Category: educational content

Outputs, deliverables and other stuff

Sustaining and embedding changes to curriculum design practices and processes was the theme for the Curriculum Design Programme meeting held last week in Nottingham.

The projects are now in their final year of a four year funding cycle, and the focus of the activities and discussions were to:

“*Explore how projects can best ensure their activities result in real and sustained changes to curriculum design processes and practices and how to evidence this impact
*Showcase innovative practice from the Curriculum Design programme and explore and discuss how these outputs can assist in transforming curriculum design more widely in other institutions
*Further explore how projects can contribute to the programme level narrative around how institutions are changing the processes and practices relating to curriculum design and the role technology plays within this”

So that by then end of the two days, projects would (hopefully) be able to:

“* outline a clear approach to sustaining their innovations and changes to the curriculum design practices and processes
*outline benefits realisation proposals for embedding their outputs to support institutional enhancement and realising the benefits of their projects more widely
*all projects will have a clearer understanding of the good practice, innovation and findings which have emerged from programme and how this can enhance their own projects and practice.”

Unsurprisingly all the projects have been on quite a journey over the past three and half years. There have been changes to project staff; most projects have had at least one change of Vice Chancellor had to deal with the various re-shuffling of senior management teams which that inevitably brings. For projects concerned with institutional level change and indeed with any project tasked with embedding a change in practice these changes at senior management have been particularly challenging. Set this against the current political climate we have to give credit to all the projects for managing to navigate their way through particularly choppy waters. But will projects leave a legacy which actually is able to sustain and embed changes to practice?

Paul Bailey and Peter Chatterton led a session on managing change and used a really nice visual metaphor of a snowball to represent the different push-pull and self momentum that projects can often find themselves in. I think it’s fair to say that most projects have found that in their discussions and base-lining activities that the “curriculum design” space was ripe for conversations. A number of projects have had to deal with some significant pressures of scope creep, and being seen as the panacea for whole host of related issues.

Stephen Brown and the projects from one of the programme cluster groups then led a session on sustaining change. This allowed for a very useful discussions around project identity, outputs and deliverables and how to “hand on” using that great catchall term, the “stuff” projects have produced. Helen Beetham has written up this session on the Programme Blog far more eloquently than I could. From the marketplace activity where projects were given an opportunity to show off their wares, there is a lot of great “stuff” coming out of this programme.

One of the high points of the meeting was the debate, where the quite challenging motion proposed was “This house believes that this programme will not actually change the pedagogic practice of curriculum design”. I won’t go into details on the substance of the debate here, however one question that I should have raised (but of course didn’t ) was – if this programme can’t, then what will? When JISC did fund a programme specifically around changing pedagogic practice (the Design for Learning Programme) one of the clear messages that came out was that projects couldn’t make any sustained impact on practice if they weren’t embedded in wider institutional processes around the curriculum design process. Whilst I can see that some projects maybe don’t see themselves as having direct impact on practice as they are more focused on the business process end of things; at a programme level I believe there is growing evidence that overall there are quite significant impacts being made. I’m not sure if this was planned or just one of those serendipitous coincidences but I think this post from Martin Weller whilst the meeting was in full swing is a good example of precisely how the programme is changing the pedagogic practice of curriculum design.

More information about the meeting is available from the Programme Blog and the storify version of the meeting and projects are continuing to share their outputs and “stuff” in the Design Studio.

The future of technology in education (FOTE11)

What is the the future of technology in education? This is the premise for the FOTE conference which was held on 7 October at UCL.  And the answer is . . . . 42, a piece of string? Well of course there isn’t a single one, and I don’t think there should be one definitive answer either, but parts of the complex jigsaw puzzle were highlighted over the day.

A few suggestions which were aired during the morning morning sessions included: it’s the standards and EA approaches on the latest Gartner education hype cycle; it’s “cool stuff” combining the physical and digital world to create engaging, memorable experiences (as exemplified by Bristol Uni); it’s predictive analytics; it’s flipped and naked; it’s games; it’s data objects; it’s the user – v – we don’t know as we haven’t figured out the purpose of education yet; it’s about better communication between IT departments and students. It’s about providing ubiquitous, reliable wifi access on campus and plenty of power sockets.

It’s probably a combination of all of these and more. But if we in education are to truly reap the benefits of the affordances of technology then we also need to be ensuring our culture is developing in parallel. As James Clay pointed out, people inherently don’t like change and this can be exacerbated in educational contexts. Why change when we’ve “always done it this way” or “it works, why change it?”. Students are powerful change agents – but only if our institutional processes allow them to be. Although there was knowing laughter around the room when he pointed out that “students are dangerous”, there was a serious underlying message. We need to be working more effectively with students to really uncover their needs for technology, and have meaningful interactions so that those in charge can make the most effective decisions about the services/hardware and software institutions provide. James rightly pointed out that we need to be asking students “what do you want to do” not “what do you want”.

There was also a lot of discussion over the day about students and “BYOD” (bring your own device). I think there is a general assumption now that students going to University will have a laptop and least one other mobile internet enable device (probably a phone). Which raises the question of institutional provision. During the day, I have to say I did feel that this panel session didn’t work that well, however it is actually the session/topic that I have spent most time thinking about since Friday.

On several occasions the student reps (and others) brought up the fact that often students don’t actually know if/where and when they can use their own devices in H/FE. Given the fact that in school all hardware is provided and personal devices are openly discouraged, this uncertainty isn’t that surprising, but I was glad to be reminded of it. Again this relates to the importance of recognising and allowing for cultural change and the importance of communication. Is it made clear to students when, where and how they can use their own devices (mobile, laptop and/or tablet)? How easy is it for students to find out about logging in to institutional services such as email, printers etc? How safe is it to carry your laptop/ipad to Uni? Do staff encourage or discourage use of personal devices in their classes? I’m sure that even amongst the technology savvy audience on Friday there were a few people wishing others weren’t constantly staring at their phones, laptops and predictably ipads and were listening to what the speakers were saying 🙂 After spending Tuesday at the Developing Digital Literacies Programme start up meeting, the issue of digital literacies is also key to the future technology in education.

All in all I found the day very engaging and thought provoking and the organisers should be congratulated for bringing together such a diverse range of speakers. I wonder what the future will look like this time next year?

Words and pictures from "Advances in open systems for learning resources" workshop

Twitter story from the Advances in open systems for learning resources workshop, hosted by CETIS as part of the Repository Fringe 2011 conference.
View “Advances in open systems for learning resources”

IMS Global Learning Consortium announces release of Common Cartridge v1.1

IMS has announced the final release of Common Cartridge v1.1.

According to the press release: “The Common Cartridge standard provides a means for interoperability, reusability, and customization of digital learning content, assessments, collaborative discussion forums, and a diverse set of learning applications. The standard offers both end-users and vendors the possibility of greater choice in both content and platforms. This latest version of Common Cartridge includes support for Basic Learning Tools Interoperability which provides a standard way of integrating rich learning applications or premium content with platforms such as Learning Management Systems, portals, or other systems.”

The standard is available for download from the IMS website.

Design Bash update

Due to holidays etc I’ve been a bit late in reporting back on the Design Bash we held in conjunction with the 2010 European LAMS conference last month at the University of Oxford.

This is the third design bash I’ve been involved in organising, and they’re probably closest in style and structure to an un-conference. There is no pre-set agenda and the main aim of the day is to foster meaningful extended dialogue between delegates. In other words, just allowing people to speak to each other. This year, the groups divided along a number of lines. One group spent most of the day discussing the ” critical success factors for curriculum design”. Paul Bartholomew from the T-SPARC project at BCU, helpfully created a mindmap of the discussion.

In contrast to these more cerebral discussions, there were a number of mini-demonstrations of tools and systems including the GLO tool, ldshake, and compendium LD, and wookie. Again links to all the tools are in the available online from the Design Bash Cloudworks site.

James Dalziel demoed a number of new features of the LAMS system such as embedding which many of the delegates were interested in. At last year’s design bash, embedding and previewing of designs was a key theme of many of the discussions, so it was great to see how over the year the discussion has developed into an actual implementation.

Members of the LDSE project team attended and the day provided a great opportunity for the team to discuss and develop potential integrations from others. For example, Bill Olivier and Diana Laurillard had a very fruitful discussion about LDSE using the IDIBL framework that the University of Bolton have developed.

Unlike last year’s event there wasn’t very much activity around sharing of designs, and I’m not sure if that was due to the size of this year’s event – there were quite a few more people in attendance. Or, if it was simply down the the overriding interests of participants this year. If we run the event again next year, we may have a slightly more structured agenda and dedicated demo slots and a slightly more structured technical stream. We did also discuss the possibility of running a similar event online. This is something we may well investigate further, and certainly it has possibilities. The cloudworks site itself does allow for a level of interactivity, however I did notice that there wasn’t as much external contribution this year compared with last. However, again this just maybe down to fact that we had more people there in person.

Overall though, there was very positive feedback from delegates on the day. You can view (comment and contribute too) all the resources from the day from Cloudworks.

EC SIG OER Meeting 27 February

Last Friday the EC SIG met at the OU, Milton Keynes for a really interesting day of presentations and discussion around OER. The meeting was in part timed to to coincide with the JISC OER call and to give an overview of some current developments in OER from a range of perspectives from the institutional to the individual.

Andy Lane and Patrick McAndrew started the day with an overview of institutional impact of the OpenLearn project. One of the key institutional barriers was (unsurprisingly) trying get over the assumption that providing open content wasn’t “giving away the family silver” and the fear of not being able to control what others might do with your content. OpenLearn has fundamentally been about de-bunking these perceptions and illustrating how making content open can actually bring about a range of benefits to the institution. The ethos of the OpenLearn project has been to enhance the student experience and the student, not the institution has central to all developments. In terms of institutional benefit, perhaps the most significant one is that there is now a clear trail showing that a significant number of openlearn students do actually go on to register for a fee paying course.

Sarah Darnley, from the University of Derby gave an overview of the POCKET project which is using OpenLearn materials and repurposing/repackaging then for their institutional VLE. They are also creating new materials and putting them into openlearn. Russell Stannard, University of Westminster rounded off the morning’s presentations with his fascinating presentation of his multimedia training videos. To quote Patrick McAndrew Russell is a bit of a ‘teacherpreneur’. During teaching of his multimedia course Russell saw that it would easier for him to create short training videos of various software packages which students could access at anytime thus freeing up actual class time. Russell explained how the fact that his site was high in google rankings has led a huge number of visits and again increased interest in the MSc he teaches on. Although not conceived as an OER project, this is a great example of how just “putting stuff out-there” can increase motivation/resources for existing students and bring in more. However I do wonder as Russell starts producing more teaching resources to go with his videos and his institution get more involved how open he will be able to keep things.

The afternoon session started with Liam Earney of the CASPER project sharing the experiences of the RePRODUCE programme. CASPER has recently surveyed to projects to find out their experiences dealing with copyright and IPR issues when repurposing material. A key finding is that the within the HE sector there is generally an absence of rights statements and only 14% of the projects found it easy to clear copyright. Ambiguity abounds within institutions about who/where/what and how of content can be reused. Of course this is a key area for the the upcoming JISC OER call.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in discussion around the call. Four of the programme managers involved were at the meeting and we able to answer questions relating to it. It is important to note the the JISC call is a pilot and is not a means to an end. It will not, and is not trying to solve all the issues around OER, however what it will do is allow the community to continue to explore and move forward with the various technical and IPR/copyright issues in the context of previous experience.

Copies of the presentations from the day are available from the CETIS wiki, and also a great summary of the day is available via Cloudworks ( a big thanks to Patrick McAndrew for pulling this together).

Semantic Technologies in education survey site now available

The next stage of the SemTech project (as reported earlier in Lorna’s blog) is now underway. The team are now conducting an online survey of relevant semantic tools and services. The survey website provides a catalogue of relevant semantic tools and services and information on how they relate to education.

If you have an interest in the use of semantic technologies in teaching and learning, you can register on the site and add any relevant technologies you are using, or add tags to the ones already in documented. As the project is due for completion by the end of February, the project team are looking for feedback by 2 February.

It's not what you share, but how you share

Scott Leslie has written a reallyinteresting post about some of the issues he has with institutional collaboration projects. I’m sure anyone who has tried to share any kind of “stuff” will find resonance in what he says.

The post is particularly timely for myself and others in CETIS as we are working closely with JISC colleagues who are planning the pilot OER call for next year. This is a major investment by JISC and the HEA with £5million worth of funding being made available.

We have been having extensive discussions around the types of architectures/sharing solutions that should be in place. Hopefully we can avoid the scenarios that Scott describes and allow as flexible an approach as possible, ensuring people can use existing tools and networks and that we don’t re-invent another un-necessary technical layer/network(s). However some decisions need to be made to ensure that any resources funded through the programme can be found and tracked.

We’ll be discussing these issues at the CETIS conference in a couple of weeks at the OER scoping session. If you would like to attend the session and haven’t had an invitation yet, please get in touch. Or just leave any thoughts about what you think here.

Content transcoder demonstration

Earlier in the summer I blogged about the content transcoder project CETIS and Knowlege Integration are developing. The idea is to create a cloudbased service which can convert the most common eLearning content formats.

At the SALTIS meeting yesterday (9 October) Neil and Hana from KI gave a demonstration of a beta version of the transcoder at the SALTIS meeting in Coventry.

Hana uploaded an OU Common Cartridge to the transcoder service, chose what conversion she wanted (in this case Common Cartridge to SCORM) and then the service went to work. She was notified via email with a url where the newly converted package was available for download. The whole process took less than 5 minutes (the network connection was a bit slow).

The project is still in the early phase of development and currently can only convert between convert to/from IMS CP 1.1.4, SCORM 2004 and IMS CC 1.0 however by the end of the project (March 09) the service will offer conversion to/from IMS CP v1.1.3; v1.1.4; v1.2; IMS CC1.0;SCORM 1.2; SCORM 2004. At this stage it looks unlikely that this initial development will be able to include platform specific transforms. However such transforms are possible within service architecture – as ever it’s really just a question of time and resources allocation. As the code is open source maybe someone else will want to pick up on that and develop further or you never know, we may even get a bit more funding to extend the project.

If you are interested in the project and have packages that you would like to convert, please get in touch as we are looking for as many testers of the service as possible. More information on the project is available from the CETIS wiki.

Update from JISC e-Learning programme meeting: open content call on the horizon

At the JISC e-Learning programme earlier this week, an outline of an exciting new call around open content was given by Tish Roberts (Programme Director, eLearning) and David Kernohan (Programme Manager, eLearning). A pilot phase will run next year (managed jointly by JISC and the HEA) and will investigate approaches for individual, disciplines and institutions towards making new (and existing) content open.

More information will be released in the coming weeks from JISC, so watch this space for more information. We are also running a session on open content at this year’s CETIS conference. So if you are interested, sign up for the session.

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