Developing patterns in technical approaches for Open Educational Resources

R. John Robertson (1) and Lorna Campbell (1), & Phil Barker (2)JISC CETIS. Presentation at OER 11, Manchester, May 11th 2011

1 Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement, University of Strathclyde, 2

Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Individual Images in this presentation may have different licences .

overview

• Some Context• Big and Little OER• Global Patterns• UKOER Patterns• Possible Trends

Context: JISC CETIS• JISC CETIS is a JISC

Innovation Support Centre. We provide advice to the UK Higher and Post-16 Education sectors on the development and use of educational technology and standards through: – participating in standards

bodies – providing community forums for

sharing experience about educational technologies and interoperability standards

– providing strategic advice to JISC and supporting JISC development programmes

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Context: UK OER and more

• UKOER programme: Phase 2 of the HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resources (OER) programme runs between August 2010 and August 2011 (£5 million funding)

• Other OER work in the UK and globally as well as other related technical developments

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Is there a sustainable and consistently successful technical approach to sharing

OER?

• Option A– Yes, use your

(institutional) repository and /or VLE

• Option B– Yes, use your

(personal) blog

Big and Little OER

• In the wider OER community there are two distinct approaches to sharing open content for education.

• Weller characterises these as Big and Little OER (http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2009/12/the-politics-of-oer.html)

Big and Little OER

• Big OER– Institutional effort– Often polished and high

quality– High reputation– Technical approach likely

to use centrally managed system; favours CMS/VLE/Repository

• Little OER– Individual effort– Often ‘as is’ or ‘work in

progress’– Personal and word of

mouth reputation – Technical approach likely

to use tools to hand which author can use; likely blogs, wikis, slideshare

Global patterns – ‘Big’

• Emergence of ‘support’ communities and beginning of consideration of accreditation (e.g. OpenStudy for OpenCourseWare; parts of P2PU; OERU)– Approach is web scale

hosted communities creating or supporting given courses

Global patterns – ‘Big’

• Federal US Government Initiatives around open content– Focus on sharing of content

to meet workforce needs– Interest in usage data –

Learning Registry work to aggregate and share data to support discovery services

– Point of interest: as yet unknown how particular discovery services deal with packaged content

Global patterns – ‘Big’

• OpenTextBooks– US and wider interest in

‘tangible’ OER– Services like

Flatworldknowledge (semi-commercial model) offering online adapt your own book tools

– But some initiatives such as opencourselibrary taking a very flexible technical approach

Global Patterns ‘Little’

• Use of blogs, YouTube, and other platforms to share resources and make tools– Professional networks

• OL Daily

– OSS• Open Attribute

Global Patterns ‘Little’

• Open Courses like:– Ds106 and other MOOCs

• Using existing tools• # and blogs• Innovative outputs,

process, and forms of feedback and assessment. Infrastructure not innovative

Middle OER?

• Initiatives like UKOER– model of institutional

support to allow individuals to release OER using institutional tools

– model of Institutional release of OER using 3rd party tools

Phase 1 technical overview

Phase 2 technical overview

Provisional differences in UKOER 1 &2

• Talking about tech issues less (Strand A+B)

• More concentration of platform and standards choices

• Many projects less concerned with tech choices – using whatever is to hand– In particular increased use of

institutionally supported systems

• Slight shift towards wordpress, drupal, rss– Lower use of externally hosted

web 2.0 platforms

• Less content creation (in scope of call)– Less focus on file format

• Much less use of QTI• Outside of collections strand

very little technical development

• Collection projects tending to build destination sites

• Development in collections stand largely around existing platforms not form scratch

Observations from OER hackday & bids

• What people worked on:– Wordpress widgets– 2 different Bookmarking

tools– Google CSE based course

catalogue– A windows install packager

for OERbit (drupal based OER production tool)

– Extracting paradata (attention metadata) from mediawiki

– Data visualisations

• Patterns– Mostly built in existing

tools and platforms– Lots of ideas that we didn’t

have time to work on

• Mini-projects– Open process– 2 bids funded

• a focus on users• online tools – bookmarking

and citation

Provisional Trends

• Beginning to see more examples of online and distributed educational or edu support opportunities outside of institutions or alongside course offerings – Web scale– Destination more than

‘sharing’

Provisional Trends

• OER release projects rightly focusing on content rather than dissemination mechanisms

• Accreditation is the coming challenge – work on badges and eportfolios likely to be of growing interest

Strategic Balance

• If you want to release content stick with safe technical choices– Plenty of existing tools;

whether taking a big or little OER approach, use what you already have or have access too

• If you want to innovate (increasingly outside of most institutional work)– Think web scale

• Xpert...

– Build on existing platforms where possible

• WordPress• Wikis• Office tools

Sustainability• Funded projects

– Tech innovation not sustainable as such but :

• funded to prove possible lower cost alternatives...

• funded to embed or demonstrate infrastructure

• working with existing tools potentially taps into existing community

• Self running projects– Small scale voluntary efforts to

address specific tasks can be very effective

• Open Attribute• working with existing tools can utilise

existing community

Questions

• phil.barker@hw.ac.uk

• robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk

• lmc@strath.ac.uk

• http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/topic/oer

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