Key Messages from UNESCO European Regional Consultation #OER #Openscot #Digiscot

I had a moment or two this morning to try out Lumen5  what a cool tool - but I hope you pick up the key messages as well as learning about this new medium

#oereumt UNESCO Regional Consultations for 2nd World #OER Congress 2017 #openscot #digitaldifference

Interview with Joe Wilson
Joe Wilson

Spotted that the papers and all the sessions from the UNESCO #OER Regional Consultations are now up - if you are interested in this important global dimension of learning really worth having a good dig around.  You can get all the key notes here  and if you don't already know about Video Lectures as a platform worth having a look at that too.

Here is me caught on one of the coffee breaks on a sunny balcony over looking Valletta harbour.
Shout out to https://twitter.com/LornaMCampbell whose work I plugged in session but is not mentioned in this edited version.

Main lessons coming out of sessions

1. Open Educational Resources is  a subset of Open Practice
2. That countries need quite clear competency frameworks around digital literacy for learners and for those who work with learners ( teachers , lecturers , trainers , librarians , community education workers , GLAM workers ) which includes an understanding of Creative Commons , open licensing and how to create, publish , find and re-purpose open educational resources and embed this in their practice.
3. That to move on both digital skills and open educational practice there needs to be some quite clear policy drivers - not sector by sector - but from government. To be really effective this can't be from Education Ministry alone it should be seen in broadest context to get both civil society and industry engaged,  they all have things that they can share openly to support learning. But Education Ministry is a good place to start.
4. That there does need to be some sort of technical infrastructure a national repository or another suitable  aggregation, tagging , discovery  tool as a means of  finding and tracking openly available learning materials

Remember too where ever you are in the system you can just share your own learning materials with an appropriate creative commons licence . You don't have to wait for permission to innovate. 

Final call for #OER17: The Politics of Open. Registration closes 16 March 2017

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/scotland/ 

 
This makes a good follow up post to my last one on the UNESCO #OER consultation - I do hope everyone knows that we are all on a journey to a world of much more open practice and collaborative learning . Though I am sure there are a few individuals and institutions who will be determined to keep their knowledge locked up. You'll be wearing a creative commons t-shirt in no time !

Open educational resources are important because they allow freedom of access and enhanced opportunities to learn for all.



https://oer17.oerconf.org

The #OER17 conference takes place in London on 5-6 April, it provides an ideal opportunity for anyone interested in learning more about open resources, policy and practice to connect with experts and enthusiasts. We welcome delegates from all sectors to come and share knowledge and experiences, network and learn. 

 

With keynotes from: Maha Bali, American University in Cairo; Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK; and Diana Arce, Activist Artist and Researcher, Germany, and plenary panel with Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz and Muireann O’Keeffe plus over 100 sessions from the open education community we hope it’s the open education event you can’t miss.

 

The conference will be chaired by social and educational technologist and Wikimedia UK Trustee Josie Fraser, and Alek Tarkowski, Director of Centrum Cyfrowe, co-founder and coordinator of Creative Commons Poland. The conference themes this year are:

 

• Local, national, and international policy and practice
• Institutional/organisational politics
• Participation & social equality
• Open Party

 

Registration closes on the 16 March 2017 and tickets are available for single and two days. For more details visit https://oer17.oerconf.org/registration/

 

#oereumt UNESCO Regional Consultations for 2nd World #OER Congress 2017 #openscot

Europe Regional Consultation on OER 23rd-24th Feb 2017 Valletta

It was a great privilege to be invited as one of 70 participants from 25 countries gathered in Malta  to contribute to the UNESCO European Regional Consultation on Open Educational Resources in Malta. This to shape the inputs for the 2nd World OER Congress to be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia 18th-20th September 2017.  I hope the remaining regional consultations  for the Middle East/North Africa, Africa , Americas and the Pacific Region are as productive as our gathering. The consultation events are ably supported by the Commonwealth of Learning and funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. You too can take part in the consultation by completing http://rcoer.col.org/surveys.html

 The theme of the World OER Congress is #OER for Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education ; From Commitment to Action. This to move the global education system on from the Paris Declaration of 2012 calling on all governments to make a commitment to OER. The aim to use OER policies and practice to meet the United Nations aims of achieving a set of sustainable development goals for Education by  2030.

We were tasked with :

1. Reviewing the progress of OER in Europe since the World OER Congress 2012
2. To identify strategies for maintaining OER
3 Agreeing  a set of action points to be presented at the next Congress in September

Our outputs providing strategies, examples and models for the creation of a sustainable open educational infrastructure and mainstreaming open educational resources will be fed into the Congress but will be published here as they are pulled together and there will be a collection of interviews from the consultation events published here.

I was invited as Co-Founder of Open Scotland and I carefully prepared our inputs with Lorna Campbell my co-conspirator and  Scottish colleagues from the Association of Learning Technology before setting off.

I'll share the key parts of my report here and some reflections from the group I worked with who were tasked to  focus on the barriers to the creation, sharing , use and re-purposing of Open Educational Resources at a national level.

In terms of Scottish approaches,  the formation of Open Scotland and the creation of the Open Scotland Declaration has positioned Scottish Education as thought leaders in building both grass roots support for open educational practice and for encouraging policy shifts at national and institutional level and this is still garnering Scotland and Scottish education with global recognition.

The OEPS project has produced some open assets that could do much to drive open practice across Scotland https://oepscotland.org/resources/open-courses/ While the Open University's broader offering for learners http://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/ offers learners access to a rich set of online courses and allows providers the opportunity to build their own courses on the OU  platform.

There are some other green shoots around the UK. The continued healthy support across the community for conferences like #OER17 , the FELTAG coalition supporting  blended learning and the sharing of developments. Some set backs too,  it is hard as yet to see the new Jisc Content and App Store as a serviceable replacement for JORUM .

However, while Scottish Government investment has been made in the Open University led OEPS project and some large global institutions like Edinburgh University have taken up the challenge to embed both open educational resources and a broader set of open educational practices across their operations for the public good and some others notably Glasgow Caledonian University are forging ahead with policies that will support OER, momentum is slow.

Why is the case - these are my own thoughts on Scottish Landscape and updates the last review of Scottish activity from October 2016.

Some of the global arguments for the adoption of open educational practices and resources do not have the same traction in Scotland. Scottish Education is not a text book driven system in Universities, Colleges or Schools - so the economic case for the adoption of Open Textbooks or more open practice around the development and sharing of resources does not have the resonance it might have in other countries where national administration's buy text books.

The levers in Scotland have to be around our life long learning system, our belief in education as a social good, open to all and around the social benefits of OER to all in the system.

Universities continue to conflate OER with lots of other policy initiatives and developments - We have a MOOC so we must be making and sharing OER ( rarely the case). We have an open research policy and we have policies and practices around open data. ( no realisation that OER is different). There are few formal staff development programmes around the creation, use and repurposing of OER and only a few policy levers to encourage their consideration.

Colleges - Recently regionalised and finding their feet have forgotten traditions of developing learning materials collaboratively and when they remember they tend to do this in closed communities as content clubs. If you do a dig into the public contracts Scotland you can see a growing trend over last six months for Colleges to buy large collections of commercial content. They are trying to make more courses available on line and playing catch up,  by buying in the learning content. The entry level and CPD standards for lecturing staff are due to be refreshed but the current standards are weak around developing skills around embedding digital practice and make no mention of OER.

Schools - No real recognition that sharing learning materials is a good thing and to a degree still struggling with the notion that teachers create  learning materials. In Scotland we have a superb platform in GLOW a Scottish Schools Intranet with excellent set of tools to support learning but it lacks a learning object repository it is hard to find materials inside GLOW and there is no coherent approach to adopting standard open licencing like Creative Commons. In terms of development there is the recently published Digital Learning and Teaching Strategy this encourages the development of digital skills in both initial teacher training and in teacher CPD for continued registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland but it tends to focus on the use and deployment of technology and makes no mention of content creation or open educational resources.

Third sector and libraries - perhaps most progress is being made here. Libraries and museums are digitising their resources and releasing these into the public domain with open licences. Trade unions and third sector organisations realise that a sharing economy is the most effective way to support their stakeholders. Good signs here that the methods and approaches of the wikimedia foundation are being adopted.

Government, while the government has usefully made a significant investment in the OEPS Project, which it references in any enquiry about the progress of OER in Scotland, it still appears to view activity in this area as peripheral in meeting sectorial objectives.

The broad view of the administration seems to be  that policy around open educational practices is not required as initiatives in this space are being driven out by Universities fulfilling their charitable and philanthropic traditions  and that there is a lack of an evidence base around the benefits to learners that justifies a policy intervention.

The growing evidence base from other countries and global initiatives is counter to this view. A healthy open educational resource driven system needs both top down and bottom up support. The papers from this consultation and from the World Congress should allow an informed reappraisal of this position.

#OER17 The Politics of Open

Image credit: CC-BY-NC-ND Jon Mould https://flic.kr/p/9MqncZ

It is that time of the year again - but it's that time in this decade when the UK probably needs to grasp open learning, before like our borders,  we succumb to our seemingly naturally conservative closed mind sets.  I'll not re-hash the Scottish Open Education Declaration.

If you believe the best education only happens in elite institutions and organisations and we just have to accept that or if you believe one day you will publish all of your teaching notes and naturally it will be a best seller.

Please stop reading here.

Worth noting that the first #OER conference was hosted at Cambridge University and if you are Scottish based have a look at how Edinburgh University is leading the charge .

But you don't have to be an elite institution or work in one to become an open practitioner !

Education is of-course a public good.

Please consider !

What could open practices do for learners ? 

Simply by making more learning resources more accessible in times of fiscal constraints
Encourage new forms of pedagogy and collaborative approaches to learning
Improve the overall quality and availability  of the learning experience
Reach into bits of the community and workplaces that need untoll gated access to learning materials.
Improve productivity and the exchange of knowledge and ideas .
Allow learners to be creators and to encourage them to lead in their own learning.
Prepare them for the real world - it is a sharing digital economy out here !
In time be the engine for much more personalised and non linear learning.

What could it do for teachers and trainers ? 

Improve content discovery,  creation , collaboration , re-purposing and publishing skills
Enrich both teaching practice and subject based knowledge and skills

Break down the artificial institutional barriers around school , college , work-based  and HE learning.

Re-light an enthusiasm for learning, if it is being extinguished by an ever diminishing pool of local resources.

What could it do for your institution 

Improve both the quality of delivery internally and allow institutional reach into many more places and allow you and your staff to become part of the global learning community  - rather than a wee local shop.

By embracing openness you are not giving away your crown jewels - you are helping your own staff and learners - and helping other people too.  Isn't that why you came into education ?

It's not just about opening up content it could be more open forms of certification and other practices too !

Who and what are the barriers 

It could be you if you are not already an open practitioner ?
It could be your institution if it does not have a policy on open learning and creative commons licencing ?
It could be your professional body if it gives no recognition for innovative practices or around the sharing of learning materials ?
It could be your : senior management team,  local education authority, your national government - but only because they don't yet see the benefits of open and need to be convinced.


Whetted your appetite ?   Doing some work in this area already ? 

The call for proposals to #OER17: The Politics of Open is now published at https://oer17.oerconf.org/call-for-proposals/.

The 8th Annual Open Educational Resources Conference will be held on 5-6 April 2017 at Resource for London, UK.

The conference will be chaired by social and educational technologist and Wikimedia UK Trustee Josie Fraser, and Alek Tarkowski, Director of Centrum Cyfrowe, co-founder and coordinator of Creative Commons Poland.

The conference themes this year are:

Local, national, and international policy and practice

Institutional/organisational politics

Participation & social equality

Open Party

The deadline for proposals: Midday GMT Wednesday, 16 November 2016. You can read the full call which includes session formats at https://oer17.oerconf.org/call-for-proposals/.

If you are interested in #oer/#oep the call for proposals for #oer17: The Politics of Open is published https://oer17.oerconf.org/call-for-proposals/

Timeline:

Call for proposals - open

Submission system - late Oct.

Call closes - 16th Nov.

Review decisions and bookings open -  Dec.

#oer16

Storify by Joe Wilson

Mon, Apr 25 2016 12:22:13

Edit

#OER16 Quick Overview and Some important links for Scottish FE

A quick overview of a superb two days thinking time.

1. Open Educational Resources for those still wondering what #oer means.
2. This conference has been going since the inaugural conference at the University of Cambridge in 2010 . It was a great privilege to be once again on the organising committee and chairing some of the sessions this year . This storify captures some of the sessions I attended . The event was supported by the great folks of alt.ac.uk/ co-chaired superbly by twitter.com/LornaMCampbell and twitter.com/HoneybHighton and attracted delegates from 29 different countries to two wonderfully sunny days in Edinburgh.
3. I am prejudiced but I do think some of our most creative educators are interested in open education. I enjoyed the action-bound challenge and I made full use of the excellent and well organised on-line programme
4. ActionBound would make a great platform for student induction sessions.
5. 

   You need to download actionbound app #oer16 pic.twitter.com/uuDaPfhVIP

   Joe Wilson@joecar

   ·

   Tue, Apr 19 2016 09:30:02

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6. @Catherinecronin did a great job of unpacking the issues around open learning and the digital identity dilemma to being open .
7. All of the sessions I attended inspired me and showed way forward for all of us in rethnking what education could be . Many of the sessions were recorded you can access them all on the conference web site oer16.oerconf.org There was something for everyone from policy makers to practitioners.
8. 

   If open is answer then what is question #oer16 @catherinecronin some thinking along with  http://wikieductor.org/Goopen  pic.twitter.com/Hu2V5MYi7H

   Joe Wilson@joecar

   ·

   Tue, Apr 19 2016 09:53:09

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9. I'll focus here on picking out a few sessions and links that I think further education should tune in to . Every session had something superb wrapped up in it so this is a tough task.
10. In no particular order and for those teaching computer games development have a look at
11. 

    Joe Wilson@joecar

    RAGE hoping colleges and universities teaching programming or games development tuned in to this #oer16 @EU_H2020  http://rageproject.eu/ 

    Tue, Apr 19 2016 13:12:06

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12. All of the sessions from Wikimedia offered something for Colleges and adult learners - I can't do them all justice in a post . But Colleges should be using Wikimedia tools not just as reference materials but as active learning tools. Learners should be authoring content for all of the wikimedia platforms
13. If you haven't discovered DS106 and you teach anything creative then have look - that primary learners all around the world are now doing some of the assigments should tell you something startling.
14. 

    Joe Wilson@joecar

    @jimgroom #oer16  http://ds106.us/open-course/  open course aimed at HE and lots of primary kids do the open assignments .. Tells you something

    Wed, Apr 20 2016 08:57:09

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15. I am assured that all of the BBC RES and other re-sources will be available to Scottish Schools through GLOW I hope similar thought has gone into how Colleges will access these probably through JISC services
16. 

    Joe Wilson@joecar

    The research and education space (RES) | RIchard Leeming BBC great session on new resources for learning #oer16  https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/research-education-space …

    Wed, Apr 20 2016 09:49:52

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17. I saw a whole new academic discipline open up as David Kernohan set out his thesis on Blogs as now being more accessible, authoritative, accessible and capable of citation than traditional research. All pointing to new ways of evaluating the impact of academic publishing.
18. 

    Evaluating blog corpus on open education nice work from @dkernohan now on to semanometrics and citation metrics pic.twitter.com/rI98Nt78jN

    Joe Wilson@joecar

    ·

    Wed, Apr 20 2016 10:28:20

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19. Dublin City University student success tool box - give Colleges a range of customiseable re-sources for induction and much more . Every College in Scotland needs access to this . Perhaps one for CDN to have a look at . Available for download from github
20. 

    Andrew Middleton@andrewmid

    Student learning toolkit from James Brunton  http://studentsuccess.ie/the-toolbox/  #oer16

    @joecar

    ·

    Wed, Apr 20 2016 10:54:55

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21. These two superb characters - are driving global changes in Educational blogging and content creation SPLOT is just one of a range of tools they demoed splot.ca/about/ watch their session carefully I liked NSCloner which gives teachers any kind of Wordpress blog they want quickly and easily
22. 

    BC Represent! @grantpotter @brlamb @unbc_ctlt #oer16 pic.twitter.com/iyan6zErvJ

    Heather Smith@doctahdawg

    @joecar

    ·

    ·

    Wed, Apr 20 2016 11:41:38

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23. Check out too how American Community Colleges use OER across the curriculum
24. 

    Joe Wilson@joecar

    For Students | OER how us community college uses #oer #oer16  http://oer.umd.edu/students 

    Wed, Apr 20 2016 13:08:28

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25. And finally if you want a closer to home example check out Edinburgh University open.ed.ac.uk/ Every College should have its own modest ambitions in opening up learning . There are 210,000 learners no longer in Scottish FE . How are you reaching out into your communities and local businesses and offering real support.
26. 

    Three strands of the vision #oer16 pic.twitter.com/Q6BAoRxRld

    Joe Wilson@joecar

    ·

    Wed, Apr 20 2016 14:34:26

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27. If you missed out - think about becoming a member of ALT and/or book your place or better submit a presentation idea to next year's conference
28. 

    Josie Fraser@josiefraser

    #oer16 delighted to be co-chairing #oer17 with @atarkowski  https://oer17.oerconf.org/  - the politics of open

    @joecar

    ·

    Wed, Apr 20 2016 15:34:46

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29. And remember too to read and comment on the Scottish Open Education Declaration !
30. 

    Read (& comment on) the Scottish Open Education Declaration. #OER16  http://openscot.net/declaration/  pic.twitter.com/Wd7xWUa17b

    Edinburgh Uni OERs@OpenEdEdinburgh

    @joecar

    ·

    ·

    Wed, Apr 20 2016 14:30:26

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#OEPS Forum , Final #Jorum Steering Group , Making An Open Information Age

In the last couple of weeks I've been involved in a number of gatherings all around the open sharing of learning materials and information across the public sector.


A re-current discussion theme -

"What are the key arguments or actions that will encourage senior policy makers in your institution to take a strategic approach to open education resources and encourage  open practice "

And response ;


If our leaders can't see the value in opening up and sharing and prefer that everything is done in silos then it is hard to challenge this. 


The usual fears of senior managers and colleagues around sharing learning materials were trotted out.


Managers fear exposure around the quality of learning resources and fear that copyright may be breached . They dream too of a new income stream from the sale of institutionally produced learning materials .  There is a conflict here - and while they are conflicted between the argument that sharing and collaboration make sense - but our materials are not good enough - and or maybe one day we could sell these teaching materials - they fall back on inaction.


Classroom practitioners share some of these fears and without leadership are worried too that by sharing learning and teaching materials they are making themselves redundant. In many cases they are worried about sharing learning materials across an institution with their colleagues  not just sharing learning materials openly.


I thought it might be worth doing a wee run down on the state of open in Scotland - This reflecting mainly on open educational resources rather than open data and open research and other open practices,


Clear Government Policy


The Government has adopted a Scottish Open Government Licence for publications from Government and their agencies . There are pockets of enthusiasm for open data , open standards and even harder to find for  open educational resources .  But the feeling is still that opening up educational resources is  very much an issue for institutions rather than government policy.


We've been trying to find and without success a Scottish government speaker for #OER16  https://oer16.oerconf.org/ an international conference, this year running in Edinburgh. The reluctance of anyone to talk out aloud around benefits of #OER underlines what is at moment an indifference to shaping policy here.


The Open Scotland Declaration while garnering much recognition outside Scotland remains a statement of ideals, though it  is gaining some traction at institutional level, it has been used a basis for Edinburgh University's recent commitment to open education.


Wales seem more comfortable with open educational resources while England is becoming a fragmented nation of content shop keepers.


National Platforms supporting Open


The government has committed funds to the OEPS project which is  due to complete in June 2017 http://www.oeps.ac.uk/ this is having good impact on practice in the 3rd sector but it is hard to see the impact it is having on the other HE partners or on the FE sector despite the best efforts of the team.


JORUM/ Re-Source  The not well understood and not well enough used platforms for open content are being retired by JISC will be  replaced by a content and app store due to come on stream in June with the  former services being  retired in September . The new platform will have a sharing area for open educational resources as well as a commercial area for re-sale of 3rd party content.


While many believe that permission for publishing to the open web is all that is needed for #oer to flourish I still believe that it needs both curation and support from a broader learning community for #oer to be sustainable. The new content and app store is aiming to be the place for this.


I think too that it is  important that a sharing space exists out with the bailiwick of a single institution.
I am cautious about the success of the TES sharing platform - but it is making progress in being the place to share learning materials. The platform meets the criteria of being in existence , having a user base and being out with an institutional bailiwick . Though deposits here are made by individual rather than by institutions. Perhaps find and sell your wares is the new reality for education.


Support from University/Colleges/ Local Authorities


Edinburgh University , GCU and Leeds - leading charge along with the Open University in having policies and platforms around open educational content.


 But in at least one of these gatherings there were mutterings from English based universities,  they are now in competition , that they and not the public purse invest in their learning materials and they use their learning materials to gain a competitive advantage over other universities and are therefore increasingly unlikely to share learning materials.


Thank goodness they are already mandated to share publically funded research.


Colleges in Scotland while happy to date to share materials through Re-Source have been focused mainly on re-structuring rather than updating their practice . There are some green shoots West College Scotland pioneering an offer of automatically marked free on-line courses.  There are different forms of open.


Colleges across UK are  looking too to closed content consortiums as method of sharing the cost of developing on-line content through partnerships like that established by Heart of Worcester College.


I hope the new content and app store from JISC will reinvigorate the sharing culture.


In Scotland hard to see any sign of local education authorities encouraging teachers to adopt open practice and produce #OER . The Scottish schools intranet #Glow is going from strength to strength and while necessarily closed to protect primary and other young learners it is producing a kind of locked in syndrome around school based resources. There is not an open area for content.


The teachers who are engaged around this tend to be the maverick enthusiasts.  Perhaps no one has noticed that maths teacher Colin Hegarty and others are just getting on with it and garnering global recognition.


It hard to see signs that any local authority in Scotland is likely to adopt the open Leicester model at moment - so ably led by Josie Fraser.




I'll add here at link based session I did on content and content creation across the FE Landscape for a recent webinar on sources of open but mainly commercial content to support delivery .


It does not have to be like this . There is a great opportunity to find out about open educational practice from around the world at #OER16 next month in Edinburgh

Content Landscape for UK Community Colleges from Joe Wilson

#Oepsforum14 #Openscot Reflections

I enjoyed the aspiration of this week's OEPs Forum http://oepscotland.org/tag/online-hub/    there is a lot of Scottish Funding Council money going into this programme and I am sure we will get something built from this that is distinctly Scottish and reaches into the challenges being faced in schools,  colleges , community learning  as well as higher education across Scotland.  The main thing I think we need to focus on is high level policy change - without this institutional blocks will remain the common denominator for those who wish to open up learning resources. 

The project objectives are here http://oepscotland.org/about/project-objectives/ 

Great too that the OU will match funding from SFC with DFID resources to build a new product for international markets - but would have liked some more focus on acting  local as well as thinking global. 

If Open Education is anything it is about life long learning , its about developing open practitioners and it has got to be about ground up practice and top down policy changes. 

I made point to organisers at end - when we were invited to come back and see them again early in the new year - that what we really need ASAP is an on-line community associated with the programme. There is already a lot of grass roots activity going on in Scotland and across the UK . I hope the partners in the OEPS project harness all of this .  Understandably a lot of focus at event seemed to be around what the Open University could do for us - question for long term sustainability should really be around what can we all do to open up learning.  The other question which I thought was rude to ask on day - was where were the other OEPS partners at the event - some thoughts from Glasgow University , Edinburgh University , Strathclyde or UHI in introductory presentations were missing from day - to make the most of this opportunity really requires broad range of stakeholders and thinkers. 

I highlight below some useful workshops being supported by ALT and JORUM really as indication that there is a lot going on in this space. 

The following webinars run and delivered by the Open Education Special Interest Group of ALT may be useful to members of this list. The content is a mix for those who are both new to and familiar with OER. Jorum will be supporting the webinar on Creative Commons in December.

1. How to write an OER workshop (for staff development)

Wednesday 5th November  13.00 - 13.40

This workshop will look at how advocates of  Open Education can use and reuse existing OER materials for training sessions cascading the OE message.

By exploring the huge variety of materials that exist, this webinar will demonstrate how your workshop can represent the OE agenda itself and act as an example of how reusing materials can be an effective and efficient choice when designing and creating learning activities.

Presenters: Alex Fenlon and Ella Mitchell

Link to webinar:

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=7565&password=M.EB5A1870DD4B812AC04FD7BDAD8E0F


2. Title: Creating and using video resources for language teaching.
(Open Educational Practice)

Tuesday 25 Nov  13.00 - 13.40
The University of Warwick Language Centre and the Centre for Applied Linguistics are partners in an EU project called Video for All. The project’s mission is to support language teachers in all sectors in the exploitation of video for teaching. The Language Centre has been innovating in the use of digital media for some time and is the subject of a Jisc Digital Media case study. Video for All will produce exemplar practices for teachers which are searchable and available as Open Educational Resources. However, challenges are evident. The presenter has recently co-authored a submission to the Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA) for a special issue exploring “Models of Open Education in Higher Education”. This webinar will discuss some of the issues we are dealing with in the hope that the OER sig will be able to contribute to our discussions and offer feedback on our decision making process.

Key words:

Streaming media; creative commons licensing; repositories; repurposing and remixing; copyright.

Teresa MacKinnon
LinkedIn Profile
Principal Teaching Fellow,
School of Languages and Cultures
University of Warwick.

To join go to:
https://ca-sas.bbcollab.com/site/external/jwsdetect/meeting.jnlp?sid=2012058&username=&password=M.7E015779A2D9581AF91B36BB9F5E97

3. Creative Commons - understanding the basics (CC for Dummies)

Thursday December 11th 13.00 - 13.40

Creative Commons (CC) licences are a simple way of retaining copyright whilst allowing others to reuse your work. The range of licences lets you define how others can reuse your material. This session will demonstrate how simple it is to use CC licences and what they mean in practice.

We will also introduce the UK repository JORUM, demonstrating how to apply CC licences to materials as you deposit.

Presentation: Vivien Sieber and Siobhan Burke
Moderator: Alex Fenlon

Webinar link

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=7565&password=M.4F5E50E2B182B1FEE046461D9A8CA6

TECHNICAL NOTE

Please note that the sessions will take place in Blackboard Collaborate. Even if you are familiar with Blackboard, it is important that in advance you check that your system and connection are capable of handling a session, and that you have the (small) Blackboard Collaborate client successfully installed. Do this from the support page at http://www.elluminate.com/support/

#oer Universities and Open Education in Scotland

Last week I did a short session in a Scottish University with the head of departments around the challenges and the opportunities around open education.

I did not touch much on massive open on-line courses as in many ways for this and other institutions this could be a step too far. I highlighted that they could do much more by simply opening up more of what they do to the communities they touch already and by doing more to harness the staff resource that they have by encouraging much more open practice across the institution .  This could be the precursor to some MOOCs at a later stage but in the short term it would get academics thinking about how they become open practitioners .

I'll stick up my presentation here when I  get back into the office . I borrowed many of my slides from previous presentations on open education. I spoke about past and current developments in Scotland 

The rest of the afternoon comprised of some excellent presentations from the library and learning resource staff. They are actually well on the way to developing open policies that will permit much more open practices . This is probably the right response from institutions who don't have massive marketing budgets to invest in the development and the staffing of massive online courses. It was good to hear that many of the academics already knew and used resources from services like JORUM the challenge is that none of them had ever deposited a learning resource there.

I hope that the new programme from the funding council led by OU Scotland , Edinburgh , Glasgow and University of Highland and Islands will make its focus - not the creation of massive open on-line courses that may prove hard to sustain  but the creation of an open culture that encourages open practices and the sharing on on-line content.

#Openbadges Simplest Possible Message about Open Badges

I've been working with colleagues to try and refine a very simple message about #Openbadges .

Here is work in progress - it is aimed at a Scottish schools audience but could be used in a range of contexts when introducing the concept of Open Badges - comments welcome !

Digital /Open Badges – What Exactly Are They?

This is a guide prepared for an audience who may never have heard of Digital / Open badges.

Badges are not a new phenomenon in learning.  The Girl Guide and Scout Association and many other organisations have used badges to reward achievement or to recognise skills development for many years. 

To earn a badge the recipient has to meet a certain level of competency or demonstrate a specific attribute.

Digital Badges are really just a simple extension of this philosophy into the digital age.  Digital badges rather than being physical artefacts handed out and  then sewn on to a sleeve are issued digitally and are designed to be displayed on the web.

The advantage that a digital badge has over a cloth badge is that a digital badge can contain a lot of additional information (called meta data).  This additional information might include details of the organisation and individual who awarded the badge, the specific competencies the learner has demonstrated and even contain  links to some of the learners work to illustrate their competence.

So a digital badge becomes an on-line way for a learner to show evidence of their learning.  The badge could be called a data rich digital icon.

The open in the heading comes from the technology that has been used to support the creation of digital badges. The Mozilla foundation has created some open source systems that allow any organisation to build, design and issue an open digital badge. There is now an open community established around the initial products and they are developing the software further. The tools to build open digital badges are freely available to any individual or organisation. There are links to some of these in the reference section at the end of this document.

The illustration below captures the idea of how metadata can be embedded in a digital open badge.

 “Badge Anatomy” by Class Hack. Creative Commons license CC BY-SA

Badges could be suitable for everyone whatever their age or previous accomplishments. Badges can recognise and communicate an individuals ' skills and achievements and display them in online environments – such as social media profiles – in ways that may help with future career and education opportunities.

 Employers, organisations, schools, colleges and universities could gain a richer picture of an individual’s learning by exploring the meta-data behind a badge.

The philosophy of open badges in the recognition of wider achievements could sit well with the principles of the Curriculum for Excellence.

In October 2013 the Scottish Qualifications Authority issued some guidance to colleges, community and work-based learning providers encouraging them to consider the adoption of open badges.  A number of Colleges and work based learning organisations in Scotland are now issuing and using badges and there are a number of case studies now available.

Institutions globally are seeing the potential benefits of issuing badges. These include NASA, the Girl Scouts, New York Education Authority , Khan Academy, Google News, MIT, Harvard, The Open University and City and Guilds

  

Why think about using Badges?

• To recognise small steps in learning - smaller than SCQF – and/or steps towards a qualification;
•  To create a culture of learning and achievement and support innovative ways of recognising learning and achievement.
• To motivate learners to come aboard and take advantage of the opportunities on offer;
• To build the confidence and self-esteem of current non-participants in learning;
• To support profiling of learners
• To motivate staff to develop skills and accumulate learning which will improve practice
• To be recognised as early adopter of new approaches.

What are the current challenges?

• To use a digital badge a learner needs to have digital place to put these. Not all learnersespecially in Early Years and Primary sectors  may  have a suitable place to position an open digital  badge.
•  The technology is new and is still undergoing ongoing development. In some cases it demands a level of technical skills set be available if you are thinking about designing and building badges or creating a badge issuing system. However, there are a number of organisations who can support you through the process.

Find out more

·       JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland co-ordinating Scottish Open Badges Group; http://www.rsc-scotland.org/?page_id=3068

·       The JISC Regional Support Centre have a range of case studies showing open badges in operation http://www.rsc-scotland.org/?page_id=2223

·       Across the UK there is growing interest in badges http://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/so-what-are-open-badges-28-aug-2013 =

• Mozilla Open Badges: http://openbadges.org/
• Mozilla Backpack: https://backpack.openbadges.org/backpack
• Badge Widget Hack (to display badges on a webpage): http://badgewidgethack.org/
• Badge issuing platforms http://wiki.badgealliance.org/index.php/Badge_Issuing_Platforms
• Badge platforms:  https://docs.google.com/a/umich.edu/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsHml-k4XnX7dHJQSDBrdUphYlprc1N0N09KMzFzckE&usp=sharing#gid=0

·       The SQA Academy – are building badges linked to General Teaching Council Teacher Standards;

·       A template for thinking about badge design http://www.digitalme.co.uk/badgecanvas/   http://www.digitalme.co.uk/assets/pdf/DigitalMe-Badge-Design-Canvas.pdf A platform for building and awarding badges https://credly.com/

·       The Scottish Qualifications Authority, Scottish Government and Education Scotland taking active interest

·       Universities are  looking at range of models; The Open University in Scotland are currently working in a specific initiative.

·       Lot of interest from Industry who are using badging for their internal CPD

·       Look out for Digital Design days run by a range of agencies  that  help folks figure out how to design, create , issue badges