Open Education Week: MOOCs at UCT
Presentation for Open Education Week, University of Cape Town, 11 March 2015
Sukaina Walji with Laura Czerniewicz, Andrew Deacon, Mary-Ann Fife, Tasneem Jaffer & Janet Small
Centre for Innovation in Learning & Teaching, University of Cape Town
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Open Education Week: MOOCs at UCT
1. OPEN EDUCATION WEEK:
MOOCS at UCT
Presentation for Open Education Week, University of Cape Town, 11 March 2015
Sukaina Walji with Laura Czerniewicz, Andrew Deacon, Mary-Ann Fife, Tasneem Jaffer & Janet
Small
Centre for Innovation in Learning & Teaching, University of Cape Town
@sukainaw
Sukaina.walji@uct.ac.za
What have we been doing over the last 9 months?
The MOOCs project at UCT
Currently 7 MOOCs have been approved for funding and development. As well as the two currently open for registration, we have MOOCs from Surgery, Stats, Inclusive Education, Climate Change and Social Innovations from GSB.
Two courses are currently open for enrollment.
In terms of open education, MOOCs are a particular form of open education – they enable free access and enrollment into many university level courses with access to materials and sometimes the opportunity to earn a form of certification. The do not replace a university level course as they do not confer university credit and the massiveness means that in terms of teaching, they are a form of self-directed learning rather than a direct teaching opportunity.
There are controversies around how open MOOCs really are. These are complicated and contested arguments and we don’t have time to discuss those in detail. There are also a lot of myths around MOOCs and openness and how the platforms dictate what can be done with the content. I’m going to share with you are experiences.
We would like to talk about MOOCs being developed at UCT.
Talk about the open agenda at UCT and wish to promote openness.
We’ve been discovering how possible it has been – how open can you be.
So we’ll share our experience thus far.
** As we are hearing today, a growing amount of UCT's scholarly work is available in its institutional repository, OpenUCT. UCT has an Open Access Policy that encourages its scholars to make their research and teaching material available online. UCT Libraries are the custodians of this Policy.
In our case, we were interested in making sure we were applying CC licences to course content where possible.
This isn’t given in all MOOCs. In fact, in most of the MOCOs we see on major platforms, the default appears to be full copyright in the materials. We have seen variations around this, but its not a given that MOOC materials are open in the sense of open content or OER.
Open content has been necessary to develop MOOCs.
The MOOCs are visual and the FutureLearn platform in particular has a design that requires images to be inserted as signals, placeholders as well as where they are required in video lectures and readings.
We have souced the vast majority of images from CC libraries. Other institutions have bought images but this is not really possible for us due to our budgets.
This isn’t straighforward. Apart from the time it takes, we need to become licence detectives.
With the images, we have to make sure where the copyright is invested (and by implication the CC licence), and that often people might believe they have copyright but that sometimes isn't the case. So when using material, we have to be careful that we check as far as possible the provenance of the claim of copyright.
A MOOC is open to all but that means the students are not registered students of an institution and do not have access to library resources.
The readings can’t be the same as in the face to face Master’s course, so we’ve had to work hard to find. Our core text is a publication called ‘where does it hurt’ from the Wellcome Trust, who release their publications under a CC BY licence. Generally it has been very difficult to find suitable readings that suit the context, and it is evident for us that a lack of open access does pose restrictions for us.
We’ve also been able to work with academics to deposit versions of their papers legally in the Open UCT repository, which can then be shared.
Clarify IP in the videos belongs to the University while the content, transcripts belong to the academic.
The advantage of the CC license is that the academics can re-use those videos in other contexts without needing to get any other permission.