Share and share alike: Encouraging the reuse of academic resources through the Scottish electronic staff development library

This paper reports on the findings of a consultancy procedure conducted within the Scottish Higher Education staff development community and focusing on the reuse and sharing of communications and information technology resources for teaching and learning. While this consultancy was conducted primarily to inform the development of the Scottish electronic Staff Development Library (SeSDL), its findings, will be of relevance to colleagues working in the fields of staff development and C&IT and all those involved in the creation of shared teaching and learning resources. The consultancy identified general staff development demands, specific pedagogical requirements, and concerns relating to the provision, reuse and sharing of staff development resources. The SeSDL Project will attempt to address these demands through the development of a Web‐based resource centre, which will facilitate the reuse and sharing of high‐quality staff development resources. Library materials are stored in the form of granules which are branded with IMS compatible metadata and which are classified using a controlled educational taxonomy. Staff developers will be able to assemble these granular components to build customized lessons tailored to meet the needs of their own departments and institutions

Repurposing learning objects: a sustainable alternative?

Recent experience shows that reusable learning objects, like the computer assisted learning programmes of the early 1990s, have so far failed to achieve expected levels of integration into educational practice. This is despite technical interoperability, cataloguing systems, high quality standards, targeted dissemination and professional development initiatives. Analysis of this problem suggests that conceptualization of the problem may be limiting the scope of solutions. This paper proposes a sustainable and participative approach to reuse that involves repurposing learning objects for different discipline areas. For some time now there has been a growing awareness that even the most accessible resources have failed to be widely adopted by the educational community and as a result have also failed to fulfil their considerable educational potential. (Campbell, 2003, p. 35

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

UK Data Archive Resources for Studying Older People and Ageing

There is a growing collection of data available on older people and ageing at the UK Data Archive. Collections include “On the Edge of Later Life”, a study that investigated the experiences of people in their 50’s, and “Older Men: Their Social Worlds and Healthy Lifestyles”, a study that investigated masculinity and ageing, with a focus on men living alone. Both qualitative and quantitative data are available. The UKDA wants to make data easily useable for research, teaching and policy purposes. To those ends, it provides access to data, additional resources and user support for those interested in using archived data. This paper describes the kinds of data and related materials that are available on ageing and later life and explains how they can be accessed and used

Harnessing Technology: new modes of technology-enhanced learning: action research, March 2009

5 action research studie

Use and Reuse of OER: professional conversations with language teachers

In the last ten years prestigious Open Education Resources projects have been set up, often with generous support from funders. Funders and institutions that support OER want evidence of their use and reuse; it seems, however, that OER have not yet been widely adopted by teachers as part of their daily practice. This paper investigates the use and reuse of OER from a subject-specific repository for language teachers. In particular, the small scale study investigates how and why language teachers use OER in their teaching and rework existing resources. It also examines whether the teachers understand the resources and how to use and adapt them effectively, as an inability to do so has been considered an impediment to their reuse (Dimitriadis et al. (2009), Conole (2010b)). One of the difficulties in working with open resources and open practices is that “the open is the enemy of the knowable” (Beetham, 2011): investigating the adoption of OER and open practices is indeed not without difficulty, and this study proposes a qualitative enquiry based around professional conversations to investigate use and reuse of OER. The research found that, far from not engaging in reuse, the teachers in the study did adapt OER, although most of those changes were not published again. In addition, they drew on considerable professional knowledge when considering the use and reuse of OER for their lessons. The current study suggests that evidence of use and reuse cannot simply be gathered through metrics; some of the reuse and sharing is not necessarily visible, and sharing might not always be appropriate. It is possible that the adoption of more open educational practices will result in reuse and sharing of both resources and practices becoming more visible in the future but, for now, more research is needed to provide evidence of the “invisible” reuse and sharing

Pirate plunder: game-based computational thinking using scratch blocks

Policy makers worldwide argue that children should be taught how technology works, and that the ‘computational thinking’ skills developed through programming are useful in a wider context. This is causing an increased focus on computer science in primary and secondary education. Block-based programming tools, like Scratch, have become ubiquitous in primary education (5 to 11-years-old) throughout the UK. However, Scratch users often struggle to detect and correct ‘code smells’ (bad programming practices) such as duplicated blocks and large scripts, which can lead to programs that are difficult to understand. These ‘smells’ are caused by a lack of abstraction and decomposition in programs; skills that play a key role in computational thinking. In Scratch, repeats (loops), custom blocks (procedures) and clones (instances) can be used to correct these smells. Yet, custom blocks and clones are rarely taught to children under 11-years-old. We describe the design of a novel educational block-based programming game, Pirate Plunder, which aims to teach these skills to children aged 9-11. Players use Scratch blocks to navigate around a grid, collect items and interact with obstacles. Blocks are explained in ‘tutorials’; the player then completes a series of ‘challenges’ before attempting the next tutorial. A set of Scratch blocks, including repeats, custom blocks and clones, are introduced in a linear difficulty progression. There are two versions of Pirate Plunder; one that uses a debugging-first approach, where the player is given a program that is incomplete or incorrect, and one where each level begins with an empty program. The game design has been developed through iterative playtesting. The observations made during this process have influenced key design decisions such as Scratch integration, difficulty progression and reward system. In future, we will evaluate Pirate Plunder against a traditional Scratch curriculum and compare the debugging-first and non-debugging versions in a series of studies

Supporting Sustainable e-learning: A UK National Forum

This article outlines the progress of a national Supporting Sustainable eLearning Forum, funded by the UK Learning and Teaching Support Network Generic Centre. The aim of the forum was to move e-learning on from project innovation to embedded practice, and address questions around the scaleable nature of e-learning. Assimilated views of a wide range of support staff are presented. These include ideas on how to devise strategies for supporting Higher Education lecturers in the design, development and implementation of online courses; disseminate good practice in supporting sustainable approaches to eLearning; and contribute to the ongoing debate in the sharing and reuse of e-learning resources