Open Content Holistic Research Environment

My colleagues Tony Hirst and Martin Weller have been busy moonlighting at being Video Jockeys making remixes as original (very original!) art. The results are a couple of really instructive and entertaing short videos now on YouTube . Tony kicked off with the need to make a presentation to some educational publishers and rather than explain he went with a show and tell. Watch the video - it shows the reality of sharing what is out there.

Now that Tony has created the new position of eduVJ, Martin joined in - with (in my opinion) a better choice of music “Anarchy in the UK” to bring together some of the current discussion around edupunk and the need to through away some of how stored up beliefs. Just as Punk broke through the music industry, openness needs to break through the education industry.  Martin has gone further and as he describes on his blog he has now produced the “Director’s commentary” version of his video on YouTube. Looking at that was genuinely revealing to me, and helped me make a few connections that I had missed. So for entertainment go and see Martin’s original on blip.tv. Otherwise click on the video below (not the embedded play button) to go through to watch the annotated version on Youtube.

What Martin has managed here is to show reuse in action - if you track down his academic papers you will see that he was part of a team (with Chris Pegler and Robin Mason) that showed how learning objects work well as a basis for reuse with the original authors still involved. Martin points out that YouTube only seems to allow the owner’s of videos to annotate at the moment - but maybe we can see the starting point for some neat reworkings. Several components all falling into place:

1. Some content released with nice creative commons licence that says you can do this
2. RSS letting you pull content from one place to another
3. Annotation and media tools that everyone can use
4. The rise of the mashup educators

Just now this is in the hands of the rebels and the anarchists that are prepared to go past a few rough edges. Will the rest of us follow? 

Last week there was a gathering of people from EU distance teaching universities at Milton Keynes organised by EADTU. The slides and ideas have been placed in the Research Zone of the OpenLearn LabSpace. The 2-day meeting was a great chance to share ideas and I felt there was a real buzz at the end of the meeting. There seemed to be complete commitment from everybody to a new world where the core content was free - but there was plenty of new opportunities to work together, help people learn and play an important role. Saying that good resources help people learn, but are only part of what is needed is the model and genuine strength of the open universities.

This meeting was part of the Multilingual Open Resources for Independent Learning MORIL project and one of the challenges for bringing people together is how to build on the result and excitement of the meeting. In this case a team working on the research side of OpenLearn captured activity on audio recording, prictures, videod sessions, video inteviews and knowledge maps. We plan to do more with some of the videos but Alexandra Okada has created a fantastic knowledge map built in Compendium. Worth a look as an example of how to get the best out of that free concept mapping tool as well as for the ideas it captures.

As part of the launch of iTunesU in Europe the OU is one of a few universities in the UK offering content for free through iTunes. I think the team at the OU that carried out the work have done a great job - and there is more about that on blogs from Martin, Doug & Tony. What this shows for us working on Open Content are a couple of things:

1. Content for free is part of university mission not just intitiative

2. The resources that are the raw materials for mix and match are now out there (over to Tony at OUseful to work out the best mashup to carry out!)

3. Routes to mass users are finally escaping from our own systems

These are interesting times.

Today I joined in a workshop that marked the start of the SideCAP project - Staff improvement in distance education for Carribean, African and Pacific universities. There were representatives from Mauritius, West Indies and Fiji reflecting work in supporting distance education. Those involved have links to the Commonwealth of Learning supported Virtual University of the Small States of the Commonwealth, a great idea to build enough effort jointly to offer a range of subjects. SideCAP though is a separate project led from the OU by Prof Robin Mason and she has created an EU supported project that focuses on capacity building.

At the stage I joined the kick off meeting there seemed consensus around a real need - to develop as an open resource guidance and materials about the finding and reuse of open resources. Other people have also seen this as a gap but the SideCAP plan has strengths in the diversity of the the group involved, the skills they have and also the plan to build up from OpenLearn and similar OER bases to be able to present concreted examples. 

In showing OpenLearn I showed the now award-winning free FM videoconferencing that can be used to arrange flashmeetings that are recorded - for this particular group it could represent a chance to reduce their carbon-footprint as they stay in touch with each other.

The panel had split up to summarise the different strands of the conference. I didn’t know everyone on the panel and should have noted the names as they were introduced by Will Swann so apologies to Lindsay and Becky, though I caught Liz Hall who is leading the development of the OU’s National role, and I know Bob Lambourne leader of the piCETL, Chris Pegler, and Martin Weller.

Lindsay reported on the student experience – and the issues of how we measure it – and the way we try to intervene to change it.

Becky (working with employers strand) – employer engagement is an opportunity and threat. Bringing together activity like this shows the range of existing activity.OU does still have USP around consistency, excellence in teaching, technology, and expertise in the learner experience. We are also learning a lot by working with employers and listening to them.

A quick hands up in the hall led to all but one person seeing it as an opportunity (what does he know that we don’t!).

Liz Hall had looked at the academic work on employer links, while Bob talked about the way in which the CETL work had impacted across the conference: with good work on synchronous links, past use of Lyceum and future use of elluminate. Bob deliberately ended on a couple of negatives – the problems of technology (illustrated in the way it even impacts on presentations in the conference and so we can expect this to hit students). The other negative is the lack of academics in the audience.

Poll: ALs, students, Regional, Central academic. Majority were central academic but I still take Bob’s point that we are talking to the converted.

Chris: lots of interesting things going on but we must disseminate (repeating a quote Phil Candy had used - “research not published = research not done”). Chris talked about sessions that I had missed where FlashMeeting (another OpenLearn technology) had been used for joint project work. She described  delighters and exciters.

Martin presented both a tag cloud (in fact two – the abstracts and the discussions) and the crowdstatus of the twitters we made.

So to finish these notes and inspired by Martin here is the tagcloud for my own notes:

Terry Di Paola talked about an online assessment light course (U122) from or Centre for Outcomes Based Learning. The course was trying to bring in people who are not embedded in education. The authoring was through good practice, case studies and then building into reflection on past learning. Work contexts and futures. There is a clever approach of verification – perhaps not that different from how we need to get people to verify passport applications. The way in which this would scale is a challenge but the portfolio approach (using the OU’s mystuff), an interesting question is how we could accredit the accreditors (verifiers). Terry responded to a question from me that this would be an ideal course to look at operating in an open way – recognising though the vital role of the tutors at the beginning and end of the process. There are some awkward issues about the assessment but probably not unsolvable.

John  Woodthorpe also talked about user-generated course content. Their product is fOUndIt at http://foundit.open.ac.uk - while it crosses over with similar tools (digg and perhaps a bit of del.icio.us) the use is around a community and the way in which a course “stub” gets extended to gain content through learner activity. The rating and commenting looked good. Suggestions were to rapidly scale this up, and how to manage the competitive and collaborative elements in recommending sites. As long as finding the resources is not the main point (analysis is). The site is separate from OU systems that releases some control but gains in terms of how people interact. The work on Openid that was part of OpenLearn and now needs to feed into the BioDiversity lab could well help this mix of OU and open systems.

Darrel Ince, Head of Computing talked about a project “Let the students do it” to produce a student generated course. He said that this was part of an approach to challenge the OU.

The particular course he described introduced elearning to the students, where the main output is 10 weeks of producing a course – with the best of the assignments becoming an OU course. A wiki will be used as the authoring environment – though at first on an individual basis (collaboration may follow). The course will be finished in May – delivered in October 2009. The courses to be generated at first was suggested as “Computational Intelligence”, “Computer music” or “Web 2.0” –intention at the moment to look at Web 2.0. Funding now for 120 students to write a book on Computer Music together with Oxford University Press and AuthorWorks print on demand.

Overall approach 20 weeks in e-learning. Select and agree topic. Work with one other student. With a focus on the chucks that are produced. The output could be on OpenLearn, with the aim that output is Creative Commons. Interest also in OU staff taking the course in the first phase. In tune with companies like 37signals where there is a switch to consumer production. 

Tony Hirst is presenting on the FaceBook application in a pink “on-brand” T-shirt to contrast with his off-brand work on Facebook. Facebook is a huge success (though I feel some people I know are drifting away from it) The OU is well represented on Facebook with ome of the motivation getting away from the formal OU systems. So part of what was behind Tony’s work was to proide something into this informal space. The application used a design principle that there was to be no use of records but did build on voluntary actions. What is great is that they extended this to include OpenLearn. The use has grown rapidly to about 5000 out of 6-7000 OU users on facebook.

This unofficial data collection has drawn out links that show intentions – potentially very useful.

Tony had very little time to describe his other applictaion – my OU story. Little daily messages and mood indicators. Very nice. These can be found by searching facebook for oustory or course profiles with more info as always on http://ouseful.info

A question was asked about appearing in facebook as a tutor – Tony’s view is to join but make sure that it is clear that this is a social space for you as well as them – just like meeting people in conferences.

Paul Lefrere suggested that this could scale up by as a way to manage identity as a neat application.

President for student association runs the social side of FirstClass. The openness of systems can go against the wishes of course teams – making it awkward for them. The answer is that such sites have their own rules.

Day 2 of the conference starts with Brigid Heywood, Pro Viice Chancellor Research and Enterprise continuing with the made conference theme of scholarship. As the person responsible for the measurement of research she emphasised that work on how to measure progress on the schoalarship dimension is also important referring back to work by UNESCO and the Carnegie Foundation - Scholarship Assessed (1997) .

Gill Nicholls, PVC University of Salford (and also the author of Challenge to Scolarship (2006)) took up the theme of the complexity of scholarship within a context of:

• Pedagogy
• Funding
• Reward
• Differentiation Institutions

She then identified the issues for academics and the convergence of research, learning and teaching. Seeking to avoid the classic research v teaching to scholarship and its application to learning in a research-led environment, and how this can then feed in to the student experience.

Her view from the literature is:

• Research is learning for academics
• Teaching is the promotion of learning to students.

I was unsure whther she means to challenge this view or support it. I think a mixture as she digs down into the way we challenge students and the need to apply this to how we can build a research-led learning environment. (RLLE anyone?). And the need for research, learning and teaching to be integrated.

As a test of institutional commitment she suggested that a key is whether the institution plays a formative role in supporting (or blocking) the links between research and learning. Probaby achieved through integarion of research strategy with learning and teaching.

At the faculty level this turns into specified staff roles and direct organisation. Which then needs to be reflected in the curriculum with understanding of research-led learning (or she said she might prefer research-informed learning).

Defining research-led learning she said it will link up with:

• Learner-centred education
• Student-centred learning
• Independent learning
• Problem-based learning and case  study
• Project work or project study.

Gill also described a variation of a research-based learning environment – which applies into the programme as well as at the philosophical level (e.g.s are Denistry and Medicine). Her argument is that making this more apparent to ourselves as teachers and our students as learners will enhance motivation and increase the participation level for learners. The implication is also that the knowledge base behind the subjects also impacts on how learning can be supported. If research can be shared we can switch from transmit to engage.

To move to research-led she suggested:

• Design
• Underpinning by research
• Learning outcomes specified (not routine)
• Student teaching methods – bring in research to challenge
• Research methodologies in learning
• Assess research competence
• Visibility of integration of research activity and teaching
• Students integrated into research culture of learning

Impact on individual and their staff development. How to get staff development culture established and rewarded.

How to get recognition of scholarship explicit? And the challenge of research that goes from one area to another – part of the solution to combine research and teaching reviews. To bring out the recognition that research money and teaching money are interconnected. Gill had faced this challenge in both directions from a research institute to a teaching one.

How will this approach appeal to businesses and employer engagement? Three facets to this are the HEFCE push, response to changing initiatives, and the nature of funding. But employers are not clear on what they want, student number funding is meant to be shared and changes such as she has suggested could help this. Approach is around engagement and matching needs with offers – her experience is that agreement is relatively smooth until funding issues cut in.

Partnerships across universities puts pressure on cultures, what is their role? Her answer included the need to share experiences in this area.

I asked a question about the distinction between “research-led” v “research-based” – I think this is important for our work on courses in the area of Educational Technology where we want our learners to join the research community. We know this has worked not least because we know the impact of some of our own graduates.

This led into to a question expressed in terms of the practice and community that we need to support. I asked a question about the distinction between “research-led” v “research-based” – I think this is important for our work on courses in the area of Educational Technology where we want our learners to join the research community. We know this has worked not least because we know the impact of some of our own graduates.

This led into to a question expressed in terms of the practice and community and I felt there was a connection with our experience that came through as she talked about motivation and the need for a knowledge base for subjects (maybe that knowledge base could be provided by open resources such as OpenLearn).