk/

Search: Classics

Retrieves Oxford podcasts

But

Search: DHOER

No results (so not universal)

http://xpert.nottingham.ac.uk/scoreresults.php?keywords=classics&search_all.x=0&search_all.y=0

Oxford University

Podcasts

What is Tragedy?

Beazley Archive

Faculty Classics

Most from Jisc/HE OER Strand 1

and hence CC licenced

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/what-tragedy

Discoverability and more

Consistent and appropriate metadata

Appropriate open licence

Repurposable

Open format

Some new initiatives

Perseids: http://sites.tufts.edu/perseids

a collaborative editing platform for source documents

Alpheios: http://alpheios.net

reading tools for Latin, ancient Greek and Arabic

Iliados: http://iliados.com

grammatical and syntactical searches on the

Perseus Greek Treebank

Leipzig e-Humanities: http://www.e-humanities.net

Tools & resources under development

Source code freely available and reusable

Coda

Reflection on our teaching practice

Digital Humanities Pedagogy

Pedagogy of Digital Classics?

What skills do our students need?

What is the best way for them to attain them?

http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Educational_Resources

Reaching beyond the already converted

• Senate House, London (SAS)

• Institute Historical Research

• Digital History

• Institute of English Studies

• Digital Text and Scholarship

• Institute Classical Studies

• Digital Classicist

• OERs for Classics (Berlin DCB & Nottingham ClassAss)

References:

Marie-Claire Beaulieu (Tufts):

‘Teaching with the Perseids Platform: Tools and methods’

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2013-08mb.html

Mahony, Tiedau and Sirmons, 'Open access and online teaching

materials for digital humanities', in Warwick, Terras, & Nyhan eds.

(2012). Digital Humanities in Practice. Facet.

Davor Orlič (2013) ‘Micro Open Educational Resources (Micro OERs) are

a novel concept in online education’, videoLectures.net:

http://blog.videolectures.net/micro-open-educational-resources-micro-

oers-are-a-novel-concept-in-online-education/

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dhoer/