Attended the HEA Scottish Practitioners’ Forum. During discussion on current and upcoming issues, that of ESD and citizenship (and graduate attributes for the 21st C) were high on the agenda.

The C-change project was introduced, and participants were particularly interested in the ‘process’ part of the project, i.e. the investigation of copyright etc.. Colleagues from English, Law and Psychology in particular were aware of the potential pitfalls, and very pleased that these were being properly tested and investigated, rather than just ‘assuming that things would be ok’ until proved otherwise. Good feedback for our approach.

The Law colleague mentioned SCRIPT – a law and technology research project at the University of Edinburgh specialising in intellectual property and law as a possible contact for expertise. http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/

Last Thursday saw me attend the above conference in Edinburgh. The conference programme summarized the event as follows:

“We are now halfway through the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable
Development. The Decade aims to promote education as a basis for a more sustainable society and to integrate sustainable development into education at all levels and all areas of life. The Scottish Parliament passed the Climate Change Act in June. This will require wide-ranging and significant responses from further and higher education if we are to meet the Government’s targets for a low carbon future.

This conference will consider the contribution that Scotland’s colleges and universities are making to the targets in the Climate Change Act and the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.”

The afternoon session had two hour ‘workshop’ sessions, one of which looked at the issues of integrating ESD into the curriculum. Two Subject Centres, GEES and Psychology, presented on their work on ESD. As a major part of our work in this area, I introduced the C-change project, in particular the CoP on the pedagogy of climate change and sustainability. I invited participants to visit the website and get involved with the CoP.

Following a discussion on the bus home last night, the following points were noted down:

1. If materials central to a learning resource are removed (e.g. a graph) because clearance simply can not be obtained then there is a possibility that the pedagogical quality of the resource could be adversely affected – that is, the learning resource will no longer have the same pedagogic value to the learners.

2. As academic level of a learning resource increases, (e.g. to Level 3), then it is more likely to link directly to academic research (especially if academic producing the resource links their teaching to their research). Therefore, as level increases, do we get into the area of diminishing returns – that is, any copyright issues become harder to clear (linked to research journals etc.) and the content becomes relevant to fewer people / less reusable?

These are the summarized minutes from the C-change management meeting, 04/11/09

EB and MS presented Interim Report notes. The reporting deadline is the 9th November, sent to Academy York. The framework of the meeting revolved around reporting against Work Package activities. At present everything has gone to plan, apart from late staff recruitment due to issues with HR and the original time frame of the OER funding.

Work Packages 2-7 relate to the partners. The IPR workshop occurred in September, and it was this workshop which initiated partner work. It was acknowledged that the amount of time for the partners to do their repurposing is short, again due to the nature of the OER funding. At the IPR workshop there was some worry that the short time frame was not obvious to partners. EB has visited a number of the partners now, with most obviously on track. Each partner is taking a slightly different pathway to gaining clearance for materials.

o Southampton has 6 part-time PhD students working on getting clearance for repurposed materials, with as little referral back to the authors as possible. EB gave a talk to the students on IPR/copyright, and they were interested and already showed understanding of this area. The students also acknowledged the issue of realistic timeframes, especially when gaining copyright clearance. They were trying to get most of the re-purposing done before Christmas, but it is now expected that most partners will have slippage in this.

o In Exeter, the clearance is being done by the partner authors. No resource has been seen by core team yet. There has been some discussion regarding processes relating to the Exeter institutional project. MS has agreed with the C-change Exeter partner that he would resolve this internally.

o EB has visited Keele, where they have a research assistant in place and working with authors on clearance.

o EB is due to have a VC meeting with the OU partners on the 5th November. It has just been announced that the OU have been successful in funding for the SCORE project, which will release 75 hours of climate change material. The C-change core team had not been aware of this project, and this will be discussed at the VC meeting.

o EB and MS have had a telephone discussions with Newport. The research assistant for this project cannot start until January the 10th, ’10.

o The Liverpool partner has sent out his project money to two individuals, one in the US and one in the UK, to repurpose the material. A question was raised about how C-change would capture evaluative information on the project’s process in this instance. It was suggested that EB would need to talk to these two individuals.

Workpackage 8 (Legal and IPR). The IPR workshop has gone ahead and went well. MS and EB have had a meeting with University of Plymouth librarian, who has looked over current documentation and approved it. He did suggest considering using ‘criticism/review exception and fair-dealing’, but EB raised the issue that this is more suitable for humanities and arts, rather than factual ‘scientific’ material. EB will be attending further IPR workshops over the next few months, and it seems clear that other OER projects are still having problems with IPR issues and that this will have a knock-on effect r.e. timeframes etc.

The C-change team has a draft IPR clearance letter from the facilitator of the IPR workshop. At present EB is trying to get some standardization across the partners, and is trying to devise a schema to give to them. However, there is a question as to how much we push partners to agree to a totally standard schema/agreement. We need to find a middle way, as we don’t want 6 totally different sets of data/processes, but on the other hand forcing total standardization seems to act against the pilot nature of the project.

There is also a question as to what happens to the data after the end of the project; where would the metadata and the resource live? Legacy is an issue. There have been similar problems with FDTL projects. JISC ask projects to keep resources/data live for three years, after which time they archive project sites. Archiving repositories is another issue in itself, but OER material will go on and gain a new life of its own by its very nature. Ideally we want to find examples of agreements and processes that have dealt with this issue.

EB asked if the team could implant rights into a resource via an XML file- for example, image tagging to help with management of images has taken off, but this is not happening in academica. If XML is used, pinning ‘due diligence’ to the resource, then there might be an issue of narrowing the usage of the resource too much. Andy McGregor from JISC Repositories might have some useful ideas. There are schema from SPECTRUM, and re-written as part of SCA. It is extensive and would need streamlining for academia. However, is definitely an avenue of exploration (again maybe for another project!). NW mentioned that this is an offshoot of the project- not part of the work plan, but to do with benefits realisation for repositories. Therefore, it is worth ‘light touch’ investigation for possible future projects.

One of the big issues for partners’ copyright clearance work that is now becoming clear is that of clearance for diagrams and graphs- that is, ‘translation’ of data and facts, where the data/fact itself has no copyright issues, but the translation of that for a reader/audience/student does have issues. There is the option to ‘re-draw’ from original data, but in reality most partners are contacting publishers to ask for clearance. EB is currently constructing a list of common contacts across all partners: this list will give partners further choice in who to contact for clearance of diagrams, and might lead, if a number of partners have issues with one particular publisher, to the GEES SC, or even the HEA contacting the publishers on the partners’ behalf. Additional fields related to publishers’ willingness to provide clearance might be added from ROMEO/JULIET- part of the SHERPA [http://www.sherpa.ac.uk] tool search- this ‘traffic lights’ journals.

Workpackage 9, technology: the Blog is working, with repository space. MT is currently trying to get some interoperability with OpenJorum (OJ). The forum is up and currently under test. The team were reminded that the forum is for private community of practice and team discussions, the blog is the ‘public face’. With respect to OpenJorum, we have no current 1st hand experience of its use as yet. At present, the Jorum team say it will be ready in January. There are currently interim interfaces. Any issues with OJ could have an impact on the workflow for the C-change project, although it is intended that only metadata will appear in there, with the resources themselves held in either/or both institutional partner repositories and UPlace. At present there ARE issues with OJ such as there being no bulk upload facility. SWORD, a simple deposition tool for multiple repositories. At present it is not certain that OJ will have this capacity. NW highlighted this area as another example of a future enhancement project. In terms of metadata, the team are trying to work with both OJ and UPlace as much as possible. It was pointed out that as long as the team can map our metadata to OJ, it will work: OJ will be using Dublin Core, so it is worth the C-change team investigating mappings now, so that if there are any extensions that are needed, NW and RS can help. It is likely that it is only the subject field that will need extending- although there is also a question over whether this field will be searchable by users (not all fields are searchable).

MT is also exploring the use of CAPTIVATE for the creation of interactive tutorials as learning objects. NW suggested that XERTE should be used to build such learning objects, which would ensure that they are SCORM 1.2 compliant. A question was also raised as to how GLOW2 sits against XERTE? This links to the OL2 CETL.

Workpackage 10: Community of Practice. The forum is in place and being tested, but there is a worry amongst the team that it is a little under-engineered. As soon as the Blog is up-to-date and the team is happy with the forum, then there will be a ‘launch’ party (possibly on Elluminate) for the CP. This will need some thinking r.e. publicity and future events. There have been a number of people external to the project who have expressed an interest in joining the pedagogy CP. It is now timely to take this area of dissemination forward. It was suggested by YK that it would make sense to link that CP to the publication of the ‘Pedagogy of Climate Change’ book which will be due out soon.
We need to ensure that Ped of climate change book and any other GEES SC materials are put into repository when time comes- if timing right, maybe could be early test materials, particularly Planet articles? Planet articles already have copyright clearance from authors.

Workpackage 11: evaluation. HK has produced an evaluation strategy which is currently underway. YK and HK worked with the Subject Synthesis team (Helen Beetham) to pick out the specific areas of evaluation that would be worth concentrating on for this project.

Workpackage 12: Dissemination. HK presented a C-change Poster at GSA, to good interest and feedback. Publicity has also gone out on JISCmail and MS has written a paper for Planet, which is out now. The first IPR workshop was successfully run, as a combination of life and VC.

The aim of the project team has been to have management meetings every two months. The management team consists of the Project Manager, the GEES Associate Director, the UoP’s Director of E-learning, the HELP CETL’s Senior Learning Technologist, and, since being in post, the Project Coordinator. Other members of staff, such as the GEES Project Coordinator, may sit in where appropriate.

The first official project management meeting took place after finding the bid had been successful, in April ’09. Summer holidays disrupted the next meeting slightly, but it took place in the middle of July, with further meetings taking place in September and the latest in November. Some of the minutes can be found in this Blog, others can be accessed by contacting the Project Manager.

Meetings have been built around different formats, dependent upon the pressing issues- this is due to the short time frame of the project, and the need to progress as quickly as possible. For example, the most recent meeting was centred around the format of the interim report.

The meetings are used to make decisions on ways forward for the future of the project, dealing with issues that have arisen and not been resolved during the previous two months, noting down areas of work that are not directly related to C-change work packages, but are of interest for future work, and sharing information with more senior members of staff (e.g. Director of e-learning, GEES Associate Director) that has not already been shared between the core team members.

Investigation of copyright, IPR and legal issues with Edina and OS: both utilised heavily by GEES departments r.e. cartography etc..

1. capturing of information that has already occurred: prior to successful bid proposal- consultation with community; contact over the next few months with partner institutional IPR/legal people- light touch interviews investigating how the process worked for them, what the sticking points were, what helped, what hindered.
2. for the GEES team: what issues could be seen from the beginning- i.e. any ‘told you so’s'? Yes, already: short term nature of milestones, especially e.g. consortium agreement. SC groupings previously suggested that combined HEA led work on developing agreements, with help from a consultant, would be most efficient way to work. Since GEES SC got agreements in, deadline has been extended, and consultant brought in (!) for other SCs. What is it about the GEES SC consortium that enabled successful meeting of deadline?

There is likely to be two strands to the OER evaluation strategy- the more quantitative KPIs required by the HEA, and the more qualitative ‘lessons learned’ and ‘what next?’ wanted by JISC.

YK and MS have had a meeting with Helen Beetham, Subject Strand E&S consultant with the OER Programme. Helen is hoping to develop a set of templates for case studies etc. to help with E&S.

Suggestions/thoughts for further discussion:
1. Take a lighter touch on following all E&S ‘leads’, esp. in terms of working with institutions (individual and institutional strands will be looking at this as well)- what are our unique investigative questions for this project? (I have some ideas… what are yours?)
2. Concentrate and track a few of these specific issues, rather than having too wide a spread of investigation.
3. the SC strand will probably reveal more than originally thought- and potentially more than other two strands.
4. What is quality? Main accessibility measure?
5. need strategies for capturing evidence during process- to drive interim reports etc. blog entry perfectly acceptable!
6. Links to CoP strands
7. Does the theme or discipline affect engagement?
8. Does ‘ESD’ within HE loosen ‘business hold/branding’?
9. why are some communities better at sharing than others?

Any more?

To add from OER consortium discussions online- where were the sticking points for each partner? Maybe send a quick email/phone the insititutional links before their memory fades?

Attending: Michael Sanders, Yolande Knight, Neil Witt.

Apologies: Brian Chalkley, Sharon Gedye

1. Mike provided updates on the following:

Consortium Agreements

Having initially been given advice at OER start up meeting not to use the JISC Consortium Agreement template, Mike wrote a ‘plain english’ version based on other successful consortium bids at Plymouth. A couple of the partners’ legal contacts had issues with the draft that needed ironing out. Following consultation with other Subject Strand projects (C-SAP and Bioscience), Mike decided to go back towards the JISC template, as others have done. That second draft has gone out for consultation with partners.

There may be an issue with all partners being physically present to sign the consortium agreement by the necessary deadline (due to the time of year). Mike has contacted Programme Management to ask what consequences there may be if this occurs.

Use of the Blog and Sharepoint

Mike is hoping to encourage all partners to use the blog to keep a record of their project’s life cycle: successes, challenges etc.. Users are encouraged to be upfront with issues, as this blog acts as part of monitoring and evaluation of the project.

Mike has also agreed to investigate the use of Sharepoint on behalf of the SC strand (along with other projects). Several members of the project team have not had good experiences with Sharepoint, but are willing to give it another go.

Repositories

Neil has just set up another repository for an external organisation and therefore is keen to develop a similar repository for C-change, separate to UPlaCe. Although Neil is taking all project responsibilities with him to his new post (E-Learning Director), he still wants to work with C-change in sharing a learning technologist (0.6 FTE C-change, 0.4 FTE other). Yolie to liaise with HELP CETL Manager to sort this out. This post would work in collaboration with HELP CETL LT, Neil and Mike on the development of repository support material for academics, and suggested workflows. These would be some of the projects outputs, linked to reuse and further contribution to OER after the end of the project. It also fits in neatly with the CETL’s ideas for sustained repositories, which allows shared working and added value.

Steering Group Meeting

The first C-Change Steering Group Meeting has occurred, with attendees from 3 of the project partners.

IPR Workshop

This is set to occur sometime in September, but Mike needs to encourage partners to give dates available for attendance. Venue to be in London.

Evaluation

Due to changes in Neil’s position, Anne McDermott will now not work as evaluator. Yolande is currently taking over this role, liaising with Helen Beetham as the Subject Strand consultant. Mike will ensure that previous discussions and feedback from community (from Christmas onwards) is ‘retrospectively blogged’.

Professional Bodies

Mike will be talking to all professional bodies about possible future roles in the project.

Quality Assurance

As part of original project bid, we know that all materials being provided has already been validated as part of an accredited programme. Will there be issues with ‘comparative qualities’? It is likely that this will only occur in terms of ‘technical’ quality: are there three types of quality to be considered, namely content/knowledge, pedagogic context, and technical format? Neil suggested that the main quality measure to be concerned about is ‘can it be re-used easily’? There is a possibility that if a resource is too ‘technical’, that this might affect ease of re-use. It might therefore be better to produce resources at a lower technical spec to allow more accessible re-use.

How do we/ can we quality assure re-use of materials? One way might be to ensure this is covered by attributable licensing- terms of license could be that if you use something, let us know what you do with it, and let us have it back- i.e. feed it back in to the system.  That way we can track how things are used/developed. If this occurred, there would be a QA issue however, as altered materials would not have been through accreditation.

Branding

Common sense needed here: keep low key and subtle, and again, relate directly to licensing. Need to ensure have a handle URI for each resource.

Community of Practice

Following first Steering Meeting, the Communities of Practice have been combined to one, with two strands (pedagogic and OER). Neil will set up an ELG from the C-change webpage to allow easy communication for groups.

Mike and Yolie ‘attended’ the first online Elluminate session, which introduced the evaluation and synthesis part of the OER programme and raised some interesting questions for future discussion. The E&S team will synthesize the discussion at a later date, but what follows is a brief summary of the discussion from our point of view, with appropriate links to other blogs/wikis/Powerpoints etc..

The link for accompanying Powerpoints, and a live recording of this Elluminate session can be found here: http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/index.php?n=Main.Presentations

The JISC OER ‘Synthesis and Evaluation Function’ aims to build a shared framework for the evaluation and synthesis of the OER piulot programme- so does what it says on the tin! There is a project wiki: http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/index.php?n=Main.HomePage, which will hold information for programme participants, and, hopefully, allow continuing dialouge with the S&E consultants. The three OER strands (individual, subject and institutional) have specific consultants working on each: the Subject Strand has Helen Beetham as contact, and Mike and I are already in discussion with her with a (very early) draft/notes on possible evaluation strategies (document to follow). The current draft evaluation and synthesis framework can be found here: http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/index.php?n=Main.GenericFramework.

The first Elluminate discussion session covered the following topics: marketing and branding; possible benefits and support for staff; pedagogy of OER; managing databases and metadata (this will be the topic for the next Elluminate session, on the second Tuesday of August, 2pm); reuse of OER and accompanying quality issues; general E&S queries. Due to the nature of Elluminate as a forum, the discussion was bitty and a little confused, but some interesting questions could be extracted, which may be worth highlighting here for further consideration by the team and partners.

Firstly, however, here is a brief intro into the E&S framework development:

How should we develop our evaluation strategy?

To allow our evaluation strategy to map to the generic E&S framework, we need to identify our project’s key outcomes, especially in relation to the following: findings, impact, benefits and lessons learned.

We need to begin to define ‘measures of openness’ (not quite sure what this means at this stage!).

The E&S team will try to help us identify appropriate factors, methods, timings and measures that will help us achieve the above: but this relies on us being proactive in seeking advice.

Once we have these methods/timings/measures agreed, it is up to us as a project to apply these through our evaluation processes.

The rationale for working in this way is that such a structure allows for the development of a common language for collation of data, challenges, solutions and outputs, encourages the sharing of questions/issues and allows the identification of key areas of interest and useful approaches for the future.

Problems/issues/questions might fit in to three categories:

1. those that can be answered by JISC/HEA Programme Managers (and tend to apply to all projects)- and an answer/solution is available.

2. those that can be answered by programme support (the OU team) and need expert advice from those already working on OER

3. those that are issues for evaluation- that is, questions that don’t have a clear answer, but the programme is investigating. Thies issues/questions can also be seperated in to:

• organisational and IPR
• social and cultural
• technical

Issues that were raised by Elluminate participants during discussion:

Marketing and Branding

• Our University’s reputation is at stake with this project, how do we approach marketing and branding? Reputational benefits may depend on identifying authorship.
• Do we need to look at business models?
• What is the difference between ‘branding’ and author/institutional acknowledgement?
• Should this just sit in the accompanying metadata?
• Is anyone thinking of using licensing that doesn’t mandate attribution?
• If an OER is branded, the branding should not impede re-use.
• Could we just use a UKOER logo (in addition to UKOER tag)? How about logo alongside originator (project partner logo?) details?
• Will a lack of branding/acknowledgement prevent reassurance of already reticent academic staff?
• Creative Commons licences wouldn’t mandate retention of UKOER logo

Benefits and support for staff

• Links investigating benefits for staff (individuals and institutions): http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/265/ (Good Intentions Report); CETIS OER Briefing Paper
• Who are the stakeholders and how can we support them, and evaluate their experience? Academic, teaching staff, technical staff, learners
• Do we need to consider evaluation of end-user communities? Who are they/likely to be? What do they need?
• How do we investigate benefits of OER whilst, at the same time, encouraging engagement?
• What motivates enthusiasts? Ask E&S to investigate participants with OpenLearn at the OU- a very enthusiastic and aware group.
• Do we need to look at how discipline cultures work across institutions? How do different disciplines share research, for example? Might this have some effect on how a discipline engages with OER?
• Colleagues at Caledonian University can cite ‘reuse of resources they have authored’ in their application for promotion on the basis of learning and teaching.
• Is anyone doing a formal survey on academics’ preferences for release of material under creative commons?

Pedagogy

• Fragmentation of resources makes it difficult for the background pedagogy (good or bad) to be transmitted wholesale to the user
• do we even want to put such caveats (e.g. ‘must be used in this pedagogic context’) against material?
• Ope Spires thinks that should not wrap material up with unnecessary contextual material
• Making resources easier to use overcomes barriers
• For the purposes of this programme, cannot evaluate learning and teaching quality (above and beyond initial accredited material) in terms of reuse, but maybe we can explore changes in practice and perceptions around quality?
• If we are not looking at pedagogic value, then surely this brings the programme’s sustainability credibility in to question?
• the JISC Mosaic Report has a good overview of this issue

Managing Metadata and Databases

• Need advice on subject schemas vs. subject tags?
• Tracking: how do we track across both OpenJorum and other repositories?
• Can track visits using Google Analytics.
• Should not just track the ‘what’ but also the ‘why’
• Another suggestion is to use javascript to record downloads- you can add a click event handler to document links, and use this to track using e.g. google analytics. An example can be found here.
• p.s. from Yolie- I’m happy with metadata discussions, but can’t guarantee that I’ve necessarily got the right words or ‘ideas’ down with respect to e.g. tracking. Far too technical for me!

Reuse and Quality

• Evaluating reuse of OERs may well be out of scope of programme: programme is focussed on creation/repurposing and release of OERs rather than on their reuse
• However, reuse will influence quality of OER, and a couple of the institutional projects will be looking at reuse, so should keep an eye on these.
• However, we may well get hints at reuse, the hows and wherefores- so make sure manage to pick these up as and when they appear.
• Should ‘intention to reuse’ be seen as part of the release? Open release implies re-use and so is part of the change of mind-set
• The programme is starting on the road of ‘building an OER culture into course design and delivery’
• SC credibility for OER project is affected if the actual resources are not valuable for reuse. Is difficult to evaluate the potential for the OERs in context until someone else has tried to embedd them. How do we maximise component reuse?
• For Biosciences, each project partner is finding a ‘client’ as a user for their OER, to act as a critical friend, rather than simply rely on the repository and reactions/use of the latter.
• Is there a difference between quality in terms of original resource (accredited programmes, therefore quality assured) vs. quality within new context (reuse)? (we think yes to this)
• We have no control over context of reuse?

Other Queries

• Institutional programme blogs can be found at http://www.netvibves.com/hwilliamson#oer-institutional_projects
• If anyone is interested in the Oxford project on Audio Visual enterprise level infrastructure, you can find more information at http://steeple.oucs.ox.ac.uk
• Could projects use Elluminate with their partners? (programme leaders investigating licensing for this)
• In terms of evaluation framework, could we have a ‘phase 1′ and a ‘phase 2′, so that we can get the project and partners started (evaluting as we go), without necessarily knowing all the questions we want to ask overall?
• Projects must gather evidence throughout lifecycle, but mapping this to the framework may well take a couple of attempts. The E&S team will help with this.

As the project continues, we will pick out particular issues raised here (and at other meetings) and ask partners for their thoughts.