Oer11 developing tech patterns

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

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

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
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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
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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

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.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2009/12/the-politics-of-oer.html)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 3rd party tools

Phase 1 technical overview

Phase 2 technical overview

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

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

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’

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

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

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

Questions
phil.barker@hw.ac.uk
robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk
lmc@strath.ac.uk
http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/topic/oer
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Oer11 developing tech patterns

by R. John Robertson

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