Co-authorship in the age of cyberculture: Open Educational Resources at the Open University of the United Kingdom

Locating Open Educational Resources (OER) as a phenomenon of cyberculture, this paper presents a reflection on the possibilities of co-authorship that are entailed in OER initiatives of different natures and settings within a large organisation. A selection of OER-related projects and activities carried out at the Open University of United Kingdom (UKOU) are examined from the perspective of a comparative framework proposed by Okada (2010). The framework identifies key features and differences between ‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Education, that is, respectively, formal education, which takes place within the constraints of institutional Virtual Learning Environments, and informal education, which is gradually taking place more widely in cyberspace. The paper is introduced with a succinct discussion of the connection between cyberculture and the emergence of OER, followed by a presentation of the comparative framework adopted. The UKOU´s structure and methods are then presented, and various projects are discussed. The article concludes by proposing a brief commentary on the creative potential that is being unleashed at the very boundaries between formal and informal educational spaces that cyberculture is challenging

Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

The organisational impact of open educational resources

The open educational resource (OER) movement has been growing rapidly since 2001, stimulated by funding from benefactors such as the Hewlett Foundation and UNESCO, and providing educational content freely to institutions and learners across the World. Individuals and organisations are motivated by a variety of drivers to produce OERs, both altruistic and self-interested. There are parallels with the open source movement where authors and others combine their efforts to provide a product which they and others can use freely and adapt to their own purposes. There are many different ways in which OER initiatives are organised and an infinite range of possibilities for how the OERs themselves are constituted. If institutions are to develop sustainable OER initiatives they need to build successful change management initiatives, developing models for the production and quality assurance of OERs, licensing them through appropriate mechanisms such as the Creative Commons, and considering how the resources will be discovered and used by learners

The trial of learning objects: exploring the design and delivery of VTE courses with learning objects

This paper describes a project undertaken in the Australian vocational training and education (VTE) sector that sought to investigate success factors associated with the design and delivery of courses using learning objects (LOs). The project explored the strategies used by three teachers as they used digital repositories to discover learning objects, and then applied the objects through a content management system to create online courses. The paper reports the factors that were found to influence the online learning settings that resulted and teachers\u27 perceptions of LOs as building blocks for online courses

Edusource: Canada's Learning Object Repository Network

An alliance of Canadian Universities and government agencies pooled their resources to establish a network to share and combine Learning Objects from a variety of sources and further develop this technology. In the process, they resolved many learning, logistical, and legal problems and moved this technology forward by an order of magnitude. Principal goals include: nationwide interoperability, network of repositories, linked servers, repository software programs, national and international standards, digital rights management, business and management models, evaluation and feedback, dissemination of results, and bilingual access to all Canadians, particularly learners with disabilities. The defined tasks were sub-divided into nine work packages, each with a lead institution as package manager

Accessible lifelong learning at higher education:outcomes and lessons Learned at two different PilotSites in the EU4ALL Project

[EN] The EU4ALL project (IST-FP6-034778) has developed a general framework to address the needs of accessible lifelong learning at Higher Education level consisting of several standards-based interoperable components integrated into an open web service architecture aimed at supporting adapted interaction to guarantee students' accessibility needs. Its flexibility has supported the project implementation at several sites with different settings and various learning management systems. Large-scale evaluations involving hundreds of users, considering diverse disability types, and key staff roles have allowed obtaining valuable lessons with respect to "how to adopt or enhance eLearning accessibility" at university. The project was evaluated at four higher education institutions, two of the largest in Europe and two mediumsized. In this paper, we focus on describing the implementation and main conclusions at the largest project evaluation site (UNED), which was involved in the project from the beginning, and thus, in the design process, and a medium-sized university that adopted the EU4ALL approach (UPV). This implies dealing with two well-known open source learning environments (i.e. dotLRN and Sakai), and considering a wide variety of stakeholders and requirements. Thus the results of this evaluation serve to illustrate the coverage of both the approach and developments.The authors would like to thank the European Commission for the financial support of the EU4ALL project (IST-2006-034478). The work at aDeNu is also supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (TIN2008-06862-C04-01/TSI “A2UN@”). Authors would also like to thank all the EU4ALL partners for their collaboration.Boticario, JG.; Rodriguez-Ascaso, A.; Santos, OC.; Raffenne, E.; Montandon, L.; Roldán Martínez, D.; Buendía García, F. (2012). Accessible lifelong learning at higher education:outcomes and lessons Learned at two different PilotSites in the EU4ALL Project. Journal of Universal Computer Science. 18(1):62-85. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/37117628518

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field