Weel 3 - Activity 11: The advantages and disadvantages of big and little OER

• From the list below, either read the chapter or view the slidecast:
  • Weller (2011b), Public engagement as collateral damage  (chapter).
  • Weller (2011a), Academic output as collateral damage  (slidecast).
• Write a blog post of less than 500 words on the benefits and drawbacks of big and little OER approaches. Remember to tag your post with #h817open.

Notes
I have been falling quite far behind on this due to holiday time. Still, can get back into it now.
I watched the slidecast but found the audio levels very low (one of the drawbacks of little OER). I followed up on some of the links, including watching a weird video of Martin Weller talking to his future self, with beard and pipe.

1. Benefits of big OER approaches.

• Looks professional is professional - set's a standard
• Big OER is planned, specified, designed, implemented, tested. 3rd party content removed and replaced.
• The OER should be 100 legal
• More comprehensive content and robust support systems (for example, system remembers all your past quizzes, and where you are in the OER. Maybe making suggestions for what to look at next).
• A professional (experts?) collaborative OER should in theory lack errors and biases that may be inherent in a single (little) OER.
• Interactive
• One Big OER probably leads on to another relevant OER in a sequence
• More likely to be known and/or recognized as an expert source of data/knowledge/information
• Markets the institution that created it

2. Drawbacks of big OER approaches.

• Content of OER may contain more than the user wants or requires, thereby taking the user time to locate and focus upon their required OER from the provided.
• Geared towards a big audience and therefore less "personal" in the perceived approach/content/delivery method.

3. Benefits of little OER approaches.

• Quick to do. No need to discuss with a team if it is just you creating the resource
• Can be aimed at a specific niche audience
• Cheap/free to do
• Supposedly specialist skills not required.
• Maybe possible to find OER content specific to a very narrow field

4. Drawbacks of little OER approaches.

• Marketing it - Making the public aware of its existence
• Need some technical skills - not only to make the resource but also to share it and manage them/it. (E.g. this slideshare, 2,773 views, with very low level audio level making it hard to hear without external amplification or headphones).
• Lacks quality control - e.g. hard to read black text due to background colour/image
• Usually a single simple resource (podcast, slideshare). No integration of multiple resources.
• Less interactive courses/content
• A single person resource could have errors or biases in their resource
• Is the OER 100% legal, no copied images, all content allowed to be shared? No time or possibly motivation to remove or cite all sources within little OER
• Lack of peer review of content can lead to a poor quality little OER

Week 3 - Activity 10: Applying sustainability models

• Read Wiley (2007), On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education .
• Then look at the following open education initiatives, and for each one determine which of Wiley’s three models of sustainability you think they are operating:
  • Change MOOC 
  • Coursera 
  • Jorum 
  • OpenLearn
• Consider the following:
  1. Was the sustainability model for each OER initiative apparent?
  2. Did Wiley’s models cover all approaches or did you think a different model was operating for one or more of them?
• You can share these reflections in either the forum or in your blog.

Change MOOC 
8 month course. "Each week, a new professor or researcher will introduce his or her central contribution to the field."
Facilitators, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier
this course is not conducted in a single place or environment. It is distributed across the web.
Closest model match is the Rice model, apparent from the "About" and "How it works" links.
It's not clear if the facilitators are paid, seems like they are not.

Coursera 
Looks very much like the MIT model with founders and a "team". They advertise job positions on their website and so these must be paid positions. MIT model then. This seemed apparent, also from the quality of their website. Time, and therefore, money has been and is being spent to make a quality site and courses.

Jorum
Website looks like the USU or Rice model, probably USU.
Jorum is a Jisc funded Service in Development in UK Further and Higher Education, to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing. Majority female team made up of more Chiefs than Indians, who do not seem to do anything concrete in editing or working on any courses content. Lacks the quality of MIT model and the funding. Most similar to USU but I cannot find reference to removing 3rd part content, but then I guess they do not need to as content is provided mostly by UK Uni's as is. Not same as Rice model since in that model individuals work on the courses worldwide.

OpenLearn
Budding MIT model. Paid from by OU but only supporting their own OU course content, unlike other models. This does not fall into any of the above models. A bit of each really. People within the OU build the course, OL promote and offer the course. Funding from OU and therefor paying students.

Week 3 - Activity 9: Choosing a licence

Activity 9: Choosing a license

A fairly easy task, if one uses the easy CC chooser. I chose this license:


This OU Open h817 course blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Click here to learn what it means: CC meaning which explains the reasons I selected this. I don't want people making money out of what I do, unless it's me. I do want people to build on anything I create as I can learn from it, and I do want my name to travel with the work in case it becomes famous and they need to track me down for the knighthood. So all in all, very selfish and egotistical reasons as oppose to the moral imperative we aspire to.

Week 2 - Activity 8: An OER course

Evaluation Reflect upon whether the use of OER caused you to change what you wanted to teach, and what time saving (if any) would be gained by using OER.

Ariadne tended to come up with nothing. The one time it did find something, on the second search page, following the link resulted in "The system cannot find the path specified." Jorum gives thousands of hits, sometimes over 3,000. However for my week 4 and 5 searches I found a relevant PDF, which although was too advanced for my needs could be useful for a higher level class and/or school management. Merlot was useless, giving me nothing or irrelevant hits. MIT's results were all far too complex or not relevant. OpenLearn came up with something that looked useful for my week 3 search but the content was from 2007 and a link to an online scanner website did not work. A link to another document took me to something from 2004, too old to be of use (I read it and the content was dated, with reference to "AOL Online"). Rice Connexions was very slow to return a search list for every search done over 2 days and with 5 different search criteria. Searching on "Laptop Care Security" resulted in the first listed most relevant result of "Ten Easy Steps To Move Your Cheese For Better Aging", how could it possible come up with that given the search terms?

Overall, very disappointed given I selected a skills based topic related to laptop use and care, taking into account data backup and security. Admittedly the topics searched on related to school level age, but given the keywords used I expected more. What I tended to get was high-level academic theoretical papers and not down-to-earth practical advice, lesson plans or resources of any kinds (i.e. posters, slides, web tutorials, multimedia). In other words, these OER sites seem pretty useless to me as a source for school level ICT/Computing. I will stick with the current search resources I already have. No time was saved and the results have not made me change what I wanted to teach.

(Search result details can be viewed here: http://davidbrettell-h817.blogspot.com/2013/04/week-2-activity-8-notes.html)

Week 2 - Activity 8 Notes

Scenario

Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners (e.g. undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, etc.). It is a short, online course aimed at providing these learners with a set of resources for developing ‘digital skills’. It runs for five weeks, with a different subject each week, accounting for about six hours study per week.

• Devise a broad outline of the topics to be covered every week. Don’t deliberate too much on this; it should be a coherent set of topics but you don’t actually have to deliver it.
• Now see how much of your desired content could be accommodated by using OER repositories. Search the following repositories and make a quick evaluation for each week of your course of the type of content that is available.
  • Ariadne 
  • Jorum 
  • Merlot 
  • MIT 
  • OpenLearn
  • Rice Connexions 
• You can use the following template for your evaluation. In the final column judge whether the resources are good, medium or bad in terms of suiting your needs.

Hmm.. Cannot insert a table unless I edit it in HTML and I don't have the time to mess around with that so will stick with a simple week by week line based structure.

Digit Skills: Laptops 4 Learning
Identified Group: KS3 (Year 7 to 9)

Week 1:
Topic: Laptop Care (Physical)
The physical care of the student laptop in terms of heat, dust, dirt, keeping it clean.
Resources:

Ariadne  - nothing

1 article and not relevant.

Jorum  - nothing

1081 results.

Computer. Macintosh Powerbook Laptop Computer 1400 C series

Staffordshire University; The Betty Smithers Design Collection at Staffordshire University (Staffordshire University, ) - Picture of a laptop!

 

A number of images of laptops and then health care.

 

Merlot - nothing

MIT  - nothing in first 3 pages

211 hits
Care of your notebook (paper!)

OpenLearn - nothing

15 hits - some detailed info on batteries

Rice Connexions  nothing
Slow to respond - slowest of the lot

60 results
slow, slow, slow

Suitability (G/M/B):

Bad - nothing or too specific and complex.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Week 2:
Topic: Connecting to the Domain/Network. Mapping drives. Internet settings
Resources:

Ariadne  - nothing

Jorum 

2650 hits
Network security

Merlot - Nothing

MIT  - Nothing

OpenLearn - Nothing

Jargonbuster - okay,but poorly formatted to be useful.

Rice Connexions - Nothing

Slow. Connection reset.
More relevant to the topic but nothing that I need for this.

Suitability (G/M/B):
Bad - nothing suitable despite a range of terms.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Week 3:
Topic: Backing up data
Resources:

Ariadne - Nothing

Found something of interest on the second page, item 21 (computer operations core lesson templates), but when selected get Error - "The system cannot find the path specified."

Jorum - Nothing

3027

Merlot  - irrelevant

MIT  - too complex, specific to certain data types.

OpenLearn - Yes! Yippee! Found something useful

Five ways to.​.​.​ stay safe online -​ OpenLearn -​ Open University
A bit old - from 2007, lots of text but short sections is okay. Free software link to outdated software, online scan link doesn't work,
Recommends:  Vandalism in Cyberspace:Understanding and Combating Malicious Software. - doesn't work. Too old, 2004, when searched.

Rice Connexions  - irrelevant
Suitability (G/M/B):

Bad. What was found was about 6 years too old.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Week 4:
Topic: Printing Installing and configuring. Dealing with typical problems (paper jam, out of paper/ink)
Resources:

Ariadne  - Nothing

Jorum 

ICTs: device to device communication
http://dspace.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/10949/998
Okay - a bit technical re: network communication - downloaded the package but it seems to need a specific reader or something. Will check it out tomorrow.

STOPPED HERE.
Started again
Received my OER Understanding badge - whoopee! My first ever electronic badge, and I've created a Mozilla virtual backpack to stick it on  (https://login.persona.org/) password is the usual one with 123 on the end. I was hoping to see a picture of a backpack with my badge on it.  Oh, I think this is the website http://beta.openbadges.org/  That's quite good.

Merlot  - Nothing

MIT  - irrelevant

OpenLearn  irrelevant

Rice Connexions  wait, wait, .... nothing

Suitability (G/M/B):
B - Did find something possibly of use from Jorum  for another class but the "package" downloaded was not standard file types and there was no link or information about needing a package reader or something. So did not waste time trying to locate the utility.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Week 5:
Topic: Laptop Care (logical - security)
Resources:
Searching on "Laptop Care security" 

Ariadne  Nothing

Jorum  1473  results,

 Security and mobile devices - http://dspace.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/10949/16147

An overview from Jisc Legal which could be very useful for middle managers and heads of subjects to assist in curriculum planning with mobile devices
Okay, not suitable for what I need but useful nevertheless for another area.

Merlot  Nothing

MIT  - irrelevant

OpenLearn - - irrelevant

Rice Connexions  Moving From The Superintendency To The Professorship: Ten Easy Steps To Move Your Cheese For Better Aging (m14268) - The first choice!

Suitability (G/M/B):
B - I got something semi-relevant although not useful for my needs.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Evaluation Reflect upon whether the use of OER caused you to change what you wanted to teach, and what time saving (if any) would be gained by using OER.

Ariadne tended to come up with nothing. The one time it did fine something, on the second search page, following the link resulted in "The system cannot find the path specified." Jorum gives thousands of hits, sometimes over 3,000. However for my week 4 and 5 searches I found a relevant PDF, which although was too advanced for my needs could be useful for a higher level class and/or school management. Merlot was useless, giving me nothing or irrelevant hits. MIT's results were all far too complex or not relevant. OpenLearn came up with something that looked useful for my week 3 search but the content was from 2007 and a link to an online scanner website did not work. A link to another document took me to something from 2004, too old to be of use (I read it and the content was dated, with reference to "AOL Online"). Rice Connexions was very slow to return a search list for every search done over 2 days and with 5 different search criteria. Searching on "Laptop Care Security" resulted in the first listed most relevant result of "Ten Easy Steps To Move Your Cheese For Better Aging", how could it possible come up with that given the search terms?

Overall, very disappointed given I selected a skills based topic related to laptop use and care, taking into account data backup and security. Admittedly the topics searched on related to school level age, but given the keywords used I expected more. What I tended to get was high-level academic theoretical papers and not down-to-earth practical advice, lesson plans or resources of any kinds (i.e. posters, slides, web tutorials, multimedia). In other words, these OER sites seem pretty useless to me as a source for school level ICT/Computing. I will stick with the current search resources I already have. No time was saved and the results have not made me change what I wanted to teach.

Week 2 - Activity 7: Exploring OER issues (Repost)

[Re-posting this as I cannot find it listed by the aggregator. Registered this blog, http://davidbrettell-h817.blogspot.com/,  again just in case ) [search term: David]

Activity 7: Exploring OER issues
What I perceive as the three key issues in OER, and how these are being addressed.

I identify my three key issues from the perspective of creating and using OER within an English language overseas international school context. From the short literature review I undertook my focus has always been on how I and my colleagues would make use of OER and under what circumstances would we be able to contribute to the OER movement (D’Antoni 2009).

Cost, in terms of time and ultimately money is the first main issue. On the one hand the literature states that creating and sharing the resources is a minimal expense, for example Caswell et all state “At little or no cost universities can make their content available to millions” (Caswell et al 2008, p.1). The job of creating OER can be integrated into a faculty workload, passed on to a media center employee (if a school has one) or most successfully accomplished by a dedicated employee (Caswell et al 2008). So then, on the other hand someone must be paid to do this work. In my international school experience, working at for profit and non-profit schools, the board does not employ staff unless they see a tangible benefit (bodies in front of kids) to the school. The time necessary to create the OER, learning and meeting the OER standard(s) used is a luxury unavailable to teaching staff in international schools. As Wilson et al reported, in their study of five institutions, one participant reported that she lacked the time to adapt OER (Wilson et al 2009, p.10) let alone, in my opinion, create new resources. An issue also mentioned by other participants of the study. Indeed the paper alludes to the delay in gaining replies from the five participants stating that they “were contacted at a busy time {mid way) in the academic year” (p.11). Given that international educators have perhaps four non-contact periods per week, one must question where they would find the time to embark on an OER endeavor without the support of their school.

Caswell et al. 2008 asserts that we have a “moral obligation” (p. 8) to create OER and Wiley (2006, cited by Caswell et al. p. 7) states that there is a “moral imperative” and how can we “in good conscience allow this poverty of education” to continue. The simple answer is that for international schools, the owner and accountant look at the bottom line figure and if any innovation does not increase the profit, or worse costs money, then altruism be dammed. It has been argued that the marketing gain from creating OER can offset the costs, which may be true at university level, but not so for a successful and full school.

Assuming OER use and creation take place. Maintaining the momentum and sustainability of the project are major issues. A key concern is the turnover of staff, on average every 2 to 4 years, on the international school circuit. Staff will not invest their own personal time and energy into an OER project when they know they will not see it through to fruition. Of course, “Open” implies geographical boundaries should not impede an OER development.  

There is scope and opportunity to use OER in Secondary Education. For example, recommending MOOCs and OER courses to secondary students as supplementary resources to be accessed outside of school (Wilson et al. 2009). Cherry picking content and including extra content when necessary, as three out of the five participants indicated (Wilson et al. 2009, Figure 4, p. 9) is an option. An example of this was when I introduced programming and Java to an IB Computer Science class by having them complete the first seven lectures and assignments from the Stanford CS106A Programming Methodology course (Stanford 2013). Due to the high level and fast pace of the introductory material, I created extra in-between assignments, and broke down the reading requirements in to secondary level manageable sections.

My International secondary school is beginning to make use of OER however I am unaware of, and doubt that, staff at my school and similar establishments will heed their moral imperative and begin creating OER, likewise the institutions will only  support this movement if it immediately profits them to do so.

Words: 694

References

CALVERLEY, G. AND SHEPHARD, K. 2003. ‘Assisting the uptake of on-line resources: why good learning resources are not enough’, Computers and Education, Vol. 41, pp.205–224.

CASWELL, T., HENSON, S., JENSEN, M., WILEY, D. 2008. Open educational resources: Enabling universal education. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 9(1), 1–4. 

D’ANTONI, S.  2009. Open Educational Resources: reviewing initiatives and issues, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 24:1, 3-1. Available fromhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680510802625443 [Accessed 30 March 2013]

STANFORD CS106A. Stanford University, USA. Stanford CS106A: Programming Methodology. Available from http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/index.html [Accessed 30 March 2013]

WILSON, T. AND MCANDREW, P. 2009. Evaluating how five higher education institutions worldwide plan to use and adapt open educational resources' Proceedings of INTED2009 Conference. 9-11 March 2009, Valencia, Spain. ISBN:978-84-612-7578-6.

(Badge: OER understanding applied for)

Week 2 - Activity 7: Exploring OER issues

Activity 7: Exploring OER issues
What I perceive as the three key issues in OER, and how these are being addressed.

I identify my three key issues from the perspective of creating and using OER within an English language overseas international school context. From the short literature review I undertook my focus has always been on how I and my colleagues would make use of OER and under what circumstances would we be able to contribute to the OER movement (D’Antoni 2009).

Cost, in terms of time and ultimately money is the first main issue. On the one hand the literature states that creating and sharing the resources is a minimal expense, for example Caswell et all state “At little or no cost universities can make their content available to millions” (Caswell et al 2008, p.1). The job of creating OER can be integrated into a faculty workload, passed on to a media center employee (if a school has one) or most successfully accomplished by a dedicated employee (Caswell et al 2008). So then, on the other hand someone must be paid to do this work. In my international school experience, working at for profit and non-profit schools, the board does not employ staff unless they see a tangible benefit (bodies in front of kids) to the school. The time necessary to create the OER, learning and meeting the OER standard(s) used is a luxury unavailable to teaching staff in international schools. As Wilson et al reported, in their study of five institutions, one participant reported that she lacked the time to adapt OER (Wilson et al 2009, p.10) let alone, in my opinion, create new resources. An issue also mentioned by other participants of the study. Indeed the paper alludes to the delay in gaining replies from the five participants stating that they “were contacted at a busy time {mid way) in the academic year” (p.11). Given that international educators have perhaps four non-contact periods per week, one must question where they would find the time to embark on an OER endeavor without the support of their school.

Caswell et al. 2008 asserts that we have a “moral obligation” (p. 8) to create OER and Wiley (2006, cited by Caswell et al. p. 7) states that there is a “moral imperative” and how can we “in good conscience allow this poverty of education” to continue. The simple answer is that for international schools, the owner and accountant look at the bottom line figure and if any innovation does not increase the profit, or worse costs money, then altruism be dammed. It has been argued that the marketing gain from creating OER can offset the costs, which may be true at university level, but not so for a successful and full school.

Assuming OER use and creation take place. Maintaining the momentum and sustainability of the project are major issues. A key concern is the turnover of staff, on average every 2 to 4 years, on the international school circuit. Staff will not invest their own personal time and energy into an OER project when they know they will not see it through to fruition. Of course, “Open” implies geographical boundaries should not impede an OER development.  

There is scope and opportunity to use OER in Secondary Education. For example, recommending MOOCs and OER courses to secondary students as supplementary resources to be accessed outside of school (Wilson et al. 2009). Cherry picking content and including extra content when necessary, as three out of the five participants indicated (Wilson et al. 2009, Figure 4, p. 9) is an option. An example of this was when I introduced programming and Java to an IB Computer Science class by having them complete the first seven lectures and assignments from the Stanford CS106A Programming Methodology course (Stanford 2013). Due to the high level and fast pace of the introductory material, I created extra in-between assignments, and broke down the reading requirements in to secondary level manageable sections.

My International secondary school is beginning to make use of OER however I am unaware of, and doubt that, staff at my school and similar establishments will heed their moral imperative and begin creating OER, likewise the institutions will only  support this movement if it immediately profits them to do so.

Words: 694

References

CALVERLEY, G. AND SHEPHARD, K. 2003. ‘Assisting the uptake of on-line resources: why good learning resources are not enough’, Computers and Education, Vol. 41, pp.205–224.

CASWELL, T., HENSON, S., JENSEN, M., WILEY, D. 2008. Open educational resources: Enabling universal education. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 9(1), 1–4. 

D’ANTONI, S.  2009. Open Educational Resources: reviewing initiatives and issues, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 24:1, 3-1. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680510802625443 [Accessed 30 March 2013]

STANFORD CS106A. Stanford University, USA. Stanford CS106A: Programming Methodology. Available from http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/index.html [Accessed 30 March 2013]

WILSON, T. AND MCANDREW, P. 2009. Evaluating how five higher education institutions worldwide plan to use and adapt open educational resources' Proceedings of INTED2009 Conference. 9-11 March 2009, Valencia, Spain. ISBN:978-84-612-7578-6.

(Badge: OER understanding applied for)