1. Developing patterns in technical approaches for Open Educational Resources R. John Robertson (1) and Lorna Campbell (1), & Phil Barker (2) 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.Creative Commons Licence

2. overview Some Context Big and Little OER Global Patterns UKOER Patterns Possible Trends

3. 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 3

4. 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 4

5. 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

6. 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.typ epad.co.uk/no_good_rea son/2009/12/the-politics- of-oer.html)http://nogoodreason.typ epad.co.uk/no_good_rea son/2009/12/the-politics- of-oer.html

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. Global Patterns ‘Little’ Use of blogs, YouTube, and other platforms to share resources and make tools – Professional networks OL Daily – OSS Open Attribute

12. 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

13. 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 3 rd party tools

14. Phase 1 technical overview

15. Phase 2 technical overview

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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’

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. Questions phil.barker@hw.ac. ukphil.barker@hw.ac. uk robert.robertson@ strath.ac.ukrobert.robertson@ strath.ac.uk lmc@strath.ac.uk http://jisc.cetis.ac.u k/topic/oerhttp://jisc.cetis.ac.u k/topic/oer 22