Fortnightly Mailing

Selecting content for OpenLearn - an insider account

Guest Contribution from Andy Lane, Director of OpenLearn

Note. This post arrived as a comment on Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn?, but is published with Andy's agreement as a Guest Contribution.

Seb recently added to the debate as to whether the OU was publishing the right content on OpenLearn. In particular Seb said:

"I think that if the OU does not use OpenLearn to showcase its best stuff, the OpenLearn initiative risks being judged as some rather pedestrian content sitting in a (possibly) innovative environment. That would be a major missed opportunity."

On my part I an unclear as to what he thinks the 'best stuff' is or should be and what is the 'missed opportunity'. As Director of OpenLearn I can take full responsibility for what we have published and explain why we have done so, and make some comments on what I think he might be getting at.

It was always part of the plan that we would publish material from our existing courses and not write new stuff nor significantly rework the existing stuff. It was about opening up some of the wares from across the breadth and depth of what we have that our students study and generally find very satifactory giving the OU's results in the National Student Satisfaction surveys. And it is about exposing such material to both learners and teachers to make what they want of it.

The New Curiosity Shop Online College - Guest Contribution from Noel Chidwick

I needed a change. After twenty years in a Further Education college I thought it was about time to try something new, come out from under the stifling blanket of institutional life.  I am fascinated by the potential of online distance learning, but I watched with despair how colleges and universities were shedding their general interest courses in favour of  training for the job market, and how adult learners were becoming sidelined. In Scotland, the number of distance learners in FE dropped from over 27,000 in 2001 to under 13,000 in 2007. In a recent response to a consultation paper to the DFeS NIACE claim: “1.4 million places in publicly-supported adult learning in England have been lost over the last two years.” I thought it was time to stop talking and start doing.

Luckily, my friend and colleague Arthur Chapman, who also spent twenty years in the same college, agreed. After careful planning we built the model that is now the New Curiosity Shop Online College.

Help to define the requirements for a college web portal

Keith Burnett, who last year wrote a Guest Contribution about using Blogger to get teachers started with e-learning is seeking advice. He writes:

"I'm trying to map out what a college web portal should provide for various types of people: students; teachers: and middle managers. I'm trying to do this in a way that makes few assumptions about the systems used to provide the services/information. I've hit upon the 'extreme programming' ploy of 'user stories'. I'd be most grateful if people had a look at these and simply made comments - either to add services, or subtract them or to specialise the roles to more finely divided kinds of people."

Ten years of online learning at The Sheffield College: taking a new direction - Guest Contribution by Julia Duggleby and Julie Hooper

Earlier this year the Sheffield College celebrated 10 years of delivering online learning. Significantly for us, the end of this decade also marks a new beginning where the two previously distinct teams, Online Learning and Online English, have merged to combine resources and experience in new online learning initiatives such as a fully online BA Foundation Degree in e Communications (beginning February 2008) validated and topped up with an online BA Hons year by Sheffield Hallam University.  These teams have developed respectively some well known and award winning courses such as LeTTOL and English GCSE Online.

So as the College moves into its 11th year, it seems like a good time to reflect on what we have achieved, what challenges we face (and not always overcome), and what we hope to gain from the merger, through the e Communications Foundation Degree and in other ways.

Northern Rock fiasco, Google, my local primary school, and the OLPC device

Guest Contribution by Dick Willis

Those of you who listen to Radio 4's 'Round Britain Quiz' will be familiar with their format - the team has to work out the connection between various apparently unrelated items. Well, here's one for you: the Northern Rock fiasco, Google,  my local primary school, and the OLPC device?

OK, don't waste your time, you've got your email to deal with; I'll tell you...

Peoples-uni.org - an open access initiative for public health

Guest Contribution by Dick Heller

Dick Heller recently retired as Professor of Public Health at the University of Manchester, UK, where he developed a fully on-line Masters course in Public Health. Previously Dick was at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he was part of the International Clinical Epidemiology Network  (INCLEN).

Let me tell you about http://www.peoples-uni.org/ which aims to develop educational content around Open Educational Resources, freely available on the Internet, to help with Public Health capacity building in low- to middle-income countries.

Local universities offering public health education may be oversubscribed for face-to-face courses and fees for overseas universities, including e-learning distance programmes, are higher than can be afforded by most potential students in these countries. Internet-based e-learning has the exciting potential to deliver high quality learning resources anytime and anywhere, and although access is by no means universal it is improving quickly.

There is an ever expanding range of high quality on-line education resources freely available through the Internet, and a number of universities are putting educational material on-line for open access, although they do not include either teaching or accreditation of learning. Peoples-uni.org aims to provide educational context around the materials freely available on the Internet. A number of national and international partners have agreed to be part of this, and momentum is building.

We are starting with Public Health, building towards Masters level courses, and are piloting our first course module on Maternal Mortality currently. We have a large interest in accessing this course and the pilot is going very well. Draft course modules on Maternal Mortality and Child Mortality can be seen on http://moodle.cawd.net/course/category.php?id=68.

We are hoping for collaborations to develop to assist with this initiative, and plan to keep costs low enough to allow access by those who will benefit. Any groups or individuals who wish to join the initiative in any capacity will be welcome.

Dick Heller -  dick.heller "AT" manchester.ac.uk

Freebase: lowering the barriers for participation in the Semantic Web. Guest contribution from Phil Rees.

Freebase is a web application that organisations and individuals use to easily publish information on-line, in a semantic structure, collaboratively.  Contributors from around the world can use the application to structure and edit any topic in the system or define meaningful links and relationships between topics.  All of the information in Freebase is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which means it can be reused for any purpose without going through a copyright clearance process.  To encourage the reuse of information, Freebase has made some programming tools available to ease the creation of web applications that extract live data from the system.

JISC online conference - Innovating e-Learning. Guest contribution from Geoff Minshull.

The second Innovating e-Learning on-line conference from the JISC takes place from 11 - 14 June 2007.  The conference focuses on the potential of e-learning in transforming practice within institutions and in supporting lifelong learning. The keynote presenters will offer a rich variety of perspectives on these themes:

• Theme 1: Institutional transformation Day 1: Terry Mayes, Emeritus Professor, Glasgow Caledonian University, and Day 2: Dr John Guy, Principal, and Dr Mike Docker, Director, ICLT, the Sixth Form College, Farnborough;
• Theme 2: Supporting Lifelong Learning, introduced by Robin Mason, Professor of Educational Technology at The Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University.

The concluding presentation will be given by

Web 2.0 - Discontinuity or Continuity? Guest Contribution by Frances Bell.

Frances Bell is a Senior Lecturer in Salford Business School: she blogs at elgg.

Paraphrasing Churchill (Russia becomes Web 2.0),

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Web 2.0. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is economic interest."  (adapted from http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/31000.html)

development and activities around the Internet continue to intrigue and excite those who engage with them; but the economics are less clear. As compared with the dotcom peak of March 2000, IT shares are -63.10% (according to S&P 500, Feb 2007), but +16.57% compared with March 2003. Tim O'Reilly's  definition of Web 2.0 started with a statement that cried out "fresh start":

"The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web."

So what is Web 2.0? Is it really something new? In a later definition, O'Reilly linked back to Tim Berners-Lee's original Web that he says is "is one of the most 'Web 2.0' systems out there".

Developments at Blackpool and the Fylde College. Guest Contribution from Christine McAllister.

Christine McAllister is Head of Learning Resources at Blackpool and The Fylde College.

After years of struggling to interest academic staff in the potential of learning technology, Moodle seems to have made all the difference!  At Blackpool, we have been lucky enough to retain e-Learning Champions for each academic department – they each get 3 hours per week off their teaching timetabletimetable.  Over the past few years, this has been a relatively stable group working first with Learnwise and then with Moodle.

This is our second academic year with Moodle and all Schools are engaged with it.  In some Schools, all courses have a presence – in others it is limited to particular courses.  Each School uses Moodle in different ways, some more heavily involved in the content side of courses (including NLN materials), others using reflective logs and communication tools.  There is a lot of interest in using video and some interest in sound.

At the end of last year, I organised a very simple staff development event where each School had a slot with a cross-section of e-learning Champions in order to share good practice across the college.  I have never run an event which generated such positive feedback!  Yes, there were some dissenting voices but the vast majority of staff all said the same things – yes, I can see the point of this, yes, this will help me.  We are now building on this to run a major e-Learning Conference for upwards of 500 staff in May of this year bringing in top level speakers from both HE and FE across a range of e-learning-related topics.  I hope this will also feel like a celebration of how far we have some as a college.

This year we have won an Association of Colleges "Beacon Award" for our Beauty Therapy provision. This was related to our Moodle use; and we also received high praise from Ofsted in relation to our Teacher Education, and Engineering and Computing provision.

There is now an interest in the college in developing multimedia materials and a possible interest in running some courses fully or partially online.

We find that there is more development work done on the Moodle system than with any commercial systems that we have experienced.  We were prepared to buy in external maintenance but we have never needed to.  So – there are lots of good feelings around Open Source Software as well as the product itself.

In terms of staff support, the college has a full-time Administrator plus another member of staff who is more or less full-time on Moodle.  Training has been done by one of the Learning Resources staff on a half-time basis.

Christine McAllister - cmca"AT"blackpool.ac.uk