From print to Web: issues in re-purposing for an Open Resources Repository

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has gained rapid support for its goals of universal access to education. The UK Open University's contribution is OpenLearn, a project funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation which, over the next two years, aims to re-purpose several thousand study-hours of existing learning materials for online delivery. The UK Open University has gained a hard-won reputation for the quality of its learning materials and integrated Supported Open Learning model. However, these materials are, as a rule, developed within the framework of long courses that typically require between 300 and 600 hours of study. Furthermore, many of the courses are 'interdisciplinary' in that they are developed by teams that include members associated with different faculties. The courses are, therefore, generally structured in terms of themes that run throughout the course and may span a variety of academic disciplines. Also, despite the breadth of knowledge brought into play when a course is developed, the courses normally reflect pedagogical and disciplinary assumptions and views that are prevalent in the UK. Based on the authors' experience of the OpenLearn project, this paper explores some of the key issues encountered when re-purposing resources. These issues include how to provide material not supported by tutorial guidance, the suitability of media components for conversion and the inter-relationship between the multimedia components. The paper will also briefly discuss the requirements for evaluation of the re-purposing process. The issues raised are potentially of relevance to other re-purposing initiatives

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Heuristic Evaluation of Course and Class Approval Online Pilot (C-CAP)

The PiP Evaluation Plan documents four distinct evaluative strands, the first of which entails an evaluation of the PiP system pilot (WP7:37). Phase 1 of this evaluative strand focuses on the heuristic evaluation of the PiP Course and Class Approval Online Pilot system (C-CAP). Heuristic evaluation is an established usability inspection and testing technique and is most commonly deployed in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, e.g. to test user interface designs, technology systems testing, etc. The success of heuristic evaluation in detecting 'major' and 'minor' usability problems is well documented, but its principal limitation is its inability to capture data on all possible usability problems. For this reason heuristic evaluation is often used as a precursor to user testing, e.g. so that user testing focuses on deeper system issues rather than on those that can easily be debugged. Heuristic evaluation nevertheless remains an important usability inspection technique and research continues to demonstrate its success in detecting usability problems which would otherwise evade detection in user testing sessions. For this reason experts maintain that heuristic evaluation should be used to complement user testing. This is reflected in the PiP Evaluation Plan, which proposes protocol analysis, stimulated recall and pre- and post-test questionnaire instruments to comprise user testing (see WP7:37 phases 2, 3 and 4 of PiP Evaluation Plan). This brief report summarises the methodology deployed, presents the results of the heuristic evaluation and proposes solutions or recommendations to address the heuristic violations that were found to exist in the C-CAP system. It is anticipated that some solutions will be implemented within the lifetime of the project. This is consistent with the incremental systems design methodology that PiP has adopted

Venturing from the “Back Room”: Do Technical Services Librarians Have a Role in Information Literacy?

Catalogers, electronic resources librarians, and acquisitions librarians spend a lot of their time in the “back room” of their library. Yet even as their roles expand to include participation in innovative library initiatives like institutional repositories, shared print analysis, and digital collections, they are not often consulted on new user-instruction activities like enhancing the information literacy (IL) programs for their library community. Information literacy to advance student learning is now emphasized by many accrediting agencies, making it one of the hottest topics in public services today. There are endless library conferences, workshops, and poster sessions devoted to its meaning, methods and assessment. Is there any connection between Technical Services and Information Literacy? Do technical services professionals have a role at their library for improving information literacy within their user community? Can they have something to contribute to the discussion? This paper proposes that these “back room” librarians do have a place in IL efforts and should be included in the conversation. Suggestions include reasons to collaborate on IL with public service colleagues and methods of active learning to use in one-shot sessions. Additionally, the paper highlights ways to relate professional roles to IL initiatives, demonstrates how to make time for participation in these initiatives, and provides ideas for staying on top of trending IL topics

The practitioner perspective on the modeling of pedagogy and practice

The promotion of e-learning in policies internationally has led to questions about how best to employ technology in support of learning. A range of models has since been developed that attempts to relate pedagogy to technology. However, research into the effectiveness of such models in changing teaching practice is sparse, and work that compares these models to practitioners’ own representations of their practice is absent. The study described here involved asking practitioners to model their own practice, and to compare these with a model developed by a government organisation. Practitioners were adept at using existing models and repurposing them to suit their own context. Our research provided evidence of broad acceptance of the existing model with practitioners, but indicated that practitioners would take this tool and remodel it for their own contexts of learning to make it meaningful, relevant and useful to them

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Synchronous collaborative L2 writing with technology

This study explored the process of synchronous collaborative L2 writing using Google Docs in an English for medical purposes setting at university level. The research design is qualitative in nature as the collaborative practices of 24 German medical students in eight groups of three were investigated. The study focussed on the (approximately) 45-50 minutes long collaborative writing process of the eight groups with respect to their negotiation of the collaborative process. In other words, how did the students use Google Docs synchronously in terms of channel usage? What aspects of the collaborative task did those groups of L2 students decide to make a subject of discussion and what does that tell us about the nature of the process? Finally, how did students experience this synchronous collaborative writing process? The data collection relied primarily on the built-in recording features of Google Docs. The resulting data (chat logs, revision history of the co-authored texts, comments history) was compiled into a chronologically organised data set. In addition, participants took part in a post-activity survey. The participants’ collaborative practices and their answers in the survey were analysed utilising a qualitative content analysis approach. The results of the analysis revealed three major findings: First, students participated very actively in the activity, resulting in many opportunities for creating and negotiating language output – a necessary condition for second language development. Students focussed primarily on content- and workflow-related discussions, which is in line with findings from collaborative writing research. Students also engaged in ‘languaging’, i.e. language-related metatalk, which raises their language awareness – another facilitator of second language development. Due to the computer-mediated nature of the student discourse and the students’ high language level, surface-level matters like layout or spelling were not discussed by the students. Second, the analysis of discussion episodes revealed that the participants verbalised certain aspects of the writing process in their task-related meta discussions. An initial peak in workflow- and content-related discussions resembled a planning phase, the following rise in language- and structure-related discussions represented the translating phase. The final phase, which resembled a revision phase, saw a decrease of all discussions. Third, it had been hoped that two distinct patterns of solving a task together, namely collaboration and cooperation, could be identified by investigating instances of synchronous channel usage. However, synchronous activity in the text or overlap of activity in the chat and text did not prove to be a reliable indicator of either pattern. Due to the synchronous and all-written nature of the activity, it seemed plausible to classify synchronous collaborative writing as collaboration by default. The analysis also revealed a negative correlation between chat activity and performance in the final text. Groups who performed worst in the final texts dedicated substantially more time to chatting (about content- and workflow-related matters) than more successful groups. These groups seemed to struggle to establish a common content and workflow understanding, which is further supported by the post-activity survey. An all-written, multi-modal environment proved to be a challenge for some students, who could have benefitted from pedagogical guidance. The exploratory investigation of the synchronous collaborative L2 writing process with Google Docs led to several implications for foreign language teaching and research. First, the implementation of web-based technology can pose a serious legal and ethical challenge for educators and researchers in Germany, in particular, as user data is surrendered to global cloud-based systems – a problem which can only be solved by relying on locally installed, open source software. Second, shared documents can be a powerful tool to bridge the gap between classroom activities and the online component in blended learning settings. Third, shared documents make learning processes visible and, hence, assessable – albeit a shift from a product-oriented to a process-oriented assessment approach poses several pedagogical and pragmatic challenges. Fourth, shared documents is a feasible way for educators to collect user data for research but could benefit from the inclusion of more sophisticated means of data collection, such as eye-tracking or screen recording. Finally, the exploratory setup of this study revealed that a new way of working together requires guidelines on how to best exploit the possibilities of shared documents technology to work collaboratively on a joint project – a valuable avenue for future research

Assessing the language of chat for teamwork dialogue

In technology enhanced language learning, many pedagogical activities involve students in online discussion such as synchronous chat, in order to help them practice their language skills. Besides developing the language competency of students, it is also crucial to nurture their teamwork competencies for today's global and complex environment. Language communication is an important glue of teamwork. In order to assess the language of chat for teamwork dimensions, several text mining methods are pos sible. However, difficulties arise such as pre-processing being a black box and classification approaches and algorithms being dependent on the context. To address these issues, the study will evaluate and explain preprocessing and classification methods used to analyze teamwork dialogue from a dataset of chat data. Analytics methods evaluated in this study provide a direction for assessing the language of chat for teamwork dialogue and can help extend the work of technology enhanced language learning to n ot only focus on academic competency, but on the communication aspect too

Handbook of successful open teaching practices

The document presents 24 open teaching practices, with the aim to inspire teachers to adopt open approaches, as well as an original competences framework for Open Education.Erasmus +info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio