HEA Centre for Bioscience OER Project Blog

The opportunity to meet so many practitioners and promoters of the Open Educational Resources approach at OER11 last week also gave me a chance to express a few concerns I have about OER traction in the academic community. Following this up on Twitter afterwards illustrated to me how a loose message can get a little warped as it passes from hand to hand (and how I need to be even more clear because of this).

I went (with Chris) to OER11 to pick up on some of the current momentum and meet with other projects in OER to ensure we can get the best from our approach in OeRBITAL over its remaining months. I think we can present some bioscience realistic practice in addition to the spectra of projects to highlight some issues to be addressed for any forthcoming OER phase 3 projects.

In essence, what we have set up in the OeRBITAL wiki is a pool of experienced bioscience practitioners to tackle the recommended online sources for OER and tell the stories about how they might be used – to help these become part of the standard practice for their colleagues, especially in the learned societies and other networks. Progress is steady but pace is intermittent. We will have realistic experience of tackling OERs for the bioscience disciplines to report upon but it is likely that our preliminary findings in the draft final report will be those that feed into the OER3 call, due to time constraints. We will therefore have to ripen these as soon as possible.

This leads me to the ripple of conversation on twitter after my presentation at OER where I was illustrating how we get embedded in our current practice without even realising it. I played an icebreaker card using a simple box representing the ideal repository (you know, the one that all academics visit in preference to Google, the one that makes them ‘mega-stars’ of education by charting their contributions) and projectile as a metaphor: the delegates were tasked as pairs to describe a resource on paper (a4 or post-it) and get it into the box with the potential aid of paper-clips and rubber bands. Various models and tactics were deployed from paper airplanes, scrunched-ball, replicates as “e-buckshot” and high power folded ‘bullets’, all with various degrees of success but very few into the repository on the first pass. I then revealed a second opportunity was now available using all the resources in the room, obviously including the first attempts in the repository and its near misses, although I did not push the hint too far.

revised attempts included

• Collaborate with the people in a better position or with a track record who had a successful approach i.e. better aim/technique/position to deliver version 2
• Re-launch version 1 from its previous near-miss result position
• Repeat first attempt but modified with the benefit of feedback from own and other attempts.

No-one simply stuck their resource on a post–it onto one already in the repository – one already attracting attention for the topic.  I didn’t say this was not allowed but I did ask the participants to think about what this game represented, not just paper and boxes.

The idea was to bring to mind our assumptions as I believe it mirrored some of the current practice with OERs. No-one appears to be appending solutions to similar resources which are already popular with the community and this is missing an opportunity to build a better solution and network of users. Is this because the common/convenient understanding of the CC licence is interpreted as more ‘free to use’ not free to build upon?

I then explained that in our OeRBITAL project we have now sought to blend Learning Technologists (LTs) with the pool of Discipline Consultants (DCs) to help identify the opportunities to build upon the resources already discovered (by the DCs). We observed in our pilot project that the LTs appeared to be working in different but overlapping orbits and communication between them (LTs and Discipline experts) was likely to be limited to only where they crossed. I am not saying LTs work in isolation to each other in general, I am suggesting that the discipline-based projects they are working on may benefit from being informed by other experts in the discipline in other institutions with similar needs, or other LTs working on very similar projects, on an on-going basis. It is usually only when each community meets up to share the outputs of its projects e.g. ALT-C, or for example, the Physiological Society, that a fruitful OER collision may be developed (as opposed to be observed) e.g. the physiology tutor that attends ALT-C, the Learning Technologist who attends with an academic to the society meeting to report on a joint project, but would be unlikely to attend a whole event as it is not their typical professional loop. Of course both can seek information online via various applications but only when we have significant cross over, like that afforded by microblogs and blogs in general, will resources (hopefully OERS) under construction get an early opportunity to work towards a common goal. If there are LTs working on projects in the biosciences are they blogging to pick up other needs and therefore other opportunities for their outputs? For example, “who else is interested in the virtual microscope we are working on” etc. Are tutors in the disciplines using the information in the repositories to find collaboration opportunities, or are they merely interested in outputs alone? We do not get a flood of requests into the Subject Centre from Learning Technologists asking if anyone else is interested in the discipline material they are currently working on. 

If we find a significant contribution to the discipline of Biosciences then we would highlight it to enable other discipline practitioners take advantage of it. We promote them when we find them to our contacts through our events and publications but this is usually initiated through the Academic related to their project.

So, in addition to compiling a collection identified by the discipline experts we are deliberately making a cross-over happen like a collision under controlled conditions, to observe in which direction  the ‘subatomic components’ might start to fly.

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I’ve been involved with more learning repository initiatives over the last few years than I care (or am able) to remember, and the issue of assigning an educational level to a resource is always a discussion point. A resource may be designed and prescribed in its metadata (assuming it’s lucky enough to have any associated with it!) as being for a specific level, but when you drill down into the content there will almost always be material within it that may be suitable for use elsewhere, either through simplification/extraction of images/etc. or technically at a higher level on a related course that may only have this subject as an option.

It always seemed a fairly arbitrary classification to make, especially at anything more detailed than a secondary/undergraduate/postgraduate level of granularity.

Of course the issue has raised its head once more with our OeRBITAL project (which is starting to shape up very nicely, thanks, check it out here), where our discipline consultants (DCs) are mining the emerging OER repositories and aggregators* to find existing open content, and providing their expert evaluation on said resources to build their curated collections. We had some useful internal discussion, and rather predictably (we’ve been lucky enough to get a fantastically eclectic group together for the project) received three completely different replies from three DCs on the merits of including educational level data, each of whom raised perfectly valid points (which I’ll endeavour to edit in here once I’ve rummaged through my email and obtained permission).

I think it’s fair to make a distinction between what level a resource may have been originally designed and used for by its creator, and what it may potentially be used at. A small distinction perhaps, but an important one, and this is the tack we’ve agreed upon for the OeRBITAL project.

Of course our primary focus continues to be (and will remain as our legacy) supporting learning and teaching within Higher Education, but the nature of – and one of the great things about – Open Education dictates we simply can’t anticipate who else might benefit from our work. What we do know for a fact is that often secondary school and non-traditional educators/learners will use our other resources, such as the highly-regarded Bioscience ImageBank, so it seems prudent to plan at least incidentally for these people to benefit.

Chris.

*deserving of a blog post in itself actually

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(This is just a comment really on this recent blog post though their blog service is closed for comments)

Learning Technology at Open Nottingham’s (not sure who’s behind this now actually, any takers? Julian?) v.recent posting on the potential for extracting useful data from users’ search terms was both interesting and familiar.

This last section in particular:

However, for me the more interesting results appear at the other end of the scale, where searches have returned zero reults. Does this indicate potential requirements not being fulfilled by the OER community? Removing obvious misspellings, does the following list provide some possible requests for any OER providers to consider?

The short answer is yes, yes it does. Not specifically that set of data, but the rationale behind it.

This is a potentially rich source of data to mine for new avenues of resource production/acquisition.

In a previous role I managed the contents of and contributions to a repository, linking to subject-specific resources held around the World.

We* set up a query to find the most popular search terms that returned zero results. We were able to see what people wanted to find resources on, but failed to, allowing us to focus our time more effectively to ensure the service catered to the needs of its users.

This turned out to be a very useful tool for us to regularly keep an eye on, though I think importantly was much more straight-forward for us as our repository was focussed on a relatively narrow discipline area, Materials Science in our case, which made analysing the merits of individual searches simpler.

I think it may be of limited value for a search facility such as Xpert however, which does not have a specific subject focus, nor sub-categories for people to access before they enter their search terms. It may prove very challenging to distil subject-focussed terms to their respective projects.

Gaining access to this search data under sustainable terms (i.e. not having to hassle the dev. team whenever we want the data) does not seem straight-forward, Hiten (Jorum) was handily able to supply me with a dataset containing only those search terms used once a user was already within the HE – Bioscience sub-category. This is something I believe that should ultimately be implemented for projects to be able to access in Jorum, and an issue I raised with them some time back.

Actually that reminds me, this kind of analysis can turn up some awesomely bizarre search terms people/spambots have used, but that’s for another posting.

Chris.

*Actually Rob Pearce, that guy gets everywhere!

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A key aim through our OER pilot project was for us to capture our project partners’ thoughts and experiences on the overall theme of OER and their involvement with the programme in a more engaging manner than simply in our final project reports.

We spent some time at the end of the project interviewing a number of them, and in some cases their colleagues within their own departments, using primarily standard video, which we digitised, but also some experimental recording through Skype, using VodBurner.

We constructed a common set of questions for the interviews to enable some comparison, and aimed to edit each interview down to ~10min.

The results are long overdue but we’ve finally managed to find some time to get a number of the videos sorted and uploaded to YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/user/bioukoer

So far we have:

Dr Sue Bickerdike, University of Leeds, on producing Open Educational Resources for Medical Microbiology, a significant collection of resources aimed at teaching of first-year undergraduate students.

• Medical Microbiology resources

Dr Viv Rolfe, DeMontfort University, on her work for the Virtual Analytical Laboratory, designed to help students build confidence in the laboratory and gain essential skills.

• VAL resources

Dr Helen Chatterjee, Alex Lee and Mark Carnall of University College London, on a resource VERB – on Evolutionary History, based on work carried out at the Grant Museum of Zoology.

• VERB, Evolutionary History resources

and

Professor David Male, Open University, on his work creating a series of Virtual Biochemistry Laboratories.

• Virtual Biochemistry resources

We have more interviews to process, and ideally we’d like to be able to offer subtitles/transcriptions, though that hasn’t been possible just yet, so stay tuned for further content.

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The OeRBITAL project has appointed its Discipline Consultants who will be working with us and the Learned Societies to discover and curate a collection for the Biosciences which representent the best examples of OERs which can be found in key topics within each discipline.

Name	Institution	Disciplines
Jenny Koenig	Cambridge	Maths (BioMaths), Pharmacology, Molecular neuroscience, physiology and biochemistry
Momna Hejmadi	Bath	Cell biology, Cancer Biology,
Peter Klappa	Kent	Biochemistry (Enzymology), Plant Sciences
Richard Stafford	Gloucester	Ecology, Marine Biology
Alan Cann	Leicester	Microbiology
Christopher Todd	Bath	Molecular Genetics, (Cell biology), Biochemistry, plant sciences
Clare Sansom	Birkbeck	Molecular biology, Bioinformatics, Chemistry (for Biosciences)
Dave Lewis	Leeds	Physiology, Pharmacology, neuroscience, Ethics, in-vivo sciences
Gordon Cooper	Sheffield	Physiology, pharmacology
Carol Wakeford	Manchester	Biochemistry, molecular biology and Biomaths

Our Discipline consultants are currently exploring a selection of repositories and their professional networks to identify resources which they wish promote to their discipline community.

We have established a project Wiki to present this material and we will promote this once we have assembled the first batch of resources.

Current ongoing work is to appoint supporting Learning Technologists who can work with the DCs to extend selected resources identified in each discipline to enable these to become key ‘core’ OERs for teaching particular topics.

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Over the last month or so I’ve been rationalizing the blogs I follow for OER. Some from OER1 have obviously gone quiet while new OER2 ones are popping up.

I’ve created a YahooPipe mainly to make things more manageable for myself, but hopefully it should be of use to others now it’s done.

It consists of all of the OER2 live project blogs I could find, and a number of more general ones, repositories/JISC compatriots/et al.

The pipe is of course clone-able, so anyone can take it and update it, or preferably if anyone has any other sources they’d like me to include that might be beneficial for everyone please just let me know.

You can view the Pipe here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=52272c843294f3c12c051ca49861fbb9

(You may need to click on the “list” tab as slightly annoyingly the site now appears to display a blog image/avatar by default, which very few have.)

If you click on “Get as RSS” you can get the direct output RSS feed to plug in to your preferred reader.

---

Here’s the full list of incorporated blogs for ref:

http://www.ntushare.org/

http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/cetisli/

http://icesculpture.wordpress.com/

http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/johnr/

http://olnet.org/blog/

http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/philb/

http://csapopencascade.wordpress.com/

http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/openspires/

http://ostrichatderby.wordpress.com/

http://csapopencollections.wordpress.com/

http://openfieldwork.org.uk/

http://oerworld.wordpress.com/

http://www.web2rights.com/OERIPRSupport/blog/

http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/

http://dkernohan.posterous.com/rss.xml?tag=oer

http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/learningtechnology/tag/oer/

http://www.medev.ac.uk/blog/oer-phase-2-blog/

N.B. if anyone has managed to embed a YahooPipe in a WordPress blog could they let me know how they managed it? Despite the fact there’s a specific “embed in WordPress” button, it was having none of it.  I spent far too long last week banging my head against the desk, without success.

Edit: Forgot Medev! For shame. Now in.

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We were invited to present at this year’s JISC CETIS conference down in Nottingham, on technical aspects of our OER project work, around the themes of “locate, collate and aggregate”.

The session and programme can be found here:

http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Locate%2C_Collate_and_Aggregate

Despite an incredibly early start, in addition to presenting our own work I found the rest of the session very useful and informative, with every presenter offering something genuinely new and innovative (at least to me), and definitely worth keeping an eye on.

You can see my presentation below:

The session was topped off with an exclusive showing of a video on metadata standards, for which suitable adjectives have yet to be invented…

http://vimeo.com/16908120

Enjoy.

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I will be attending ALT-C to discover more about the current status of OER with respect to the learning technologist’s community. We have the opportunity to present a poster to promote findings so far from phase 1 but also to attract some OER ‘attitude’.  I have tried to be a little provocative to secure some attention and comment; from our perspective there are very many opportunities for the Learning Technologists to score a few open goals with respect to OER and improve the link between subject disciplines and technologists.  However, if this community does not engage with the development and enhancement of existing material then who will?

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We’re now beginning to see evidence of our project partners starting to search for and use others’ OERs to develop their course materials for the coming academic year, which is great, obviously. As a result of this, questions are starting to arise on the No-Derivatives/Share-Alike aspect of the CC licence.

In particular, what constitutes a significant enough alteration to require the adapted resource to be classed as a derivative work?

We had an interesting discussion some time ago during our JISC/HEA OERPh1 project, around the difference between localisation and adaption, where a localisation would be relevant only at (surprisingly) the immediate local level,  adding in references to department facilities for example, or maybe adding links to other materials within the course.

The examples below are from a chat with one (re)user:

1. A nice package, which has been exported from say Moodle, arrives as a pile of html files but no index, so it was required to create next | back in html and change the css and logo

2. As above, but remove sections referring to original institution’s other materials and modify text to meet local requirements

3. A pedagogically useful Word file which has been made without styles, and uses particularly difficult graphics for text, and cumbersome table formats. Save as web page (Word) to strip out images. Either edit in Word to insert styles and convert to html via Open Office or edit in Dreamweaver. Add index. Begin to correct English…

It’s interesting to note that the edits are primarily format-related rather than content.  I wonder if there’s any kind of distinction to be made between format/content regarding the licence, or if it’s all classed as “the resource”? The latter, I would expect, though would changing only the format of a Non-Deriv resource to make it more accessible violate the terms of the licence? Probably.

From an accessibility point of view, you could argue that 1 and 3 might(should) have been carried out by the originator,  though I would never want to discourage anyone from uploading their resources, regardless of their current condition, as if we go down that road we’ll end up missing out on a lot of rough diamonds.

If any change is to be considered a derivative work, there’s a danger we could either end up with several copies of the same resources that are more or less identical, cluttering up the place, or people will decide not to use a resource at all.

So, where do we draw the line?

———————–

Update: KavuBob kindly pointed me to this document, which whilst not specifically related to Creative Commons does contain a very handy graph (which I can’t currently reproduce as I can’t find an email address for Kluwer Academic Publishers!), with a line on it on pg4 of this doc [pdf]:

http://www.loc.gov/cds/downloads/FRBR.PDF

(http://www.loc.gov/cds/FRBR.html)

It’s a good start, but there’s still a distinct air of vagueness and interpretation* about it, though it does seem to class more or less anything as a derivative (or new work), other than a direct copy. So, the jury’s still out on this one.

Interesting graph though anyway.

*welcome to the law! Hoho.

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I’m very pleased to announce that our wiki containing guidance on all aspects of OER is now available:

http://stemoer.pbworks.com/

As part of the UKOER programme one of our outputs was intended to be a set of guides on OER production and release. We’ve since expanded this idea to create the guides as an evolving wiki, and combine with the other STEM centres to base the contents on our experiences over the pilot project.

The wiki should be considered a good starting point for those interested in learning more about OER, how to benefit from it and how to begin producing your own.

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