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Gillian Stevens
10 Aug 2010
10 Aug 2010 2:33 PM
What I need to do is be organised and not just in my head. Have to give the blog more direction and be more thorough. Also it needs to be updatd regularly.
Have been asked to think about styles the repository can use. Right now I am clueless because I have seen a few that I like but at the same time I dont really know what to use. I have to ask myself what will be efficient as well as user friendly. Can we use the same style for both smaller and larger repositories? Will it be attractive? I know one thing - I dont want the site to look budget, but professional and academic. Most of all it needs to be informative and meet the needs of its intended audience. They too need to be kept in mind when the site is published. Site gets published by 30 August so will probably need to have some kind of idea abt it by then ...
A number of things I need to do coming up in next few weeks. Have to write a report about this entire experience by end of October. Report writing is not a strength at all so I am not looking forward to doing that. I find it difficult to order my thoughts when there is so much information to consider. Anyway there is still time for that ...
Need to keep updating the OER repository
Need to find out who to contact regarding those that can submit material we can turn into OER
Need to ask more about the distance learning part of my wiki
I'm sure there are other things for me to get overwhelmed about before my OER meeting on Monday, but hopefully I woul have remembered about it all by then!
Going to work on my OER repository now. Still looking at SciTable but almost finished.
5 Aug 2010
05 Aug 2010 12:49 PM
Not sure if it is good enough, but i did try to be in sightful and write it in the right way ... time will only tell i suppose.
hopefully gonna do some more repositiory work now; am currently busy with scitable which is an arm of the Nature Group. its predominantly got to do with genetics and DNA, but its very insightful. I think it would provide an incredible supplementary resource for those interested in such a topic.
29 July 2010
29 Jul 2010 2:58 PM
Got to add two more resources today; one called scitable emphasises quite heavily on genetics, but its very interesting. i like the site design too!
thats all for now - a quickie! - hopefully next wek brings more productivity and more insight into the world of OER!
27 July 2010
27 Jul 2010 9:00 AM
I like the idea of Podcasts and being able to listen to lectures - they seem to stick with me more than just reading something off a piece of paper. The berkeley podcast site isnt extensive as such, but the information is interesting and it is also being ke current. It could be an excellent resource for students and teachers alike.
Busy today with Neil Butcher's OER seminar here next month and have a meeting on; hopefully will be able to do some more repository work after that or inbetween.
13 July 2010
13 Jul 2010 4:35 PM
Other than that I added another resource to the OER repository - from BioMed Central. Its a journal-orientated site and looks to have some pretty interesting subject areas and relevant journals. I also found an image library - didnt browse through it, but hopefully it has a lot of good content as I find there are not that many open ed sites with an extensive and thorough collection of good quality photos.
Opening up Staff Attitudes towards Open Education
13 Jul 2010 9:44 AM
Am still reading up articles on sustaining OCW projects. Will be listing points on a very important topic i read last week: Getting Staff to buy into Open Education. As faculty at higher education institutions are the major driving force behind open educational resources it is imperative to have them on board and willing to play a pivotal role in not just setting up OCW projects but also in sustaining them.
The article i read focusses on Nottingham University's BERLiN Project. BERLiN stands for Building Exchanges for Research and Learning in Nottingham. the BERLiN project is a 12-month nationally funded project which aims to build on its already exisiting open courseware programmes.
In order to ascertain what faculty members thought about open corseware et al, the BERLiN project team ran a series of focus groups to identify what issues were involved in order to develop strategies to resolve these.
Their findings confirmed their initial suspicions that faculty members were resistant to adapt to OCW and their main concerns were rooted in the fear of loss of control, time and effort it required to create resources, moral and legal restrictions, quality controls, and the extent to which numerous forms of teaching can be adapted to open learning.
Nottingham's own experiences have led them to find that the main obstacles to OER respository development has not been technical but rather managerial and cultural. In fact the slow uptake of Nottingham's Respository development has been blamed on the fear of loss os academic control, insufficient internal and external promotion and of course infringement of intellectual property rights (IPR).
Thus the BERLiN Project was introduced to reinvigorate Nottingham's existing Opencourseware and encourage both the routine use and publication of learning resources for open distribution under a Creative Commons License.
Nottingham looked at 3 reasons why they felt they had to get staff attitudes to change towards Open Education:
1. Social Transformation
2. Promotional Opportunities
3. Cost Efficiencies
Social Transformation:
Nottingham sees it as their moral obligation as well as upholding their mission of providing high quality education to students around the world irrespective of their financial or geographical positions. To this end, both teachers and learners play a great role in reaching such a goal. End-users should also be consulted on what materials should be used and the format its presented in so as to best maximise OER resources. because OER needs to address a variety of audiences, there will undoubtedly be challenges on the best way to present the material on a singe site.
the staff feedback at Nottingham suggested that social transformation is an attractive reason to commit to OER, but conceded that they were skeptical about the potential for realising potential benefits in developing countries. other concerns centred around IPR, a potential loss of income opportunities, and issues surrounding localisation.
Promotional Opportunities:
While feeback indicated a fear of potential damage to reputations amongst the staff, the BERLiN group thought that perhaps the sharing and reusing of content could allay this fear as the material could have extensive exposure through a variety of peer-produced content and thus easing unfounded fears of quality.
Other concerns that were brought up included quality control - being associated with poor quality material - and potential damage to reputations with misleading information published due to a lack of context. The BERLiN team suggested that they already had quality control mechanisms in place to monitor learning materials that were being submitted as OER, and that including biographical info on the authors/creators of materials could help put information submitted in a specific context. This solution, though, was met with concern that academics could well gain an international teaching reputation but fall behind on their research.
Lecturers also voiced concern over OER affecting attendance at lectures or even making them redundant, but BERLiN is not advocating a wholesale publication of OER plus it refers to an Australian study which said that lecture attendance is not necessarily affected by the availability of OER materials.
Other concerns included the time and effort it took to produce materials, IPR clearances and whether offering OER materials devalues them. The BERLiN team are looking at further ways to increase the usage of their site e.g. a language converter so lecturers will be encouraged to invest time creating OER materials.
With the question of devaluing OER materials the team points to the fact that open source computer software has long been in use with numerous examples of high quality good value materials being available under open licences.
Cost Efficiencies:
The BERLiN Team are looking at cost efficient ways of increasing the uptake of OER materials while balancing the needs of the faculty that is meant to provide it. Time and financial constraints are big issues for faculty as to whether they can produce suitable OER materials as well as IPR infringement and loss of control.
Cost efficiency benefits would mean that teaching staff could use and re-purpose exisitng high quality OER materials thereby reducing development time scales and ensuring best practice. there are definitely cost efficient benefits of the re-use and re-purpose of OER especially where mechanisms to support re-purpose exist.
Other issues faculty members had included technological barriers as well as distributing materials from other Higher Education Institutions.
The BERLiN project has been charged with looking into these issues as well as the slow uptake and growth of the university's open resource site and the limited number of relevant resources.
This was an interesting read - definitely can envisage us having some if not all of the same issues here at UCT. Lots of food for thought!
july 8
08 Jul 2010 3:35 PM
because of this i have been limited to what i could do, but fortunately i could so something so i didnt have to spend time twiddling my thumbs! it took a while to get vula open but once i did i was able to download the minutes from the OER meeting that happened at UCT this week.
listening to the WMA of the meeting was interesting and confusing. confusing as many of the technical issues up for discussion was over my head. i caught bits and pieces here and there while i tried to make notes. some of the other issues they discussed did catch my attention, such as licensing issues, copywrite infringements, scope and breadth for an OER newsletter and other important issues like OER Commons being stagnant for months.
Apparently there are quite a few copywrite issues going on at UCT at the moment that the group wanted to address, but instead of going the usual anti piracy route they wanted to adopt a more positive mantra such as what you can use and how you can find more free stuff. it might be better to go this way as students generally prefer to go after the forbidden fruit so to speak esp after you have just declared it off limits!!
another interesting piece of information to come out of that meeting was someone asking what exactly is OER material. is it just available to those outside of UCT or is it OER to people also within UCT? a major issue related to this is the use of the library and the materials they have that could be of interest. many students dont know how to use the library effectively esp when they first arrive and the library has put out some kind of guidance manual to help. but could this be used as OER esp for those from other institutions that could find this kind of material helpful. of course licensing and property rights come into play here. all of this needs to be looked at.
the OER Commons stagnation is of great concern to UCT. OER Commons is thee space in the OER world; it gets a lot of traffic and UCT obviously want their resources up there to get more traffic to the UCT Opencontent source. The group dont know why the site hasnt been active in months but they are hoping to get to the bottom of it.
i feel a little disconsolate about it all really. i feel like i know so little about OER, not sure i can even make a proper contribution or if i am even on the right track! frustrating me to no end! in any event if we all did manage to get this together - and it sounds like one helluva job! - can we sustain it without the necessary financing? could it all be in vain? resources are an obvious issue, then there is the issue of contributions. one member of the meeting expressed that one of the departments were not enthusiastic about opencontent - that was my understanding anyway. i understand both sides of the argument, but obviously OER cannot work without willing contributors who allow their work to be reused anywhere in the world. if the faculty is resistant it is a major stumbling block. then of course the issues of copywriting is a major issue. is open content really open? this is a minefield one that needs to be addressed head on to avoid potentially devastating consequences.
I had wanted to do research to add more repositories to my wiki today because i have been reading articles the whole week, but cant do cos of the net. i can try next week again as the pitfalls of technology has really robbed me of my enthusiasm today.
sigh ... hopefully next week is better.
7 July - Talking about sustaining OCW projects Pt 1
07 Jul 2010 1:48 PM
I have spent my week so far poring over articles from the OCW Consortium Conference that took place in Hanoi Vietnam. So far I have read all the articles on using OCW and sustaining OCW projects and need to go through the Building OCW articles.
But I thought it would be prudent and hopefully beneficial to take a break from reading and note making and list some of the key points from the articles I have read so far here in this blog. It hopefully will help us ask the right questions, point us in the right direction and even give us more ideas on what we can do with the UCT Health OER site.
They say knowledge is power and where education is concerned this couldn’t be more true!
This blog will discuss key points from the articles in the Sustaining OCW projects folder.<o:p></o:p>
1. Balancing Academic Benefits from OCW with Institutional Financial Concerns:<o:p></o:p>
John Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health School has fully embraced OCW even though its faculty members were cautious at first. Though it doesnt offer credits for its OCW it does encourage self-learners and lecturers around the world to freely use their resources. Furthermore, the school views OCW as able to help them fulfil their education mission at one end of the spectrum - providing free education to a large number of people.
OCW at the school has slowed after 5 years which is important to note. It seems to be the case amongst many institutions that start OCW initiatives.
A reason for the slow down could definitely be attributed to finances. Like many instituitons JHBPHS' grant money to cultivate OCW runs out after a certain period of time and the schools need to find other financial resources to keep their OCW sites relevant and updated. This is something UCT OCW will have to address at some time or other. <o:p></o:p>
JHBPHS has relied on donations, commercial underwriting, government funding, school fees, grants having OCW budgets included in them and even just fortuitous circumstances to keep their operation going. The authors note that extra funding can be found through an institution's general funding and even from grants for online training development.
The findings from this paper has found that JHBPHS OCW benefits from having links to its strong and competitive online teaching and learning centre; in fact the authors conclude that it’s imperative for any OCW venture to already have ties to a good and strong online education undertaking with a team of educational professionals within a center that supports teaching.
Another important finding from this article is that OCW benefits the university's own students to prepare for exams for example as well as faculty members and outside educators looking to prepare lectures.
The authors note that universities should use OCW as part of their mission to reach students who cannot enroll because of financial or geographical restraints.<o:p></o:p>
july 1 2010
01 Jul 2010 4:16 PM
spent all of today cataloguing Mededportal and then two or three other sites that didnt have the same amount of info as MedEdportal, but still seemed like it could be useful! while Mededportal didnt have as much info as the MIT Courseware site I really liked its lay out and the fact that many of its resources were recent.
it took a while to get through it all - 2 and three quarter days in fact! - but hopefully its effort well spent.
even though i am immersing myself in the subject more and more I still feel like I dont know that much about OER!! hopefully this changes the longer i pend time on it!
hoping next week is as productive OER wise as this one has been
June 30 2010
30 Jun 2010 4:08 PM
we are halfway through 2010; i have been at UCT now for nearly 5 months and i still feel ike i just got here and havent done very much! especially when i see what still needs to be done and how much is out there to catalogue alone it is daunting and overwhelming.
i have been catalouing the last two days. found this awesome medical site known as MedEdPortal - it was on the Africa OER Health repository site - and it is chocked full of information! there are not that many categories per se - probably 20 or25 - but there is so much information inside each category. and much of it is recent too which is definitely a bonus.
this site isparticularly user friendly and i think it could be a blue print for what the UCT OER site for health could look like. i havent had too many ideas of a layot or format, but the mededportal gives useful hints in the direction we could go.
for one thing we want our site to be used extensively by uct students and faulty staff looking for health material around the world, while we also want members of uct to contribute so that other people around the world will be able to find useful information for themselves ... and so the circle would go on.
while i do enjoy cataloguing what i realis especially when you're dealing with such a big site like medEdportal is that it can take a very long time. i have been working two days straight on it and i am not even half way yet.
there is still a long way to go, but it is encouraging knowing that there is a lot of very valuable health resources out there.
