OER@UCT

 

On Sunday I attended a workshop which previewed the forthcoming UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Platform.  The workshop was hosted within the framework of the Highway Africa and the Pan African Conference on Access to Information (PACAI) conferences also happening at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) this past weekend. I wanted to share some thoughts on the workshop, in particular: an overview of the UNESCO model curriculum for journalism education; an invitation to comment on the UNESCO OER policy guidelines; an introduction to the UNESCO OER Platform; and some exciting future activities to watch from the UNESCO OER program. 

UNESCO Model Curricula for Journalism Education

The workshop brought together stakeholders from journalism and media institutions throughout Africa in which UNESCO aims to support as they become ‘Centres of Excellence’ in journalism education.   The stakeholders had been involved in developing and using the UNESCO Model Curricula for Journalism Education published in 2007.  The UNESCO Model Curriculum for Journalism provides a model curriculum that any institution around the world can adopt and use in their institution. 

The Curricula is a generic model that can be adapted according to each country’s specific needs. It takes full cognizance of the social, economic, political and cultural contexts of developing countries and emerging democracies, highlighting the connection between democracy and journalism and arguing for a more cross-disciplinary approach within journalism training centres. Source

From what I understand the curricula is an open educational resource, but I did note that it does not contain an open copyright license such as Creative Commons.  It would be great to see an open license on the curriculum as well. 

UNESCO OER Policy Guidelines

Abel Caine highlighted some of the activities which The UNESCO OER Programme are involved in including the recently drafted OER Policy Guidelines for Higher Education and the forthcoming UNESCO OER Platform.

The OER Policy Guidelines for Higher Education are being drafted and UNESCO has asked for comments on the draft guidelines.  UNESCO in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) have developed these guidelines to support governments, teaching staff, higher education institutions/providers, and quality assurance/accreditation and recognition bodies.  If you are like us and have an OER initiative on your campus, and yet no policy to formally support these activities, this document might be worth a review.  I plan to take a close look at the policy guidelines in the next couple weeks and hopefully provide some feedback. 

Introduction to the UNESCO OER Platform

We had a preview of the OER Platform currently being developed by UNESCO in collaboration with the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE).  The platform will be used by UNESCO to “radically “enhance” UNESCO’s Clearing House function by offering “selected” UNESCO publications as OER products and allowing “stakeholders” to freely copy, adapt, and share their resources”. Source 

The platform will host and share open curriculum developed by UNESCO and will eventually move towards hosting more diverse types of OER.  The platform comes with the tagline “Find, compare, build and share”.  Any UNESCO curriculum on the platform can be adapted, localized, translated, or innovated upon directly in the browser.  The adaptation is linked to the original version, as well as any other adaptations of the original (or an adaptation of an adaptation!)  What makes this platform different is that it allows one to then compare revisions of a curriculum document directly in the browser.  Differences are highlighted to show where the content has been revised to match the need of the local context. 

The OER Platform uses similar functionality to the Open University’s LabSpace, which allows one to make ‘revisions’ of content; and Rice University’s Connexions platform, which uses one to ‘reuse / edit’ content on their site.  Keeping track of the versions and adaptations is the real strength of such a system, as it is then easy to see the reuse of content and how it has been contextualized within different contexts.  

It was a great workshop and I was really happy to engage with the other institutions who are looking to open educational content to improve teaching and learning at their respective universites. 

 

 More information about upcoming UNESCO OER initiatives can be found below:

UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning are "planning" to host the 2012 World OER Conference at UNESCO in Paris from Wednesday 20 - Friday 22 June, 2012.

he purpose of the Conference will be to:

1. Highlight global best practices in OER laws or policy, projects or initiatives, and practices;
2. Release the 2012 Paris OER Declaration calling on Governments to support the development and use of OERs

We are planning several lead-up events:

1. UNESCO Forum on OER Policy Guidelines - UNESCO, Paris, January 2012
2. Asia-Pacific OER Policy Forum - India, Feb 2012
3. Africa OER Policy Forum - South Africa, March 2012
4. Latin America OER Policy Forum - Brazil, April 2012

The 2012 World Conference will be followed up by a 2015 Millennium World Conference where we hope to show very strong progress by Governments on OER policies, initiatives, and practices.

  by  Stanford EdTech 

Does this look familiar?  How can we see this as an opportunity rather than a problem?

On Tuesday last week I went to a talk from Prof Vivian Forssman; Director of the Learning and Technology Services (LTS) team at the Sauder School of Business at University of British Columbia.  The LTS have been very involved with supporting lecturers in the use of blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social tools both inside and outside the classroom, as a means of classroom learner engagement.  Forssman shared with us her experiences providing several examples of how they are implementing social learning, as well as offering various critiques. Much like UCT, her examples were closely tied to the challenges of teaching in large lecture theatres.

The Sauder School of Business has been able to invest quite a bit in their classroom technology, equipping rooms with multiple screens, cameras, and microphones between every two students amongst the audience.  This technology has enabled more of a conversation to occur in the classroom.  The microphones enable students to have a voice which everyone can hear.  When a question is being asked, the camera automatically pans to the space where the student is seated. 

Vivian alluded to the “unintended consequences” which have been experienced as a result of the new classroom technologies. The old trick of calling out a student sleeping in class takes on a whole new dimension!  Imagine catching some sleep in class, and then the teacher calling upon you…all of a sudden your sleepy face is presented on the big screen for all to see and the microphone is ready for your answer.  Vivian has said this unforseen use case has led to students being slightly more alert in the classroom. 

Another technique which has led to students being more alert is the playing of music in the classroom at the start of the lecture.  Imagine walking into the lecture theatre with some loud pulsing music to get you fired up!  This is a very simple technique which seems to have lead to more vibrant students in the lecture which follows. 

The Sauder School has also embraced Facebook as a classroom collaboration tool.  As we all know, nearly all students seem to be using Facebook these days, but it is still considered a distraction rather then an opportunity for most.  By leveraging social media, they are engaging with students using their online platform of choice.  Groups are set up for specific courses which allow students to share, comment and collaborate on the course material through the platform. 

While I was concerned about how students might feel mixing their social and academic identities online, there are tools being developed which allow students to keep their social engagement separate from their academic engagement on Facebook.  Therefore, students don’t necessarily have to become ‘Facebook friends’ with all of their classmates, but can still have discussions around the course material.  Additionally, participants in the course don’t have to receive all of the updates from the student’s social activity stream, unless they choose to become ‘Facebook friends’.  This allows Facebook users to use their profiles to engage in the course, without becoming linked to all of their classmates as friends.  I tend to think students would be happy to use their Facebook accounts in this way, especially if it led to an improved learning experience.

I found it remarkable how the Sauder School had embraced the tools that the students wanted to use, and made them part of the academic experience.  Forssman gave the wonderful example of how graduate tutors monitor the Facebook course page for student’s updates, questions, or contributions.  If a relevant link is shared, question is raised or debate is prompted on the Facebook page, the tutor may interrupt the class and bring the academic into the discussion.  For the most part, the tutor can probably help the students out on the Facebook page by themself, but when the discussion needs to be elevated to course level, they can raise the issue for discussion.  The tutor acts as a filter between the academic and participants; addressing, and adjusting the lesson in real time.  I think this is a really wonderful example of creating a backchannel within the classroom.  This may create more opportunities for students less inclined to challenge the teacher aloud to have a voice.  As well it leaves a lovely record of what transpires in a course, and how students relate it to their everyday life.   

I am always interested in how educators are using technology in other contexts.  Thanks to Prof Forssman for sharing the Sauder School of Business examples!  You can read more about the Learning and Technology Services group at Sauder in their annual report. 

I’ve just finished publishing our latest open educational resource here at UCT, a DVD that was created in the Centre for Intercultural and Diversity Studies (iNCUDISA).  The DVD contains a short 8 minute trailer for the upcoming film Black Adam: End of the White Guy?  In addition to the video trailer the DVD is meant to serve as an interactive teaching resource by providing short clips which address themes drawn from the movie.  In fact the DVD is used as a teaching tool as part of the Diversity Studies Honours and Masters programmes here at UCT.  It is envisioned that this resource can be used to generate discussion around whiteness in the post-colonial world.

So when iNCUDISA brought us the DVD to share on OpenContent I was more than happy to help out!  But how do you share a DVD online when it includes interactive features like a DVD menu with textual links to certain clips according to their theme?  Since I could not replicate a DVD menu on a video streaming service such as YouTube, I decided that I would create an HTML start page for the individual videos which would serve as the DVD menu providing links to the clips.  With a little work we had the source clips converted to a web friendly format (SWF) and hosted on our video streaming server.  I created a simple HTML page to link to each theme and we had the video online along with the resources that support it!  

Most often when we create DVD’s we intend for them to be watched on mass, unless the DVD is being sold for profit of course :)  But if you have a DVD that you want to distribute widely and freely, there are still costs involved in with creating physical DVD’s and handing them out.  I know that iNCUDISA wanted to share all of the hard work that they put into this project and designing the learning activities that support it.   So in fact, the DVD format was not the best way to get it ‘out there’ since they would have to phyically distribute the DVD.  I am hoping the web version will get a lot more use by educators who find it useful in their context.  It also provides a resource which students can refer back to anytime, anyplace as long as they have a connection to the web.  

I have often heard the statement “if it’s not online it doesn’t it exist?”  While this is a bit binary, there are other questions to ask around sharing educational content; will students have a chance to (or choose to) look at it more than once?  How usable is it?  What format it is in?  What is required to access it?  How much does it cost?  

Designating educational material free (as in the case of this DVD resource) is one way of making it more accessible but we also need to keep in mind the formats we use for sharing.  Unfortunately there are no easy answers around formats, but its good practice to try to keep in mind maximum exposure, reuse, and accessibility when sharing materials.  

We are delighted to share this great story of openness!! One of our recently added open educational resources has been selected for publishing in an academic journal.  Yes, you read that correctly.  One of the teaching and leaning resources which had been shared under an open license was found by a journal editor who wanted to publish it in their journal!

Matumo Ramafikeng designed her learning module on occupation focused conceptual frameworks for her own teaching practice.  Her materials were intended to be used by the students in her course at UCT and met an instructional objective.  We were happy to have met Matumo early on in our project and share with her the idea of open educational resources.  Matumo was happy to make her teaching material open and have it used more widely by sharing on the UCT OpenContent directory.  The material was used in the class as usual but also made available for others to use.  The OpenContent directory stores metadata about the teaching material which makes it more discoverable through web search.  

So the Journal of Occupational Therapy of Galicia contacted Matumo through the site after viewing her teaching materials.  They indicated that they were interested in the material and wanted to publish it in their journal.  Matumo agreed to have the article published and the process began.  The article was then translated into Spanish and published in the September 2010 edition of the journal!!!  According to the journal editors the article would be the first of "The Model of Creative Ability" published in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries (Latin America, etc)

This is a great example of how openness can lead to benefits for people working in academia.  It’s not all about giving it away for free; it’s about operating transparently so that others can see all the great work we are doing.  Operating openly allows us to make connections with other people and have opportunities that would not be possible in a closed system.  The internet enables this openness; we just need to embrace it!  

In this case someone found Matumo’s teaching materials and considered them so valuable that they wanted to share them more widely though the journal.  Matumo still gets all of the credit for the article and can add a publication her list of accolades!  

Congratulations Matumo from the entire OER UCT team!  

By the way, this is big news and the story also made it on the University of Cape Town news feed.  

 

Two weeks ago I attended a meeting of minds interested in setting up a local South African Wikimedia chapter.  Facilitated by the African Commons Project and the Wikimedia Foundation the meeting brought together people from academia, industry, software programming/support and all lovers of open source to discuss the need for a local chapter and how to get there.  Establishing a Wikimedia chapter involves drafting a local chapter constitution and registering the organization with the Wikimedia foundation and the local government.  It also requires fostering a community of editors and contributors to the body of African knowledge.  There is an incredible opportunity for South Africa to lead this charge on the continent by contributing and creating articles currently underrepresented on Wikipedia.  This process is going forward and much of the discussion from the workshop has been documented on the South African Wikipedia Metapage. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Group photo image by David Richfield

One of the greatest potential benefits in establishing the chapter is to encourage participation in Wikipedia editing.  According to Johann van Tonder at Memeburn, "despite being one of the most visited sites in South Africa, only a fraction of Wikipedia readers contribute to the open encyclopaedia by creating or editing articles." Perhaps people do not realize how easy it is to contribute and make an addition to most any article currently on Wikipedia.   

There is certainly a space for articles to be created as just last week I was able to create the Company Gardens article.  It was quite surprising to me to find that the article did not exist on Wikipedia, considering the rich history of the site.  There is most certainly a wealth of unfounded South African Wikipedia articles, as well as a great number which would benefit from active contributions.  

There is also an incredible opportunity to better represent South African languages on Wikipedia.  Wikipedia supports and encourages all articles’ translation into multiple languages.  Ian Gilfillan recently recorded the total number of South African articles which indicates some growth over the past few years but still a great opportunity for further development exists.  

South African Language Wikipedias

Language	1/10/2007	3/8/2009	30/5/2010
Afrikaans	8374	12568	15260*
Zulu	107	187	195
Tsonga	10	169	174
Swati	56	157	173
Venda	43	124	162
Xhosa	66	112	115
Tswana	40	103	105
Sotho	43	79	69
Northern Sotho	0	311	540
Ndebele	0	0	0

I believe that academia has a great role to play in helping to build Wikipedia.  Despite being a fallible resource at times, it is now the largest encyclopaedia in the world and a tremendous starting point for knowledge seekers online.  If you see an inaccuracy in an article, change it!  If you see an article not currently represented in Wikipedia, create it! It's easier than you would think to create an account and get started.  The real fun starts when others around the country and potentially around the world start adding to what you have contributed.  Then before you know it, you're a 'Wikipedian'.

I am particularly interested in meeting anyone in the UCT community who currently edits or contributes to Wikipedia in any way. There is already a small group of us who would like to run some workshops on how we can contribute to this movement.  Leave a comment and we can discuss futher.

Engaging with Wikipedia is a great way to get started with Open Educational Resources as well.  Everything (I mean everything) on Wikipedia is licensed under Creative Commons, which makes it a great resource for teachers.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of images, videos, samples which can be exported and used in the classroom.    

The University of Cape Town is running a campaign to bring awareness to the potential legal implications of copying and distributing copywritten materials.  So we are seeing alot of images like this around campus. 

I respect copyright law, and in doing so I always try and source openly licensed images, software, video, audio, research, courses, and presentations.  Because resources from these types of sources have an open license such as Creative Commons I can use them legally under the simple conditions; most often giving attribution to the resource creator and sharing the material onwards.  

So while I believe it is important for students to be aware of and respect copyright law, I believe it is even more important that they be aware of the wealth of material available for reuse, mashups, integration into projects, etc.  

So we are trying to come up with some posters which complement the copyright campaign by alerting students to the potential of using openly licensed content instead of violating copyright.  I am crowdsourcing ideas here so please leave us a comment or a link to a similar campaign.  

Adapted Creative Commons Image by 姒儿喵喵 <- Cool!

The UCT OpenContent directory is enabling and promoting the discovery and accessibility of UCT teaching and learning resources.  Materials which have been shared on OpenContent become more visible because of their listing alongside the keywords (or metadata) that describe what the material is about and the context in which it might be used by others.  

OER Commons is currently one of the largest aggregators of OER content from leading institutions around the world.  The UCT collection of OER is automatically listed on OER Commons when entered in the UCT OpenContent directory.  We are seeing an increase in inbound links coming from OER Commons. This means people are searching for materials and seeing UCT content alongside other leading institutions such as MIT, Yale, Open University UK as well as other knowledge centres such as NASA, The Library of Congress, and the Museum of Natural History.   

So while our content can now be found in OER Commons. OER Commons is also contributing to our 'findability' using traditional search engines such as Google as well.  People searching from South Africa specifically are more likely to come up with a South African educational resource from UCT, if one exists based on the search terms.  This is why it is so important to keep an eye on what people are searching for in the directory.

We recently added the GIPCA lectures to our directory and have found that already Google is indexing and ranking our content quite well based on select search terms.  So if one was to search for "Tim Noakes public lecture" in Google, they could find the entry on OpenContent quite quickly. 

I believe this is the primary reason people put things online - to share and allow others to discover the content.  The UCT OpenContent directory helps to make it more discoverable and therefore accessible by listing it in other major OER repositories, and enabling Google to 'view' it more clearly. 

A couple months back we created a screencast which was aimed at assisting OER producers at UCT in getting a Creative Commons logo onto their teaching and learning material – most often offline yet digital files like Powerpoint presentations and Word documents. 

I made the video available to the UCT community and then on Youtube under an open license.  I was quite pleased when Creative Commons International caught wind of the video and included a link on their wiki page of Creative Commons relevant videos.  Creative Commons representatives in Germany, Guatamala, Switzerland, the United States and Greece took note of the video and suggested we make it even more accessible by adding subtitles. 

Claude Almansi from Switzerland took the liberty of transcribing my voice to audio subtitles so that the video could be interpreted by the hearing impaired.  She then went a step further by transcribing it in both French and Italian so that we now had the original audio plus three caption tracks!

I have uploaded the captions to the original Youtube video file so that viewers can choose to watch with subtitles in either English, French, or Italian.  We intend to add additional language tracks in the near future so that anyone in the world can make use of this video! 

This demonstrates the amazing potential that open licensing has in improving and enhancing online content.  I initially made this screencast to satisfy a local need, but it has now reached the world in a number of languages because like minded people in six countries used the power of the network.  Another great example and motivator for this movement of openness and the idea of open educational resources. 

Thanks to all of those that attended our Open Teaching for a Digital Age seminar!  As promised you will find the presentation linked below.  We will be working on releasing the audio as a podcast soon.  

Click the link below to view the presentation in your browser. Click screen to advance. 

Open Teaching in a Digital Age v3.swf
Or download the Powerpoint file
Or view it on Slideshare

The Creative Commons Video and licensing your document screencast can be viewed here.  If you have trouble viewing the videos let us know.  We are still struggling with standards for different browsers.  

Creative Commons Video:
Local 

Licensing your Document Screencast
Screencast

* Screencast made with CamStudio open source software 

We have created Powerpoint files for our classes, we have made these files available to our class to accompany the lecture, and prehaps we have added these Powerpoint files to the VULA (LMS) site which accompanies the course, but is this the end of the line for our valuable educational resources??

What if certain slides of your presentation could be valuable to someone teaching a similar course in Mombassa, Kenya? Or a colleague based at another university.  How would you get the slides to them? You could email them but this creates a host of issues if your version changes or changes are made by your colleague. What if you could set up a collaborative plane for many people to share and collaborate on one presentation?

You can. Educational resources no longer have to remain static documents stored in filing cabinets or under piles of textbooks-well, they still are in most cases but they just don’t have to be!  We live in a world where new information and communication technologies are creating opportunities for collaboration which we, as academics, have been slow or hesitant to adopt. The time is now to introduce these tools to enchance our teaching practice and as some would argue, adopt them as standard practice.

Google Docs is a web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and form application offered by Google. We encourage you to explore all of these tools when working in a collaborative environment. In doing so you can tell others you are utilising cloud computing-whats that?; Software and storage capability online. This means you can access and work on your documents from any computer on the internet. You don’t have to worry about them being on your memory stick, and you can send the link to colleagues to collaborate on a shared document.

All that is required is a Gmail account, which nowadays is very simple to get. The Gmail account identifies you and is used to identify your documents and permissions.

Google Docs Presentations works just like Microsoft PowerPoint, which we are all familiar with. One can start building a new presentation online, or upload an existing presentation from PowerPoint.

We will start by uploading a presentation that we have on our computer onto Google Docs so that we can share it and work collaboratively.  Click the "Upload" button to begin uploading a document.

Choose the file to be uploaded from your local computer or disc and click the Upload File button.  Google Docs will reconize what type of office file it is and create a version of it online.  

Once the file has been uploaded you can begin to work on it just as you would using Microsoft PowerPoint. There are a few features missing such as animations and transitions but (in this writer's opinion); these were often overused to the point of distracting features of PowerPoint.

Your document is automatically saved every few seconds so you do not have to fear losing it or constantly saving manually.  When you are done editing your presentation you can click on “Docs Home” to get to the docs home page. Here all of your documents are listed and available to work on, share, email, download, etc. 

When you right click on a filename you can see some of the available options for managing this particular document.  There are some useful options here, such as convert to PDF, sharing, publish, and even download as PPT - should you want to work with the presentation again in PowerPoint.  

From the document management page you can also share the document.  By sharing the document you allow others to make changes to the file and contribute material, slides, ideas or media.   We are still testing concurrent collaboration, but it seems as if many people can be working on the same presentation at the same time, so it is great for rapid development of presentations.  

I am inviting Cheryl to this document as she is the original creator.  Once Cheryl accepts she can start making edits to the online document that I will see next time I view it. 

 If you choose to publish the document, you make it available to anyone in the world with an internet connection. You will be given a web address which can be accessed by anyone.  

Once you confirm the publishing this presentation is now published and we can use the web link given to us to share it with colleagues. We can also use the link in an OER directory service such as OER Commons to describe the contents of the presentation and make it searchable on the internet.

 

 

We have started experimenting with the OERca software which is currently being developed at the University of Michigan (UMich).  The OERca software was designed to support the dScribe process of clearing potential open educational resources for global use under open or Creative Commons licenses.  

From the UMich dScribe Wiki:
dScribe is a University of Michigan initiative that uses students to convert curriculum materials into Open Educational Resources (OER). Each semester, motivated students collaborate with faculty and a team of U-M Open Educational Resource specialists to gather, review, edit, and publish course materials for use by students, educators and self-learners worldwide.

UCT has decided to use this method as a framework for our own intellectual property clearing process.  We were fortunate with our first two resources published to OER Commons, as they were not media rich.  The two manuals that were published did not contain any media elements that needed to be checked – to ensure that copyright issues were not being violated.  In the future we anticipate resources containing a variety of media elements, which will need to be individually scrutinized to determine the source.  

The dScribe process is fairly rigorous.  I will let you review it on the UMich website.  The software is a tool which should help facilitate this process.  As with any piece of software it has functionality that we may or may not use depending on our localized need.  

For our first glance at the software, we will go through the process of uploading a resource, and viewing how media elements are handled.  I am going to upload a very simple PDF document which contains two pictures.  

At this time we are uploading the resources to a UMich instance of the software.  We hope that once the software has matured we will have a local version. 

I have logged in with Haley using her account.  She is dScribe in our scenario.  We have not yet begun role playing with the various agents in the dScribe process. You can see below that we have two resources currently attached to this course.  The status bar on the right gives a graphical display of the number of resources cleared, in process, or awaiting some sort of action. 

When I upload a resource I need to provide some information which will be attached to the object.  This is called metadata and is needed to help describe the object.  Metadata is an important part of any digital media object.  When you look at a picture or listen to a piece of music it usually will invoke thoughts or emotions.  Metadata helps attach this information as text to the object which means people can search for it using keywords.  The metadata needed here is fairly simple and that is ok because this is not a search engine as such.  We are going to describe the object in terms of Author, Material Type, and Application Type. 

Material Types:
Discussion Group
Exams
Labs
Learning Objectives
Lecture Notes
Lectures Slides
Not Tagged
Photo Slides
Projects
Readings
Review/Summary
Schedule
Supplemental Media
Syllabus
Video Lectures

The Automatically Extract Embedded Content Objects check box should be selected as I believe that this is required to pull out any media elements in the file for clearance. 

Once the file is uploaded it joins the list with the two existing resources for this course.  You can see already that it has identified two resources within the PDF which may need to be cleared for copyright.  

When I click on the resource I can view the two objects that have been extracted from the PDF.  For some reason they are upside down!?!?  We have not been able to determine why, but this only seems to happen with this particular file. 

Now that the media objects have been extracted from the document we can begin the process of clearing them.  There is a number of things that we can do when we come to an image, clear it for OER, ask the lecturer where it comes from, replace it with something openly available, apply fair-use, or remove it completely.  This will depend on the individual image, and how much is known about it. 

The option to upload a replacement is available to the right of the image.  We have not experimented with this function yet, but imagine how useful it could be if it actually replaced the images in the source document!!!

The person clearing the images should have some knowledge about their origins.  The dScribe makes an initial recommended action and this gets elevated to the dScribe2 and/or lecturer for approval.  In the list below of recommended actions, I noticed a lack of a Creative Commons (CC) option.  I think it would be helpful here to quickly label and clear objects which have a CC license attached to them. 

 

If you select an option that suggests that the item should be cleared you will have to next enter the copyright information.  In our case the images were generated by our talented UCT illustrator.  So we will attach her name as metadata to image along with a short description and more detailed information if necessary. 

Because I am a humble dScribe in this process, I should only be able to suggest an action for the image.  We did not get to determine whether the software had logic built in to control this.  (Love to hear from uMich on this)  The images (I did the other one as well) both show “In Progress” which indicates that some action is required to complete the process, in our case confirmation from a senior that the images are in fact cleared for re-publishing.  

That’s all we have time for in this session!  The software is quite comprehensive and there are many additional things that we need to look at, including messaging and dialog, questions and answer tools (ASK forms), workflow, downloading of finished content, and much more.  

The Open University (OU) Labspace is an area for experimentation, where educational practitioners are encouraged to download, amend and adapt both current and archived course materials.  (labspace.wiki)  Labspace in particular breaks outside of the traditional OER model of simply presenting OER material in an organized form.  Labspace allows the user to make adjustments and contribute to the online content.  Things can be added or taken away, just as one would find in a wiki environment.

We set out to explore the processes around changing and adding (re-mixing) to an OER resource.  Most of the resources available from OpenLearn are actually online courses offered through the Open University as well as presented in the LearningSpace, so they are well structured and of high quality.

Unlike the LearningSpace area of the website, all of the resources available in the Labspace have additional options for rebuilding and remixing the material.  

The same course as viewed from LearningSpace vs. LabSpace

 

The big difference on LabSpace is the addition of the Versions pane.  In order to make additions to the material you need to actually make a copy of the original material for editing.  Depending on the size of the unit this may take a while.  

 OU has made this option available to logged in users, potentially deterring the abuse of this process.  The opportunity of getting high quality reworked material with additions is tremendous.  Naturally, this takes an investment of time and resources.  I was unable to determine exactly how many courses had been reworked in full to produce an alternative version and how often the reversion was of higher quality than the original.  I am however very curious of this!!

Once you have created a copy of the course you are presented with the copy of the original material with a few more options available.  The course is given a new name including the version of the course, in our case 2.1.  

 In the top right corner I have the option to “Turn Editing On”.  Once I have entered into editing mode all of the content is available for editing.  I basically have full control over the content of the module.  This is very similar to a Wikipedia entry, and the potential for vandalism, or misuse could be a concern. 

 

 Clicking on a chapter in the course takes me to the specific lesson.  Here we are looking at the Design chapter of the Database Development Life Cycle module

 

 The chapter can be editing completely, I can change, add, or delete text.  Also I can change, add, or delete images or media elements in text. 

 

 A full WYSIWYG editor is available to add markup, links, formatting, and media.  I have made a small change in the opening paragraph of this chapter and will attempt to save it as a revision. 

 My revision has been added and this version of the course is available in addition to the original one.  One can view all of the revisions to a particular course using the menu on the left side of the page.  The process of comparing the revisions to the original document and looking for potentially new content or media for the course is presumably left up to the original author.  

Due to the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license attached to the original material I am now free to use this content for my own course or research as long as I adhere to the clearly defined terms.  The non commercial clause lets me know I can not use this material for commercial gain and the share alike license ensures that I also share the material in the same way that I found it.  

The courses can be downloaded from LabSpace in various formats including Moodle Backup, Plain Zip, Content Package, Common Cartridge 1.0, Print this Unit, OU XML Package, Unit Content XML.  Presumably, in at least one of these formats the material could be integrated back into a local learning management system for distibution to students.  The academic would have to cite the Open University as the original author of the material but could still claim to have localized the material for his/her students.  

In this fashion the OU is attempting to create a unique model for sustainability through constant and evolving quality through collaboration.  I would be very interested in seeing some statistics on how often the courses are remixed, how detailed the remix is, and how the original author iterates through the new material.  Without a doubt, this can only get better with time, as more resources are reworked and input from academics all around the world can be integrated.  

 

 

We are using Google Docs to manage our work in progress documents.  It is a powerful tool that lets mutiple contributors write for one paper.  It will become increasingly important to see what changes have been made since last viewing the document. 

You can see who was the last two have worked on a document on the far right column.  In this case Chodkinson was the last to edit the document today at 8:55am. 



Once you viewing the document  itself you can see what changes were made during the last edit.  To do this you need to select File ---> Revision History.  Changes are highlighted as shown below. 



With help from:
www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/8236.aspx

Naturally we will all come upon web content which is releavent to our OER research.  The best way for us to organize and share this conent is using the popular Delicious website.  Here we can tag and store all of our discovered links regardless of which computer we are using at the time.  To make things even easier we recommend that you download and install the Delicious Toolbar for Firefox.  This tutorial coveres installing the toolbar on Firefox only but there is also a toolbar for MS Explorer fanatics here.  

To simplify the process of adding sites to your delicious links a toolbar for Mozilla Firefox is available.  Add the toolbar from the Mozilla Firefox Add-Ins website here.




Click add to Firefox then read and accept the license agreement on the following page. 

You will be presented with a dialog box to confirm the installation.



The Delicious Toolbar is now being downloaded and installed on your local machine.



Once it has downloaded you will have to restart Firefox to see the changes

For information on getting the most out of the Delicious Toolbar refer to this article.