Supporting teaching in higher education to improve student learning across the Biosciences Fostering collaboration and enhancement through community-building Chris Taylor and Terry McAndrew Follow UK Centre for Bioscience logo © University of Leeds. All rights reserved. This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence except where explicitly exempted.Creative Commons Licence

Subject Centre role One of the most important and valued aspects of the Subject Centres’ work is to build and establish networks of discipline- specific academics

Outline Bioscience pilot project background Aims for collaboration Blogs Use of RSS Yahoo Pipes Feed43 Partner profile pages Skype OeRBITAL

Bioscience OER pilot project Focus on resources to enhance practical and fieldwork in the Biosciences To produce and upload to OER repository 200+ resources uploaded To explore issues around creating and releasing openly-licensed content Working with ten academic partners in ten institutions spread around the UK Each exploring same set of issues

Aims for collaboration To build a community of geographically- disparate practitioners around a central theme – OER To foster communication that would sustain without our direct intervention To contribute positively through collaboration to the overall project goals To remove barriers for partners

Blogs JISCInvolve – Wordpress-based Main Centre project blog Individual partner blogs 7/10 blogged regularly

Blogs Very useful tool for reflection To keep track of and share issues encountered All encouraged to follow and comment on RSS output...

Use of RSS Very powerful for automation Allowed us to do a lot behind the scenes Very little experience or awareness of amongst project partners Use in blogs With Yahoo Pipes With Feed43 Partner profile pages

YahooPipes Why? Wanted straight-forward way to collate project partners’ blog entries and other resource outputs Visual and fairly user-friendly Versatile Just scratched the surface Number of ways of exporting results Can produce size-customisable output window to embed in site/output through web2.0 in addition to standard further RSS feed output Examples of my YahooPipes: YahooPipes logo Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

YahooPipes

Not without its limitations Restricted by content and quality of RSS feed input to it Unable to draw out our specific project partner resources from Jorum due to lack of keywords field in RSS Not practical to repeat keywords in description body So, more challenging solution required Feed43

Feed43 custom RSS What? Feed43 is a free third-party custom RSS creator Scrapes contents of URLs offered to it and produces tailored RSS feed based on defined search parameters Feed43 logo Copyright © 2006–2009 A.I.Studio. All rights reserved.

Feed43 custom RSS Why? To resurface links to Jorum records in context within our own site for project partner profile pages 11 pages on our site required project’s OER content Central page and each of 10 project partners Update pages automatically when new resources added Sustainable (allowed us to keep track of partners’ uploads ;) )

Emulating repository profile pages To reproduce their Jorum-held resources on each partner’s page on our own website, along with small biography, reasons for contributing to OER and Comments facility Recognition To build context around resources provided by each partner So those who might use the resources could associate them with their creator, and have a space to engage them in a dialogue (though not used) To allow potential users to relate to creators and their motivations

Feed43 custom RSS How? Run specific search query in JorumOpen for individual partners (Surname AND bioukoer) Take resulting URL and input into Feed43 Set parameters on data to collect and output Manipulate using ASP.NET* and display on website *If easier you can of course feed resulting RSS into YahooPipes instead

Feed43 custom RSS

Feed43 custom RSS From this:

Feed43 custom RSS To this:

Risks Vulnerable to stability of third-party applications Feed43 YahooPipes Reliant on Jorum not changing their search results URLs

Why? Easy (with minimal training) Instant Versatile Instant messenger Audio (with multiple participants) Video Screenshare

Supplied partners with headsets and webcams Exchanged details of Skype IDs Most had not used Skype before, but all found it useful Able to carry out video interviews, with VodBurner Partners all now have permanent contact details in their Skype profiles

10 months after project finished still have contact with partners, and amongst themselves Relationships have sustained The future for Skype...?

Interviews with project partners On bioukoer channel on YouTube:

Interviews with project partners Prof David Male, Open University: “The main advantage for me, so far, is the contacts that I’ve made. I’ve been in touch with a lot of people via the [Bioscience] OER project… I think it’s a good thing we’ve let this material go out, and hopefully is available and useful for people, but for me it’s the contacts I’ve made and the possibility of taking things forward for new open educational resources.”

OER phase 2: OeRBITAL Open educational Resources for Biologists Involved in Teaching And Learning Sustaining OER, not creating Thematic Collections strand To identify existing OER from multiple repositories and build subject-specific collections Focus on reuse to provide sustainability

OeRBITAL Building on experience from pilot project Communal MediaWiki as collaborative development tool Encouragement of discussion areas for comment Use of further collaborative spaces such as GoogleDocs…

Supporting teaching in higher education to improve student learning across the Biosciences Fostering collaboration and enhancement through community-building Chris Taylor and Terry McAndrew Follow UK Centre for Bioscience logo © University of Leeds. All rights reserved. This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence except where explicitly exempted.Creative Commons Licence