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Open Nottingham Seminar – videos now available

1 April 20th, 2011 at 03:04

The full set of videos are now available for the Open Learning Seminar:

Introduction to the event
Andy Beggan
Head of Learning Technology, The University of Nottingham

The Learning Registry
Steve Midgley
Deputy Director, Office of Education Technology, United States Department of Education
The Learning Registry

The Learning Registry makes federal learning resources easier to find, easier to access and easier to integrate into learning environments wherever they are stored — around the country and the world. This will enable teachers, students, parents, schools, governments, corporations and non-profits to build and access better, more interconnected and personalized learning solutions needed for a 21st-century education. The Learning Registry project is an informal collaboration among several federal agencies that share the same goal: making federal learning resources and primary source materials easier to find, access and integrate into educational environments.

Key members of the collaboration are:

• The Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL) from Office of the Under Secretary of Defence for Personnel and Readiness
• The Office of Educational Technology at the US Department of Education

The OER University
Wayne Mackintosh (presenting by Skype)
International Centre for Open Education / OER Foundation

The OER university is a virtual collaboration of like-minded institutions committed to creating flexible pathways for OER learners to gain formal academic credit. The OER university aims to provide free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials with pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognised education institutions. It is rooted in the community service and outreach mission to develop a parallel learning universe to augment and add value to traditional delivery systems in post-secondary education. Through the community service mission of participating institutions we will open pathways for OER learners to earn formal academic credit and pay reduced fees for assessment and credit.

The OER university concept is derived from the original etymology of “universitas magistrorum et scholarium” referring to a community of scholars. The OER university is an innovation partnership of like-minded institutions committed to creating pathways for OER learners to gain academic credit through the formal education system. As such we use the lowercase “u” to refer to the OER university collaboration. The OER university is not a formal teaching institution and does not confer degrees or qualifications — but works in partnership with accredited educational institutions to provide credit for OER learning on the pathway to awarding credible credentials.

Open Educational Resources do save time and students do use them
Steve Stapleton, Project Manager of Open Nottingham

This presentation offers two case studies focused on the use and re-use of OER by staff and students at Nottingham. The first provides evidence of re-use by an academic from the School of Geography. The case study includes survey results showing that OER can save time with no compromise on quality. The second case study shows how students at Nottingham’s campus in China have been using open resources to support their studies, to learn how to evaluate academic resources and to support them on their journey to becoming global citizens.

Broadcast or Conversation: What does ‘openness’ mean to universities?
Dave White
Senior Manager: Development
Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL )
Project Manager of the JISC OER Impact Study
University of Oxford

Drawing on the initial findings of the JISC funded OER Impact project this presentation will explore how OER is being used/reused and the implications of institutions claiming to be ‘open’ in their engagement with the web.

Lessons from Open Source Software Re-use
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Chief Technology Officer for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), OER Commons

The world of education is trying to learn lessons about sharing from the world of open source. As it turns out, some of these lessons are more easily transferable than others. How does innovative reuse occur in the world of open source software, and how can these principles of reuse be applied to the very different world of education?

OER Glue
Joel Duffin (presenting by Skype)
CEO
OER Glue

OER Glue is a uniquely open approach to online learning that lets content be used where ever it is found rather than requiring it to be copied into a new system. OER Glue can be used to efficiently find content, assemble courses, and teach online by “glueing together” open education resources and integrating with popular online services including Google Documents, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and discussion and assessment tools. OER Glue’s web browser add-on approach lets you gather video, images, and text from web pages and put them and widgets into existing web pages. Authors and teachers can use this functionality to wrap context and navigation tools around online content and to integrate content and services from multiple sources in a coherent manner. This approach addresses licensing issues by modifying content and integrating services “in place” after they are loaded in the web browser. OER Glue is in private beta right now and looking for partners who are interested in enhancing existing courses and building new ones using OER Glue as well as providing feedback and input on the design of the tool. To learn more about OER Glue, visit the website at: http://www.oerglue.com/

How OER were embedded in the module ‘Developing the Online Learning Experience’
Timos Almpanis
Learning Technologist/ Associate Lecturer in Blended Learning
Southampton Solent University

The purpose of the ‘Developing the Online Experience’ module is to increase participants’ awareness of blended and online learning techniques so that they become familiar with the various ways in which technology can be used to enhance the students’ learning experience. Increasing awareness about OER enables lecturers to enrich their materials further and focus more on the ways in which students engage with the materials and in facilitating learning. OER have been used in various ways in the module ‘Developing the online learning experience’; OER were integrated with other subject-related learning resources such as journal articles, book chapters and presentations from the face-to-face sessions.

To encourage participants’ own use of OER, they were featured in a face-to-face session, – link to the Introduction to OER session: http://mycourse.solent.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=160120 – in which participants were asked to work in groups to evaluate the use of some of the most common OER material on websites such as OpenLearn, Jorum, MIT Courseware and more. Furthermore, learning activities – both group and individual – were based around Open Educational Resources as participants were asked to search, identify and evaluate an online, publicly available, structured activity that could be relevant to their subject area.

Learning from the Web for Learning on the Web
Nathan Yergler
Chief Technology Officer
Creative Commons

The move towards open courseware and open educational resources has resulted in a tremendous shift: there are more learning materials available online for use, remix, and repurposing than ever before, and creators and learners alike are discovering new ways to collaborate. But problems exist: search and discovery are by no means solved, and when the web is your classroom, getting useful information about how learners connect to materials is difficult. Can we look to the Web for lessons that can be applied to Learning on the Web? Can we look at best practices and lessons learned, and extrapolate useful information for learning and education? What should we expect, given the evolution of the Web?

All of the videos are available at our You Tube channel. They will also soon be made available, along with the presentation slides, at our Open Nottingham site