Supporting sustainable e‐learning

This paper draws upon work carried out within phase one of a national forum for support staff, funded by the UK Learning and Teaching Support Network Generic Centre. It sets out themes in current Learning Technology research within the context of institutional practice. It reports the responses of a range of e‐learning support staff to new developments in the reuse and sharing of Learning Objects. The article highlights tensions across support units, inconsistencies in support provision and confusion over issues concerning different modes of teaching. It also forewarns a growing gap between institutional practice and research in the development of approaches to sustainable e‐learning

ICOPER Project - Deliverable 4.3 ISURE: Recommendations for extending effective reuse, embodied in the ICOPER CD&R

The purpose of this document is to capture the ideas and recommendations, within and beyond the ICOPER community, concerning the reuse of learning content, including appropriate methodologies as well as established strategies for remixing and repurposing reusable resources. The overall remit of this work focuses on describing the key issues that are related to extending effective reuse embodied in such materials. The objective of this investigation, is to support the reuse of learning content whilst considering how it could be originally created and then adapted with that ‘reuse’ in mind. In these circumstances a survey on effective reuse best practices can often provide an insight into the main challenges and benefits involved in the process of creating, remixing and repurposing what we are now designating as Reusable Learning Content (RLC). Several key issues are analysed in this report: Recommendations for extending effective reuse, building upon those described in the previous related deliverables 4.1 Content Development Methodologies and 4.2 Quality Control and Web 2.0 technologies. The findings of this current survey, however, provide further recommendations and strategies for using and developing this reusable learning content. In the spirit of ‘reuse’, this work also aims to serve as a foundation for the many different stakeholders and users within, and beyond, the ICOPER community who are interested in reusing learning resources. This report analyses a variety of information. Evidence has been gathered from a qualitative survey that has focused on the technical and pedagogical recommendations suggested by a Special Interest Group (SIG) on the most innovative practices with respect to new media content authors (for content authoring or modification) and course designers (for unit creation). This extended community includes a wider collection of OER specialists. This collected evidence, in the form of video and audio interviews, has also been represented as multimedia assets potentially helpful for learning and useful as learning content in the New Media Space (See section 4 for further details). Section 2 of this report introduces the concept of reusable learning content and reusability. Section 3 discusses an application created by the ICOPER community to enhance the opportunities for developing reusable content. Section 4 of this report provides an overview of the methodology used for the qualitative survey. Section 5 presents a summary of thematic findings. Section 6 highlights a list of recommendations for effective reuse of educational content, which were derived from thematic analysis described in Appendix A. Finally, section 7 summarises the key outcomes of this work

A guide for Teachers

The role of the teacher in Higher Education is changing rapidly, and much of this change is as the result of the introduction of e-Learning. Teachers are now expected to share their role as course designers with many other professionals working in their institution while taking on a bigger role in the technical and resource discovery aspects of course design. This guide tackles these issues as well as examining emerging pedagogical issues that arise from the use of technologies in teaching. You will find information, advice and guidance that will help you make appropriate and effective use of e-Learning to support your students

Historical roots of Agile methods: where did “Agile thinking” come from?

The appearance of Agile methods has been the most noticeable change to software process thinking in the last fifteen years [16], but in fact many of the “Agile ideas” have been around since 70’s or even before. Many studies and reviews have been conducted about Agile methods which ascribe their emergence as a reaction against traditional methods. In this paper, we argue that although Agile methods are new as a whole, they have strong roots in the history of software engineering. In addition to the iterative and incremental approaches that have been in use since 1957 [21], people who criticised the traditional methods suggested alternative approaches which were actually Agile ideas such as the response to change, customer involvement, and working software over documentation. The authors of this paper believe that education about the history of Agile thinking will help to develop better understanding as well as promoting the use of Agile methods. We therefore present and discuss the reasons behind the development and introduction of Agile methods, as a reaction to traditional methods, as a result of people's experience, and in particular focusing on reusing ideas from histor

The role of re-appropriation in open design : a case study on how openness in higher education for industrial design engineering can trigger global discussions on the theme of urban gardening

This case study explores the opportunities for students of Industrial Design Engineering to engage with direct and indirect stakeholders by making their design process and results into open-ended Designed Solutions. The reported case study involved 47 students during a two-weeks intensive course on the topic of urban gardening. Observations were collected during three distinctive phases: the co-design phase, the creation of an Open Design and the sharing of these design solutions on the online platform Instructables.com. The open sharing of local solutions triggered more global discussions, based on several types of feedbacks: from simple questions to reference to existing works and from suggestions to critiques. Also some examples of re-appropriation of the designed solutions were reported. These feedbacks show the possibilities for students to have a global vision on their local solutions, confronting them with a wider and more diverse audience. The case study shows on the other hand the difficulty in keeping students engaged in this global discussion, considering how after a few weeks the online discussions dropped to an almost complete silence. It is also impossible with such online platforms to follow the re-appropriation cycles, losing the possibility of exploring the new local context were the replication / modification of the designed product occurred. The course’s focus on Open Design is interesting both under the design and educational points of view. It implies a deep change in the teaching approach and learning attitude of students, allowing unknown peers to take part of the design process and fostering a global discussion starting from unique and local solutions