The C-change website now has a form allowing you to feed back your thoughts on our OER.

This is available from the menu above – from the ‘Have you used an OER” tab or directly at:

http://c-changeproject.org.uk/?page_id=382

The input that you give us will be fed directly back to the C-change team and will help us plan and implement further developments of OER materials for GEES.

To find our material simply go to:

http://open.jorum.ac.uk/ and search for GEESOER.

or click here

We have now finalised the last versions of our Partner Advice Documents:

1. c-change_supporting_info_3a – Final (98Kb) – originally – C-change Back-Page Guidance
2. c-change_deposit_jorumOPEN_4 – Final (48Kb) – originally the C-change JorumOPEN deposit Guidelines

Development will continue of these guidelines, however they have now been made far more generic and aimed at all the wider GEES community.  The newer versions are still available on the documents page at:  http://c-changeproject.org.uk/?page_id=3

The C-change project is also working with the other STEM OER projects on some more generic guidelines for producing OER for the sciences.

JorumOPEN is based on a set of minimal metadata.  On the whole this is a good thing….or at least we can see that this idea started with good intentions!

But with so few fields to fill out, we really need to take great care on how we fill them.  It would be just too easy to end up with a lot of data squashed into just a few fields and a lack of standards making the data almost unusable.

The best example of this is most probably the ‘author’ field:

For a start, this field is taking three types of possible ‘author’.  First the name of the people who created it, but then also the name of the ‘owner’ , which is likely to be different and then finally the name of the insititute or univeristy who employed the author, who may or may not be the ‘owner’ of it.

Then there is the question of how to enter the ‘name’ into one field which has to include both ‘surname’ and ‘first name’. Remembering that it needs to be in such a way that when the data is sorted, it uses the surname rather than the first name.

This all asks for a high level of standardisation and we have started down that route by starting a set of draft guidelines, which can be downloaded from the Documents page at:

http://c-changeproject.org.uk/?page_id=3 and is called:  Depositing into JorumOPEN eib 4

As ever, we would appreciate any thoughts or feedback you had into this document

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C-change in GEES is totally committed to using JorumOPEN for the delivery of all its OER materials and has always considered it to be the primary interface for  our community to find and download C-change OER materials.

We therefore have high hopes for how JorumOPEN will work for the Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences community, but feel that there are still some areas where we would like to see some improvements in the user interface and workflow, before we can unreservedly recommend it to our community.

After talking with JorumOPEN, they recommended that we post our experiences and thoughts to their forum on Community Bay.

We have done this and the thread can be found here:

http://community.jorum.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=98#p142

We would really appreciate any further thoughts that you had – posted on the thread there or if you prefer do go ahead and leave a comment here.

cheers

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The GEES Subject Centre is delighted to announce that:
‘C-Change in GEES – Open Education Resources (OERs) for climate change and sustainability – practicalities & pedagogy’ is to be held on Thursday the 29th of April 2010 at the Macdonald Hotel Manchester from 9.30am to 4pm.

This event will mark the launch of the C-Change in GEES project and has two main aims:

1. To disseminate the resources and learning outcomes from the GEES Subject Centre project ‘C-change in GEES: Open licensing of climate change and sustainability resources in the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
2. To promote the ‘Pedagogy of Climate Change’ book, published by the GEES Subject Centre and edited by Simon Haslett, Derek France and Sharon Gedye. Due to be launched at the event.

This event provides an excellent opportunity to both learn more about the production and use of OER materials for the GEES and also to further explore the pedagogy’s of climate change, identify the areas for development in our knowledge and understanding and look forward to what can be achieved in the future.

For further details of the event please visit:
http://gees.ac.uk/events/2010/geesoer/geesoer.htm

for any more information please do get back to anyone in the C-change team.

A while ago I was talking with Tim Denning at Keele University about the lack of clarity in the approach many Universities have to IPR in the widest context.  Tim is working on MedDev, another project in the OER Programme and they intend to grab this bull by the horns and undertake a survey of their partners to try and find out a bit more about university institutional IPR policy.

It would be great to extend this survey as wide as possible so I would encourage all of you to get in touch with Tim or Adrian on oer@keele.ac.uk and I am sure they will be delighted to send you the details of how to fill out the survey.

These surveys always take a little time to fill out, but it should be worth the effort as they promise to share the results with all those who have filled it out and I think it will make very interesting reading.

Yesterday Mike Sanders and Ed Bremner went up to the Open University in Milton Keynes to meet with Rose Webb and Andy Lane from the OU about the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE) and Dr Martin Reynolds from the OU – one of the C-change partners.

SCORE is built on the OpenLearn project which has already reached its target of providing 5,400 learning hours of content in the LearningSpace and 8100 hours in the LabSpace, covering a full range of Open University subject areas from introductory to postgraduate level.  SCORE now aims to extend the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) to help support similar activities in the rest of the Higher Educational sector.

It was a very interesting trip, although in some ways a little daunting to see how large and well organised the OpenLearn project is.

The good news is of course that SCORE intends to share its knowledge about OER and help the rest of us get the very best from our projects.

SCORE is intending on launching a new website shortly, but for the moment you can find out more about the project by visiting their pages on OpenLearn LapSpace at:  http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=5129

If you have any questions, you can always register (for free) and post them to the forum or you can download details of their last OER Workshop on Copyright Commons.

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At the end of last month I presented a poster on C-change (designed by Ed and Sharon) at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon. The poster was presented along with 19 others in the session on “From Virtual Globes to Geoblogs: Digital Innovations in Geoscience Research, Education, and Outreach”. There were 379 posters available for view in the exhibit hall within 26 different sessions, so delegates had a lot of things to see! From 4pm – 6pm (when presenters are required to be at their posters) 10 people stopped to look at the C-Change poster and a total of 14 handouts were taken. The poster was usefully positioned next to the queue for free beer and I followed a few people along the line in order to hear their opinions on the project.

Everyone I spoke too was very interested in the project and felt that the materials could be useful. The fact that the materials were from the UK did not matter. About half of those I spoke to had used the MIT Open Courseware materials and one person mentioned that there wasn’t much there on energy, so the C-Change resources would prove useful.

Although this was a geology conference, several people noted that they taught introductory level environmental science / studies and that the materials would be very useful for that. Other suggestions for use included K-12 teacher professional development and public understanding (e.g. through promotion of the materials in museums).

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?