Collaborative Authoring of Open Courseware with SlideWiki: A Case Study in Open Education

Producing or finding and reusing high-quality educational content online can be a laborious and costly process. With the open-source and open-access SlideWiki platform, the effort of producing and reusing highly-structured remixable educational content can be crowdsourced and therefore widely shared. SlideWiki employs crowdsourcing methods in order to support the open education community in authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing open courseware. This paper presents a case study of this platform carried out in the context of open education and informal learning and reports on the feedback received thus far from members of the open education community

The potential of mobile phones to transform teacher professional development

Futures thinking is used by governments to consider long-term strategic approaches and develop policies and practices that are potentially resilient to future uncertainty. English in Action (EIA), arguably the world’s largest English language teacher professional development (TPD) project, used futures thinking to author possible, probable and preferable future scenarios to solve the project’s greatest technological challenge: how to deliver audio-visual TPD materials and hundreds of classroom audio resources to 75,000 teachers by 2017. Authoring future scenarios and engaging in possibility thinking (PT) provided us with a taxonomy of question-posing and question-responding that assisted the project team in being creative. This process informed the successful pilot testing of a mobile phone-based technology kit to deliver TPD resources within an open distance learning (ODL) platform. Taking the risk and having the foresight to trial mobile phones in remote rural areas with teachers and students led to unforeseen innovation. As a result EIA is currently using a mobile phone-based technology kit with 12,500 teachers to improve the English language proficiency of 700,000 students. As the project scales up in its third and final phase, we are using the new technology kit—known as the ‘trainer in your pocket’—to foster a ‘quiet revolution’ in the provision of teacher professional development at scale to an additional 67,500 teachers and 10 million students

Developing front-end Web 2.0 technologies to access services, content and things in the future Internet

The future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable web services accessible from all over the web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user?service interaction is still an open issue. This paper states one vision with regard to next-generation front-end Web 2.0 technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the future Internet. In this paper, we illustrate how front-ends that wrap traditional services and resources can be tailored to the needs of end users, converting end users into prosumers (creators and consumers of service-based applications). To do this, we propose an architecture that end users without programming skills can use to create front-ends, consult catalogues of resources tailored to their needs, easily integrate and coordinate front-ends and create composite applications to orchestrate services in their back-end. The paper includes a case study illustrating that current user-centred web development tools are at a very early stage of evolution. We provide statistical data on how the proposed architecture improves these tools. This paper is based on research conducted by the Service Front End (SFE) Open Alliance initiative

Reinventing the university

In view of the discernible trends in Higher Education towards increased numbers, increased diversity and expectations of students, declining resources, increased competition between providers and increasingly irregular patterns of student attendance, there is a need to establish new ways of delivering and supporting teaching and learning. The convergence of different media into a single networked digital domain, and the rapidly expanding accessibility of such media, both driven by market forces, is tempting many HE institutions to develop an online presence. True ‘virtual universities’, i.e., completely online, are still the exception and there are strong reasons why traditional, face‐to‐face, universities should resist the pressure to develop a virtual alter ego. Nevertheless, online delivery and support of teaching and learning offers many potential benefits to students of such institutions, not least of which could be freedom from the constraints of conventional attendance patterns

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

The OER FLOW and social media

This presentation introduces some strategies for producing, sharing and reusing OER through the OER Flow and social media. The aim of this investigation is to identify how colearners can apply the OER Flow and social media to make the production and adaptation processes of OER more explicit for anyone in the community to contribute. This work analyses, therefore, the interactions of “COLEARN” – an open community of research in collaborative learning technologies – who created and remixed diverse open media components for producing an open book about OER using the OER flow and Social Media. The outcomes show that educators and colearners can move from a passive position to a more active and informed network role when they are able to co-authoring OER

The evolving landscape of learning technology

This paper provides an overview of the current and emerging issues in learning technology research, concentrating on structural issues such as infrastructure, policy and organizational context. It updates the vision of technology outlined by Squires’ (1999) concept of peripatetic electronic teachers (PETs) where Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide an enabling medium to allow teachers to act as freelance agents in a virtual world and reflects to what extent this vision has been realized The paper begins with a survey of some of the key areas of ICT development and provides a contextualizing framework for the area in terms of external agendas and policy drivers. It then focuses upon learning technology developments which have occurred in the last five years in the UK and offers a number of alternative taxonomies to describe this. The paper concludes with a discussion of the issues which arise from this work