Presented at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada - An Introduction to Educational Computing with Steven Shaw (PhD supervisor) on November 11, 2013.

1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/76323119@N00/2905298482/
DESIGNING OPEN LINGUISTIC SUPPORT
ALANNAH FITZGERALD @ CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL

2. “The best way to predict the future
is to design it”
Buckminster Fuller

3. Overview
• Data-Driven Learning for the Masses
– FLAX Language Project at Waikato University
– MOOCs and Specific Academic English Support
• Open Oxford and Resource Reuse
• Creative Commons Licensing
• Open Educational Resources and Practices
• Educational Computing and Punditry

4. DATA-DRIVEN LEARNING FOR THE
MASSES?

5. MOOCs and the Massive Potential for
Linguistic Support Development
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/join-next-weeks-mooc-of-moocs-at-hybrid-pedagogy/41485

6. MOOC Meltdowns
‘Charles Severance ran into the language barrier in week two of his seven-week
course. After 45,000 people signed up, 23,000 actually logged in when
the course began in June. By the end of the first week and the first quiz,
11,000 had stuck around. Not the kind of retention rate Severance was
accustomed to at Michigan, but par for the course in a MOOC.
That’s when Severance made what was, in retrospect, a tactical error. “I
wanted to try the peer assessment as fast as possible,” he says. So he
assigned a short essay -- 400 words or so...that’s when things started to go
awry.
“Probably a third of the students do not have English as a primary language,”
says Severance. “A problem I have never had before is … suddenly I’ve got
people in 15 languages. I’m trying to be subtle and draw out some insight,
[and] they want something they can really translate and understand.”
After that assignment, the active enrollment in his course dropped to 6,000.’
(Kolowich, 2012)
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/08/30/first-humanities-mooc-professors-road-test-courseras-peer-grading-model#
ixzz2Qq92NBi2

7. FLAX Project at Waikato University
FLAX image by permission of non-commercial reuse by Jane Galloway

8. FLAX – Flexible Language Acquisition
Flexible Language Acquisition
library

9. MOOC Linguistic Support with English
for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)

10. Virology OER from Open Educational
Practitioner, Vincent Racaniello

11. FLAX Virology ESAP Collection
• YouTube lectures streamed
• This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcasts
• Open Access articles
• Virology blog articles with hyperlinks to resources
• Text analysis tools for e.g. lexical bundles,
collocations, word lists, part-of-speech (POS)
tags, and links to Wikipedia, the British National
Corpus (BNC) and the live web
• Digital library features: search, retrieve, save,
interact and learn

12. The traditional text analysis software interface for
working with large language collections (corpora) has
been the Key Word In Context (KWIC) interface. Corpus
linguistics researchers and developers of KWIC
interfaces have claimed over the years that learners of
a language can deduce language use patterns by
examining KWIC lines. This method is also known as
data-driven learning.

13. FLAX Interface Design

14. OPEN OXFORD AND RESOURCE
REUSE

15. Re-using Oxford OpenSpires content
in podcast corpora
http://www.alannahfitzgerald.org/re-using-oxford-openspires-content/

16. https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/2483648http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/melissa/2013/03/23/licetne-anglice-loqui/

17. FLAX British Academic Written English
(BAWE) Collections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26i_Y146GOs

18. FLAX Do-It-Yourself Podcast Corpora with
Oxford OER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si24d3Z-8nQ

19. FLAX Do-It-Yourself Podcast Corpora 2:
Building interactivity into your collections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fysDzYjbhh0

20. CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSING

22. http://creativecommons.org/choose/

23. Chris’s
Reusable
Card
Game
Chris Pegler
http://orioleproject.blogspot.co.uk/p/shop.html

24. 19. LICENSE TO USE
19. License to use
Open licenses (e.g.
Creative Commons)
allow resources to be
used without the need
for rights clearance.
Is the content you need
openly licensed?
Purpose
Concerns
Quality
Technology
Resources
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LuM
axArt_Gold_Guys_With_Creative_Commons_S
ymbol02.jpg
http://www.slideshare.net/orioleproject/chris-pegler-reusable-card-game

25. Licensing Scenarios
(adapted from UKOpenUni workshop)
I’ve found six images on the web for use in my
course-related DVD and the resolutions are fine.
However, they are available under a Creative
Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-
Alike licence. This clearance is fine for my initial
use for staff and students, but we would
probably eventually hope to sell the DVD.
Should I not bother with these images?

26. Cont.
I’ve found an article by Diane Nation on the web
and this would be brilliant for my learning object
intended for open use. I’ve tried to contact Ms
Nation twice and have been in touch with the web
master of the site to see if they can help but have
had no response so far. I’ve amended the article, as
I didn’t agree with some of the points she was
making. I think I’ve improved the work actually and
I’ve obviously left her acknowledged as the author.
As I’ve had no response I’m just going to use it
anyway. Everyone’s always talking about risk so I’ll
take one. Is this OK?

27. Cont.
My institution has an online open learning
resource and is based in the UK. We have
selected an England and Wales UK licence for
the use of our content. However, a user in China
has asked us if the CC licence still applies? Does
the CC licence refer to where the content is
being used or where it is hosted?

28. Cont.
I have some software I would like to make
available under a CC licence – would that be OK?

29. Cont.
My institution is making some of its content
available under a CC licence. How do we ensure
that our trademarks/logos are protected?

30. Extended Licensing Scenario
My educational institution is going to be working in collaboration with
at least two other educational institutions in Canada.
You are going to create an innovative joint MA TESOL resource for
Masters students studying and researching in the area of open
corpora for teaching English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP).
This facility will act as a provider of online resources. All institutions
will provide some of their own existing materials that contain third
party content (journal articles, images, extracts from books, and
website content) which are made up of text and audio-visual
content.
The collaboration would like to make the content openly available
whilst ensuring that their intellectual property rights are not
compromised.
30

31. Consider the following questions for
discussion:
• How would you license this content to users?
• Would you consider using a Creative Commons
licence, if so which one?
• Would you need to consider more than one type
of licence?
• What would you need to take care of
contractually in relation to the content?
• How would you ensure that the integrity of third
party content is maintained?
31

32. OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
AND PRACTICES

33. 3. SHARING IS GOOD
3. Sharing is good
The ethos of education is
to share learning.
Can open content be a
sound investment as well
as the right thing to do?
Purpose
Concerns
Quality
Technology
Resources
By Toban Black
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/3773116901
/
http://www.slideshare.net/orioleproject/chris-pegler-reusable-card-game

34. • For the practitioner
– Web presence; resources development expertise;
professional recognition.
• For the student
– Preview of, access to and contribution to course content.
• For the institution
– Brand promotion; best practice showcasing.
• For the EAP community
– Materials development collaboration; sharing best
practice; providing an alternative to commercial
publications (Specific vs General EAP).

35. 28. MY COMMUNITY
28. My community
If I belong to a
community already,
then is this the best
place to look for great
reusable resources? Or
would I miss
something?
Purpose
Concerns
Quality
Technology
Resources
By Meer
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meer/172210681/
http://www.slideshare.net/orioleproject/chris-pegler-reusable-card-game

36. 7. LEARN NEW STUFF
7. Learn new stuff
Does working with other
people’s stuff offer
effective development?
Or would you miss the
creative thrill of making
your own?
Purpose
Concerns
Quality
Technology
Resources
By Wayan Vota
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcmetroblogger/329854339
8/
http://www.slideshare.net/orioleproject/chris-pegler-reusable-card-game

37. • For the practitioner
– Development of practical skills in digital materials
creation: reuse, repurpose, remix and redistribute.
• For the student
– Access to up-to-date resources: inside and beyond the
classroom.
• For the institution
– Sustainable resources and continued recognition.
• For the EAP community
– Exposure to new and relevant tools and resources for
EAP (e.g. FLAX)

38. EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING AND
PUNDITRY

39. The end of the university as we know it
“The future looks like this: Access to college-level
education will be free for everyone; the residential
college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of
thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the
bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant;
and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million
students.” (Harden, 2013)
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352

40. The Education Apocalypse:
#opened13 Keynote
“Where in the stories we’re telling about the future of
education are we seeing salvation? Why would we locate
that in technology and not in humans, for example? Why
would we locate that in markets and not in communities?
What happens when we embrace a narrative about the
end-times — about education crisis and education
apocalypse? Who’s poised to take advantage of this crisis
narrative? Why would we believe a gospel according to
artificial intelligence, or according to Harvard Business
School [Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation theory], or
according to Techcrunch...?” (Watters, 2013)
http://hackeducation.com/2013/11/07/the-education-apocalypse/

41. Shifting Predictions within Disruptive
Innovation for Education
“People did not create new disruptive business
models in public education [K-12], however.,”
Christensen writes. "Why not? Almost all
disruptions take root among non-consumers. In
education, there was little opportunity to do
that. Public education is set up as a public utility,
and state laws mandate attendance for virtually
everyone. There was no large, untapped pool of
non-consumers that new school models could
target.” (Christensen, Horn & Staker, 2013)

42. OERu: Disruptive Innovation Aimed at
an Untapped Pool of Non-consumers?

43. From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What you
really need to know about the Internet
“We’re in the midst of a major upheaval in our
information environment, and none of us has any real
idea of where it will end up. So we need to put it into
perspective. As it happens, Johannes Gutenberg
triggered a comparable revolution five and a half
centuries ago when he introduced printing by moveable
type. His invention shaped the world into which the
Internet was born. What can we learn from that
experience?” (Naughton, 2011)

44. OER Research Hub
http://oerresearchhub.org/

45. MOOC Research Initiative
http://www.moocresearch.com/

46. References
• Christensen, C., Horn, M., & Staker, H. (2013). Is K–12 blended learning
disruptive?An introduction of the theory of hybrids | Christensen Institute. Clayton
Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. Retrieved from
http://www.christenseninstitute.org/publications/hybrids/
• Kolowich, S. (2012). Learning from one another. Inside Higher Ed, August 30.
Retrieved from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/08/30/first-humanities-
mooc-professors-road-test-courseras-peer-grading-model
• Harden, N. (2013). The end of the university as we know it. The American Interest.
Retrieved from http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352
• Naughton, J. (2011). From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What you really need to know
about the Internet. Quercus, London.
• Parr, C. (2013, October 31). Mooc rival OERu puts accreditation on menu. Times
Higher Education. Retrieved November 11, 2013, from
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/mooc-rival-oeru-puts-accreditation-
on-menu/2008571.article
• Watters, A. (2013, November 7). The Education Apocalypse #opened13. Retrieved
from http://www.hackeducation.com/2013/11/07/the-education-apocalypse/

47. Thank you
Alannah Fitzgerald: a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca; @AlannahFitz
www.alannahfitzgerald.org TOETOE Blog
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/