Category: open education

My OER (open emotional response) to #oer17

That was my response to the #Iwill challenge given as part of the final plenary session at the #OER17 conference this week.  Starting with the end in mind seems apt for a post reflecting on the conference.   But how did I get here? Why did I end up selecting generosity, inclusivity and hospitality?  There are plenty more that are still swirling round my brain.

I think the answer is these are things that I think I can do, and in doing so can maybe start to address some of the bigger issues politics, power, criticality, definition and action that wove their way through all the presentations, discussions and conversations over the two days of the conference.

Thanks to Kate Bowles and her contribution to the panel session I took part in, the importance of hospitality needs to be highlighted.  If we want to extend practice to embrace open then we need to provide hospitable spaces – both physical and digital. Spaces that are welcoming, where you can choose where and when to enter, that make you  want to explore and more importantly want to stay, come back to and bring others along.

I think we are all a little bit (and a times quite a big bit) guilty of presuming hospitably in our open spaces without really considering how they are experienced by others. What we might assume is an open, hospital place because we know how to navigate it, can actually appear to be quite hostile to those who don’t come from our context, who aren’t privileged to our understandings of how those spaces work and how to interact within them and with “us”.

There’s an old saying in Scotland that describes the difference between East and West (Glasgow/Edinburgh). In Glasgow people will say “come in, you’ll have your tea” and in Edinburgh “come in, you’ll have had your tea”.  There’s a subtle but important difference in terms of hospitality which, never mind the geographical stereotypes,  we all need to be mindful of. Open spaces, even with appropriate open licenses, can be appear to be scary, at times aloof and distance, places you enter with a bit of trepidation or just by pass all together.

As an example from my personal experience,  I had until this conference, always felt a bit like that about Virtually Connecting. Although open, it just seemed to me  a bit of a space for “those and such of those” the great and the good of OER, and those that were involved in what I call “proper” researchers.  However, as I have previously explained, I did end up joining one of the sessions at the conference thanks to the hospitality of Autumn and Maha pre, during and post conference.  That hospitality extended the digital open space in this reflection on user perceptions, to an invitation to participate and to the warmest, welcoming hospitality in the open physical space of the conference.  That little experience of open hospitality is what we all need to ensure we all continue to foster.

Maha is probably one of the most hospitable and generous people I have the privilege of knowing. However in her opening keynote she made a really important point about generosity the need to think very carefully about what we give.  As Maha pointed out, if you are hungry but have no teeth and someone gives you an apple, that apparent act of generosity can actually cause anger, hurt and show lack of understanding of context.

So as I try to be generous I will now make a more of a concerted and explicit effort to ensure that my generosity – in whatever form it takes – is appropriate and inclusive and given with understanding and care.  This may take some time and I might not succeed all the time but I will try.

I really hope that all of the people who attend the conference both physically and virtually found it to be an open, hospitable and generous. But if they didn’t we need to know why so we can change things.

Another issue that bubbled throughout the conference was that of definition. What does open education actually mean? Have we created our own open silo, with our own cozy spaces and discourse? Why aren’t all educational systems (from nursery to universities ), governments fully embracing open-ness?  Many of the reasons of course echo the theme of the conference “the politics of open”.  I’m sure they will be reflected on far more eloquently than I am able to today over the coming weeks but if you want a bit of a taste just search for #trexit.

What is sure is that we need to keep extended the conversations, sharing our research, our practice, working with organisations like wikimedia to extend open knowledge creation and sharing, and seriously think about more creative forms of activism as described by Diana Acre in her inspiring keynote. We need to allow others to help us define open. We can only do that if we work together with our wider communities to keep extending our hospitality and giving people appropriate, inclusive safe spaces to learn, share and grow.

There is so much more I need to reflect on but for now this is about as much as I am capable of.  I’ve been trying to find an image to use that sums up hospitality, but they are all just so culturally bound it doesn’t seem quite right in this context but I think hot beverage is almost universal  . . . once again thanks to the Unsplash community for the generosity of their open images.

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The comfort and discomfort of working and in open and closed spaces #oer17 #critopen #femedtech

#OER17 is rapidly approaching and I am really looking foward to attending the conference. I am always aware of what a privilege it is to be able to attend conferences. This year it that privilege has been highlighted by the uncertainty of institutional support for me to be able to attend (budget cuts are getting deeper) but perhaps of more relevance, my own uncertainty of having any work to present that would be of any relevance.

Happily on this occasion both uncertainties have been overcome, and I am really thrilled to be part of a (quite fabulous) panel with Josie Fraser, Frances Bell, Viv Rolfe and from a distance Kate Bowles.

The title of our session is:  Staying open: sustaining critical open educational practice in a time of walls and borders

What it’s about: What are the prospects for sustaining a generous and critical practice of open educational practice and open research in these times, one that can address the pressing challenges of the emerging political formations that govern higher education? By staying open, can we find effective means to challenge the new politics of normalisation? What are the challenges and privileges of open practice under austerity and precarity? What kind of refusal does open practice now represent? And what tactics work at the local level, in institutions whose strategy for open is driven by the promise of reputational gain? (read more here)

We hope to foster a critical discussion through a series of questions and provocations.

The theme of this year’s conference “the politics of open” couldn’t really be more timely. Like everyone I am used to working with the “p” politics within my (and indeed any) institution and sector, however since the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump  “P”olitics has impinged on my practice and well, my being in a way I’ve not been aware of before.  I have always taken a pragmatic approach to open education, and OER. My politics of open have seemed to naturally fit with open educational practice, more than open educational resources.

I have always supported the need for closed spaces as well as open ones (check my OER15 keynote for more).  Over the past year I have become increasingly uncertain about my own ability to be open. This is partly due to some of the work I have been involved in which has had to be done in closed spaces and it not quite being at a stage to share in any open sense. But also due to me not actually knowing what to say in relation to wider, world events.  It’s not quite “not yet-ness” but there is something resonates with that concept in how I am coping with the challenges I face and my ability and inability to work through these in open and closed spaces.

In turbulent times it is easy to retreat into closed spaces, keep your head down and just try to get on with things, keep away from the increasingly loud negative and disturbing aspects of social media. Work with those closest to you and find comfort in a mutual solace in the things that really your own colleagues only really understand in terms of internal politics.

My provocation for the session is around exploring open and closed behaviour in relation to the Visitor and Residents methodology.  I could take comfort from the veneer of open-ness that one interpretation of my mapping offers.  In reality it is actually quite discomforting. I’ll hopefully be able to articulate this more succinctly in the session.

Lately, I often feel I don’t actually have anything worthwhile to say . Then I remind myself that I have a moral obligation, particularly from my western European, white, middle class position of privilege to continue to use my access to any platforms to continue to speak out – even if my voice is really, in the grand scale of thing, just a squeak.  Keeping my personal politics and Politics separate is increasingly difficult. I often ask myself is there is a new  level of risk? Where are my boundaries in this? Should I be deleting my tweets or be willing to live with higher risk of mis-interpretation?

Openness and sharing is part of me, of my practice. I find it very unsettling to be constrained to working in closed spaces yet conversely as I described I can derive comfort from it.

Despite the madness social media still offers me many wonderful opportunities for connecting and sharing.  In fact only this morning it reminded me of this paper from Jen Ross and Amy Collier on Not Yet-ness. It keeps me connected with fellow souls, it allowed for an initial germ of an idea for the conference to take shape and grow.  Over the past weeks I have to thank Kate, and then Frances for introducing me the concept of the hospitality of open-ness.

I find being an open practitioner  a struggle.  It’s a constant internal and internal battle, I struggle with not being a “proper” open researcher, a “proper” creator of OER, my own imposter complex, and the joy of being able to share lots of “stuff” openly.

On reflection I think I actually need that uncertainty. Open education gives me many anchors not least from the inspiration I gain from the wider open education community.  I have gained so much solace, strength and solidarity from the conversations I’ve been having as part of planning for the conference.

As part of our pre-panel discussions the notion of elephant trails or desire paths arose. These are the trails that mark the shortest route between spaces. Interestingly they are usually only one person/animal wide but many, many people can use them. I creating my revised V&R map, it seems all my open desire paths lead me back to my blog, to twitter, to open-ness.

I’m looking forward to the extending this conversation more at the conference, but if you have any thoughts, dear reader, then please share them with me.  In the meantime here’s one of those random, motivational quotes that found me in a waiting room on Saturday.

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#101 open stories – my story

101 open stories is a great idea organised by a fantastic global team of open educational researchers and educators to amass some open stories during this year’s open education week.

It got me thinking about my OER story or stories. Where to begin? I wish I had the time and the ability to weave a tale worthy of Scheherazade. One full of poetry, wishes, fantastic voyages and the odd djinn.  One that would keep Vice Chancellors awake till just after the midnight hour (aka TEF/REF/NSS results publications).  One that would entice them to fully embrace open education. However,  if I want to get something done this week  all I can do is share my experiences and some reflections my open journey so far.

My involvement in the open education world has been quite long and varied.  It started during my time at Cetis. We were supporting open standards and open source, had been part of the whole learning object thang,  so OERs and wider open educational practice were a natural addition to our remit. I was involved in our first OER briefing paper, was one of the first OLNet fellows back in 2009 when I went to Mexico to the OCWC conference to find out more about that community.  I probably should do a time line of open stuff I’ve been involved in . . .

I think my open story is very much an evolving, personal one.  Open practice has become an increasingly important part of my working life. I’ve never been “hard core” open, in the sense that it’s never taken up 100% of my time. Even back when I worked with Cetis I wasn’t involved directly in the support of the Jisc/HE OER programmes, I was of course influenced by them and did try to filter the open element to other Jisc programmes I was involved in at the time.

Sharing has always been at the heart of my professional practice. When we were made to blog at Cetis it actually opened a whole new level of professional interaction and personal reflection for me.  At the time I didn’t really consider this as open practice, but now I really do.  Openly sharing and reflecting has connected me to so many colleagues across the globe.  That has been equally rewarding and enriching. It has lead to conversations and sharing of practice and ideas.  This open story of mine  probably hasn’t  changed that much in the last two years.

I think that my experiences of open learning has been, to use a phrase I don’t really like,  “game changing” for me. Back in 2011/12 in the heady days of MOOCs I probably signed up for a few too many of them but I really wanted to understand this aspect of open from a learners point of view. I still am a recovering Mooc-aholic. I still slip off the wagon now and again, but it’s not the same as the it was back in the old days . . .

My experience as an open learner really helped me to focus and reflect on my own approaches to learning, my own practice in terms of my approaches to learning design, to learner engagement, to peer support, to assessment. In fact all the things I do now as part of my job.  It also introduced me to another set of fantastically diverse, open learners and educators. People like Penny who is one of the organisers of the 101 stories project.

Open-ness is now a habit for me. It’s part of my practice, but it has natural (and at time imposed ) peaks and troughs. Not everything can or should be open. I often find it a struggle to keep open on my agenda. I’m still working out my own praxis with open-ness.  am doing this through the work of many open education researchers, people like Catherine Cronin whose work provokes and inspires me, and leads me to many others who are working in this field.

Open education isn’t a fairy tale, but it does confront some vary salient, moral and ethical issues around education.  Including but not limited to: who can access education and publicly funded resources/data/research findings.  What rights do staff have over materials they produce whilst working for institutions?  Open-ness doesn’t automatically lead to a happy ending.  It has many twists and turns, just like the stories of the Arabian Nights. It might be a bit like The Force in Star Wars, surrounding us and binding us. . . but that’s a story for another day.

Today as the UK takes a leap into the unknown and to closing of borders and creation of barriers, we need open stories more than ever. We need these stories to permeate, to keep open on the wider political agenda. To keep people talking about open, in the open.

I look forward to watching and learning from the #101 stories and hope that if you have read this you might think of sharing your own.

UPDATE AUGUST 2017

I have now received my open badge from the good folks at #101 open stories for this contribution.

open-storyteller

Not so much the a case of the wrong trousers, more like a wardrobe malfunction my story for #oer17

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Nb this is not a picture of my wardrobe!

I’m really looking forward to hearing the keynote from,  and meeting in person, Maha Bali at #OER17.  As part of her preparation for the conference Maha has been using her blog to share ideas and to get contributions and stories from the wider community.  I did something similar when I keynoted at OER15 and it was incredibly useful).

To try an encourage some more sharing of stories, Maha has written a lovely blog post called Fixing the shirt but spoiling the trousers. I love this idea:

“There is a part of my keynote where I plan to refer to an Egyptian expression, which, literally translated, means “when you tried to fix the shirt you spoiled the trousers” (must remember to say trousers not pants in the UK or they’ll think I mean underwear). It conjures up an image of comedy of errors or such, where trying to fix a problem creates new problems.”

Like many people I often think that parts of my working life are bit like a comedy of errors – sometimes all you can do is laugh at some of the absurd situations that arise. However in relation to open-ness I have to confess that recently I have had feelings more akin to a Shakespearean tragedy ( well maybe not quite that dramatic but you’ll  get the idea from this post)

I commented on the post “somtimes feels like I have a wardrobe full for OER but nothing to wear”.  I am want to qualify that a bit more.

I really try to be an open practitioner, I make an a concerted effort to share my work, reflections etc via my blog. It’s probably my main open outlet.  In my institution we have an OER policy, great support and guidance for  creating and sharing OER , a growing OER repository (mainly due to the perseverance and hard work of Marion Kelt in our library).

However recently despite having all this support I don’t seem to have been making any kind of meaningful contribution either through sharing of OERs or reflections rants about open practice.   I do feel it’s kind of like opening your wardrobe, which is full of cloths but you still can’t find something/anything to wear.  That can be (well, for me anyway ) a pretty demoralising experience.

However, to extent the wardrobe metaphor a bit further as OER17 draws closer, I am finding a couple of things that I’ve forgotten about and on trying them on have started to feel much better dressed.

A case in point is Virtually Connecting. I have been aware of this great open, extension to conferences, for a while now, but haven’t ever participated. Partly because I have been fortunate enough to have been at many conferences in person, and partly because I didn’t really think it was “for the likes of me”.  It’s for “proper” researchers.

However on reading, and commenting on the excellent reflective post on the paradox of inclusion  from Autumn Caines about the history and some recent evaluation of Virtual Connecting,  I am changing my mind maybe it is for “the likes of me” after all. I am looking forward to participating in my first VC session during OER17.

I might not be able fully dressed in open everyday, but I am stating to feel better about my wardrobe options and choices and not worrying so much about wearing the wrong trousers.

Open, cost and practice: CLA FE Copyright Master Class

I was delighted to once again represent ALT at a master class for copyright in teaching and learning in FE this week in Glasgow.  Organised by the CLA this workshop focused on providing guidance and information about copyright and various resources from the CLA and others including SCRAN and ERA specifically aimed at the FE sector.

It was fitting that during Open Education Week that I got the opportunity to talk about open educational practice, OERs within the context of my personal open journey. I think the CLA should be commended for recognising and, for a number of delegates, introducing the concept of open educational resources and practice.

Of course the main reason for this series of masterclasses is to give an overview of the services CLA and other agencies provide to (in this case FE) the sector. It also provides an opportunity for the community to feedback to CLA around their issues and pain points.

I had forgotten about SCRAN, so it was good to get a reminder of the image bank and the services that I can access via my institution’s subscription. I did ask the question about opening up the services, at present there are no plans, despite support for that from staff. The original (and at the time probably quite ground breaking) license still stands.

I do feel there is an opportunity there for at least a part of the collection to become “open SCRAN”, and opportunity for some nationally funded cultural institutions and resources become and show support for the Open Scotland movement.  I suspect I am not alone.

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Cost is always an issue (or pain point), and not just in FE. Although currently FE is being increasingly squeezed. And of course it did come up during the discussions.  There is of course a cost for open resources too. Open doesn’t = free. As was pointed out during the discussions, many freelance writers, artists, musicians rely on license fees to make their living.

However in (publicly) funded educational institutions sharing back resources does make perfect sense to me and many others. Our open-ness isn’t free -there is a cost: staff, time etc but open-ness core to many of the common goals of institutions such as the common good, something my own institution GCU and the University of Edinburgh share. As an aside it was great to hear that Edinburgh has joined us with the publication of their institutional OER policy this week.

Finding the balance of open-ness is something we all struggle with personally and institutionally. I was at the workshop in my capacity as an ALT Trustee. ALT,  is a great supporter of the open education movement. This week it has been involved in a number of events for Open Education Week. As a  membership organisation can’t afford to make everything free. For example conferences.

As a membership organisation (with a very small staff) we can’t afford to run major conferences such as OER16, and our main ALT-C conference for no cost.   We try to make as much of these events as open as possible via live streaming, open publications etc. To this end we also rely heavily on open and free contributions from our membership as well as the many additional hours the ALT full-time staff contribute.  We also rely on conference fees to cover the expenses of providing a first class conference.

In my day to day job I have to make decisions about what conferences I want to attend, where will it make the most impact to have my work shared, presented and published.  There is always a cost. I, like the majority of my peers, regularly give up my time to review conference submissions. That’s part and parcel of academic life. I now consciously support conferences that are committed to publishing conference proceedings openly. My positive open-ness if you like.

Open educational practice is constantly evolving, and gaining more mainstream traction. Open Education week is a great opportunity to share an reflect on this evolution.  It’s also a good time to reflect and gain greater understanding of how, where and when open education in the form of resources, practices and most importantly people use open-ness most effectively in their context.

A bit of experimentation with visualizing blog comments using Textexture

I’m still processing all the comments that were left on my blog about mainstreaming OER and Open Education last week. I’ve done a quick summary and as a quick visual overview a wordle of the comments.   However I thought I would try and do something a bit more sophisticated and perhaps more enlightening.  I’m a bit fan of the visualizations Tony Hirst does using gephi, and have played a bit with it, usually with the help of my former Cetis colleague, David Sherlock. Anyway, I was all set for an afternoon of visualisation delights at the weekend, but gephi didn’t want to play. I’ve since found out it is probably a java/mac issue . . .

However in my search for an alternative I came across Textexture, which will “visualise any text as a network” (using gephi).  Below is a screen shot of the network for the blog comments (the embed code doesn’t work for me in wordpress), but if click on the picture you’ll be taken to the interactive network.

I’m not sure how much more this tells me, other than confirming the interconnectedness of ideas.  But, it is a pretty simple service to use and we all love a network diagram.

Network visualization of comments

How do you mainstream open education and OERs? A bit of feedback sought for #oer15

The theme of the OER15 conference is Mainstreaming Open Education

“. . .  the aim being to explore approaches that are moving OER (& OEP) into the mainstream, and also barriers that need to be addressed for that to happen.”  http://blog.edtechie.net/oer15/oer15-is-go/

As part of my keynote I want to explore and share my experiences with mainstreaming open education and OERs.  I think part of the reason I “got the gig” was down to a couple of posts where I questioned some of the assumptions about open and actual (mainstream) practice.

Whilst I love the simplicity of the slogan “the opposite of open is broken” in reality it is a bit more complicated than that. We are still a way away from an open by default approach in my institution and I suspect many others. There is a cost to open, and many of us don’t have access to external or internal funds to kickstart and maintain open approaches.

So, this post is an attempt to do a bit of crowdsourcing and feedback before the conference on OER and open educational practice in mainstream education.

Here at GCU we have OER guidelines (which hopefully will be actual policy one day soon), that’s still not that common so can I count that as mainstream? In terms of practice it’s difficult to measure what impact they are having.  Guidelines alone does not a mainstream culture of OER creating and sharing make.  Sharing, even within our walled gardens is still not on the radar of many of my colleagues. Personally they are really useful for me and my team as we have somewhere to point people to in terms of creating and releasing OERs.  So maybe just having that simple workflow is actually a mainstream practice- or at least the beginnings of one. The guidelines have been driven by Marion Kelt in our library so are very much a bottom up approach, which in many instances is how policy should develop.  I have a noticed a change in the past year in that I hear “openness” and OERs being talked about much more regularly now by staff at all levels.

In my own practice, I do self-identify as being an open practitioner.  I try and share as much as I can, mainly via this blog and also now via our team blog. Wherever possible I take try to take an open approach. To take Martin Weller’s guerrilla research analogy , I quite often take a guerrilla approach to educational development. I use as many open (and often just open as in free) resources, software, platforms as I can.  I encourage my colleagues to do the same – sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. GCU Games On,  The open event we ran last year was only possible due to the fact we could engage with and use a number of open resources.  This case study I wrote for the OEPS project explains our approach in more detail.

I’m not sure if that approach is mainstreaming or more like pic’n’mixing. But in the mainstream you have to be very pragmatic and work with what you’ve got, not wait for what you’d like to work with. Doing a little openly is better than doing nothing openly, right?

So, how/do you you do it?  Do you have examples of mainstream and by that I mean I mean regular, everyday, use and/or creation of OERs by the majority of teaching staff in your institution? How do you get and maintain the “open habit”?  If you could share anything in the comments I’d be really grateful and I will include them in my talk at the conference.

Where Sheila's been this week – revisiting #OERRHub and the researcher as an API analogy

I spent the early part of this week in Milton Keynes with the OER Research Hub team as part of the second phase of the project evaluation.

When I worked with the team last year one of the things that intrigued me about the project was the fact that they were planning to apply and adapt an agile programming  approach to the project.

As I pointed out then, I felt there could be challenges with this as typically the outputs from research projects aren’t as concrete as most software development products, but I could see the attraction of this approach.

Bringing researchers who form part of a globally distributed team together for set periods to focus on certain aspects of research project does make sense. As does having some kind of structure, particularly for focusing “group minds” on potential outputs (products), adaptation of peer programming could be useful for peer review etc. However implementing “proper” agile programming methodology to research is problematic.

But if we stick with the programming analogy and stop thinking in terms of products, and start thinking of research as a service (akin to software as a service) then maybe there is more milage. A key part of SaS approaches are APIs, allowing hooks into all sorts of sites/ services so that they can in effect talk to each other.

The key thing therefore is for the researcher to think of themselves more as the interface between their work, the data, the findings, the “what actually happened in the classroom” bits and focus on ways to allow as wide a range of stakeholders to easily “hook” into them so they can use the outputs meaningfully in their own context.

In many ways this is actually the basis of effective digital scholarship in any discipline and of course what many researchers already do.

A year on, and after experiencing one of the early project sprints how has it worked out?

Well everyone knew that the project wouldn’t be following a strict agile methodology, however key aspects, such as the research sprints have proved to be very effective. Particularly in focusing the team on outputs.

The sprints have allowed the overall project management to be more agile and flexible. They have brought focus and helped the team as a whole stay on track but also refocus activity in light of the challenges (staff changes, delays to getting surveys started etc) that any research project has to deal with. As this is very much a global research project, the team have spent large chunks of time on research visits, going to conferences etc so when they are “back at the ranch” it has been crucial that they have a mechanism not only to report back and update their own activities but also to ensure that everyone is on track in terms of the project as a whole.

The sprints themselves haven’t been easy, and have required a lot of planning and management. The researchers themselves admit to often feeling resentment at having to take a week out of “doing work” to participate in sprints. However, there is now an acknowledgement that they have been central to ensure that the project as a whole stays on track and that deliverables are delivered.

I was struck this week by how naturally the team talked about the focus of their next sprint and how comfortable and perhaps more importantly confident they were about what was achievable. It’s not been easy but I think the development, and the sustaining of the research sprint approach over the project lifespan has paid dividends.

Returning to the wider API issue, last year I wrote

I wonder if the research as API analogy could help focus development of sharing research outputs and developing really effective interactions with research data and findings?

Again, one year can I answer my own question? Well, I think I can. From discussions with the team it is clear that human relationships have been key in developing both the planned and unexpected collaborations that the project has been undertaking. At the outset of the project a number of key communities/agencies were identified as potential collaborations. Some to these collaborators had a clear idea of the research they needed, others not so much. In every case as the research team have indeed been acting as “hooks” into the project and overall data collection strategy.

These human relationships have been crucial in focusing data collection and forging very positive and trusted relationships between the Hub and its collaborators. Having these strong relationships is vital for any future research and indeed, a number of the collaborations have extended their own research focus and are looking to work with the individual team members on new projects. As findings are coming through, the Hub are helping to stimulate more research into the impact of OER and support an emerging research community.

One of the initial premises for the project was the lack of high quality research into the impact of OER, they are not only filling that gap, but now also working with the community to extend the research. Their current Open Research course is another example of the project providing more hooks into their research, tools and data for the wider community.

The project is now entering a new phase, where it is in many ways transitioning from a focus on collecting the data, to now sharing the data and their findings. They are now actually becoming a research hub, as opposed to being a project talking about how they are going to be a hub. In this phase the open API analogy (imho) can only get stronger. If it doesn’t then everyone loses, not just the project, but the wider open education community.

The project does have some compelling evidence of the impact of using OER on both educators and learners (data spoiler alert: some of the differences between these groups may surprise you), potential viable business models for OER, and some of the challenges, particularly around encouraging people to create and share back their own OERs. For me this is particularly exciting as the project has some “proper” evidence , as opposed to anecdotes, showing the cultural impact OER is having on educational practice.

In terms of data, the OER Impact Map, is key hook into the visualizing and exploring the data the project has been collecting and curating. Another phase of development is about to get under way to provide even more ways to explore the data. The team are also now planning the how/where/when of releasing their data set.

The team are the human face of the data, and their explanations of the data will be key to the overall success of the project over the coming months.

More thoughts to come from me on the project as a whole, my role and agile evaluation in my next post.

Summary of #GCUGamesOn Evalution Findings

As promised this post shares the summary findings from our recent online event, GCU Games On. As I’ve written about before we developed this very quickly (in a month from idea to online) so we were very aware of some of the pedagogic shortcomings of our overall design. However given the rapid development time during the start of summer holidays when most of our subject experts were on holiday we had to make some very pragmatic design decisions.

Overall the feedback was pretty positive and the whole experience is helping to shape our developing strategy to open, online courses. (Nb the text below has been adapted from an internal report).

Background

GCU Games On was an open online event designed to celebrate, explore and share experiences during the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. It ran between 16 July and 8 August 2014.

Instigated by the PVC Learning and Student Experience, it was developed in little over a month. Due to the time constraints (one month from idea to being available openly online) a simple design was developed which included: background and contextual information with relevant links, making a wish on our digital wishing trees, at least one twitter based activity and a medal quiz challenge each week. Sharing experiences of Glasgow 2014 via twitter was encouraged each week. Daily email updates were sent to all registered participants.

The event was delivered via the new Blackboard Open Education platform.

Participation

  • Registrations: 211
  • Countries: 12 excluding the UK
  • Digital Badges issued: 174
  • Tweets: 424
  • Digital wishes: 107

Evaluation

Of the 211 registrations, 22 completed the survey giving a 10.4% response rate. In addition, due to the use of social media (and in particular, twitter) a number of informal responses to the event were shared.

Summary Findings

The majority of respondents to the survey were female, aged between 25 to 65, based in the UK with no connection to GCU. The majority of participants were based in the UK, with 36% based in both Glasgow and Scotland respectively. 18% of respondents were from the rest of the UK, and there were equal numbers (4.5%) of respondents from other Commonwealth countries and non Commonwealth countries. From registration information we know we had registrations from Australia, India, Trinidad & Tobago, Ireland, Israel, Denmark, Canada Italy, Israel, New Zealand, Spain and South Korea.

59% of respondents had no connection with GCU and 45% of respondents cited wanting to experience online learning at GCU as their main reason for participating. The vast majority of respondents had some form of formal educational qualification, 45% up to Masters level.  This correlates to general trends in open online courses, but may also reflect a network effect from the Blended Learning Team’s network and promotion of the event. 95% of respondents found the site easy or partially easy to use.  54% of respondents completed all of the activities.

Open feedback was generally positive about the experience.

“I really enjoyed this as a bit of fun.  What I got out of it most was seeing new blackboard system in operation and it looks and feels very impressive.”

“I think looking at the Twitter feed this was spot on for what it was trying to achieve. Much fun was had by all it seems and the course gave a great scaffold to talk about their experiences at the games.”

“I do know it is hard to pull together a learning experience around an event like this and I guess that was weakness of this approach.  At times I think really perhaps due to lack of substance or clear learning outcomes – the learning design was a bit hit or miss – but I think you did achieve outcome of getting folks to engage with learning platform which was I think what it was about rather than the content”

 

GCU Games On Gold Medal
GCU Games On Gold Medal

Where Sheila's been this week – navigating the marvellous and the monsters #altc 2014

This week I’ve managed to avoid that back to work and “omg look at that inbox” feeling for a few days by attending the annual #altc conference.  Last year’s conference was a bit of a personal highlight for me, but this year the team at ALT and all the co-chairs pulled off another great event,including two of the best keynotes I have been to in a long time from Catherine Cronin and Audrey Watters.

Both Audrey and Catherine highlighted the need for engagement to ensure the authentic voices, stories and experiences (from all of the education sector, not just ed tech) voices are heard and ensure that new noisy narratives (particularly from certain commercial sectors) don’t become the defacto history and more worryingly, future of education.

Audrey wove together an inspiring narrative (including references to Ada Lovelace, Roald Dahl, Luddites, Mary Shelly, Byron, F B Skinner to name but a few) about the creation of monsters, lost histories and control.  She reminded us that we can control the development of technological monsters through our combined efforts to inspire love technology and education. Catherine reminded us of the inherent ethical and political nature of education and how openness, online spaces and new forms of identity can empower us to make our voices heard. However, within this marvellous new open world there are power struggles too.

We may laugh at the idea of teaching machines, but in our drive for ever increasing personalised, mobile access to education, content vendors and governments are often (knowingly and/or unwittingly) all too willing to ignore the narrative from educators and buy into a behaviourist, watch video -> click through -> mcq-> (pay for) certificate = learning solution.

Helen Beetham made a very good point after Audrey’s talk that in the UK we do have a different narrative – particularly around the student engagement agenda within HE which is different from our North American cousins. But we are not immune, as the FELTAG discussions (particularly around % of online content) and stories illustrated.

There were many, many great stories shared over the three days of the conference. John Traxler reminded us of the danger of assuming our  developed, western global ideologies, learning theories and learning designs don’t automagically meet the needs of many emerging cultures (in particular Africa).  David Kernohan provided an entertaining yet mindful tale of how the heady days of open and social collaboration may well be at an end, as big business, governments and employers (included HEIs) start to close down, commercialie and control access and impose censorship.

Conferences like ALT are a great way for our community to strengthen and share our own “folklore” and build our collective narrative around the positive impact of technology within learning and teaching. We need to keep sharing our stories openly, and ensure our narrative, folklore, collective knowledge and wisdom is developed and shared as widely as possible.  Roll on ALT-C 2015.

Here are my visual notes from all three keynotes (NB if you click on the images you’ll go to full size, CC licences copies on flickr)

Visual notes from Jeff Haywood keynote, altc 2014
Visual notes from Jeff Haywood keynote, altc 2014
Visual notes from Catherine Cronin keynote ALTC 2014
Visual notes from Catherine Cronin keynote ALTC 2014
Visual notes from Audrey Watters keynote ALTC 2014
Visual notes from Audrey Watters keynote ALTC 2014
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