Sharing and reusing rich media: lessons from The Open University

OpenCourseWare and Open Educational Resources comprise many types of assets including rich media. However dynamic rich media offer different opportunities and challenges for learners, teachers and higher education institutions alike than do more static items such as text. The Open University in the UK has been extensively developing and using rich media in its distance teaching programmes since it was established in 1969, often in partnership with the BBC. As new media technologies have arrived so has the capabilities of The Open University to create rich media. This paper describes these developments and then discusses the approaches required to guide them in a way that both serves the university and the wider higher education community. It concludes that rich media are an essential part of the developing OCW/OER landscape and that openly sharing them brings defined benefits to an HEI beyond their traditional student body

Developing sustainable business models for institutions’ provision of open educational resources: Learning from OpenLearn users’ motivations and experiences

Universities across the globe have, for some time, been exploring the possibilities for achieving public benefit and generating business and visibility through releasing and sharing open educational resources (OER). Many have written about the need to develop sustainable and profitable business models around the production and release of OER. Downes (2006), for example, has questioned the financial sustainability of OER production at scale. Many of the proposed business models focus on OER’s value in generating revenue and detractors of OER have questioned whether they are in competition with formal education. This paper reports on a study intended to broaden the conversation about OER business models to consider the motivations and experiences of OER users as the basis for making a better informed decision about whether OER and formal learning are competitive or complementary with each other. The study focused on OpenLearn - the Open University’s (OU) web-based platform for OER, which hosts hundreds of online courses and videos and is accessed by over 3,000,000 users a year. A large scale survey and follow-up interviews with OpenLearn users worldwide revealed that university provided OER can offer learners a bridge to formal education, allowing them to try out a subject before registering on a formal course and to build confidence in their abilities as learners. In addition, it was found that using OER during formal paid-for study can improve learners’ performance and self-reliance, leading to increased retention and satisfaction with the learning experience

Open educational resources for all? Comparing user motivations and characteristics across The Open University’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform.

With the rise in access to mobile multimedia devices, educational institutions have exploited the iTunes U platform as an additional channel to provide free educational resources with the aim of profile-raising and breaking down barriers to education. For those prepared to invest in content preparation, it is possible to produce interactive, portable material that can be made available globally. Commentators have questioned both the financial implications for platform-specific content production, and the availability of devices for learners to access it (Osborne, 2012). The Open University (OU) makes its free educational resources available on iTunes U and via its web-based open educational resources (OER) platform, OpenLearn. The OU’s OER on iTunes U reached the 60 million download mark in 2013; its OpenLearn platform boasts 27 million unique visitors since 2006. This paper reports the results of a large-scale study of users of the OU’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform. A survey of several thousand users revealed key differences in demographics between those accessing OER via the web and via iTunes U. In addition, the data allowed comparison between three groups: formal learners, informal learners and educators. The study raises questions about whether university-provided OER meet the needs of users and makes recommendations for how content can be modified to suit their needs. As the publishing of OER becomes core to business, we reflect on reasons why understanding users’ motivations and demographics is vital, allowing for needs-led resource provision and content that is adapted to best achieve learner satisfaction, and to deliver institutions’ social mission

Open Engagement Through Open Media

This case study outlines and characterises the broad range of public engagement activities using media technologies undertaken by The Open University and in particular draws out how both open access and open licensing of content is influencing the ways in which a university can engage with various publics from around the world. It also discusses how different channels and social media technologies are shaping the way that such engagement happens and how it is necessary to think about ‘learner journeys’ through different media and different types of educational content. This is all placed in the strategic view of how open media is supporting the enduring social justice mission of The Open University

Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Dependence: A Dialectical Intervention

Recently, several authors have utilized the notion of dependence to respond to the traditional argument for the incompatibility of freedom and divine foreknowledge. However, proponents of this response have not always been so clear in specifying where the incompatibility argument goes wrong, which has led to some unfounded objections to the response. We remedy this dialectical confusion by clarifying both the dependence response itself and its interaction with the standard incompatibility argument. Once these clarifications are made, it becomes clear both (1.) that the dependence response does not beg the question against the proponent of the incompatibility argument and (2.) that the dependence response advances the dialectic whether it is developed as a version of Ockhamism or as a version of multiple-pasts compatibilism

Explaining Classifiers using Adversarial Perturbations on the Perceptual Ball

We present a simple regularization of adversarial perturbations based upon the perceptual loss. While the resulting perturbations remain imperceptible to the human eye, they differ from existing adversarial perturbations in that they are semi-sparse alterations that highlight objects and regions of interest while leaving the background unaltered. As a semantically meaningful adverse perturbations, it forms a bridge between counterfactual explanations and adversarial perturbations in the space of images. We evaluate our approach on several standard explainability benchmarks, namely, weak localization, insertion deletion, and the pointing game demonstrating that perceptually regularized counterfactuals are an effective explanation for image-based classifiers.Comment: CVPR 202

Digital badging at The Open University: recognition for informal learning

Awarding badges to recognise achievement is not a new development. Digital badging now offers new ways to recognise learning and motivate learners, providing evidence of skills and achievements in a variety of formal and informal settings. Badged Open Courses (BOCs) were piloted in various forms by the Open University (OU) in 2013 to provide a digital acknowledgement for learners’ participation in three entry level, unsupported courses: Learning to Learn and Succeed with Maths Parts 1 and 2. The desire to build on the OU’s badging pilots is informed by research (Perryman et al., 2013; Law et al., 2013) into the motivations and demographic profiles of learners using the free educational resources which The OU makes available through its OpenLearn platform. This research activity was repeated in 2014 and found that an increasing proportion of informal learners are keen to have their informal learning achievements recognised. This paper outlines how the evaluation of the 2013 pilots has informed the development of a suite of free employability and skills BOCs in 2014 that are assessed through the deployment of Moodle quizzes. It also discusses why the University sees the growth in free, ‘soft’ accreditation to be of strategic importance against a backdrop of MOOC providers issuing certification for fee. The BOC project, which aligns with the University’s Journeys from Informal to Formal Learning strategy, will help to provide accessible routes into the University for students who might not otherwise have the opportunity to participate and supports The OU Charter to promote the educational well-being of the community

Data, data everywhere, but ne’er time to think: identifying patterns in user behaviour across changing open media channels

The Open University has made its open educational resources (OER) available through a number of different ‘open channels’, or websites in different formats. The investigation of mass and individual user activity is not always straightforward with the same ‘content’ on different channels. Equally, it is also not always straightforward to chart trends in activity over time when the site is also subject to many functional and content changes in response to internal and external feedback. Nevertheless this paper examines and discusses two aspects of user behaviour and how we try to make sense of it. The first aspect is the number of activities that can be viewed as evidence of collective or collaborative behaviour on and between channels which have or have not been sustained and grown over time. The second aspect is the journey that users take between informal learning as represented by our open media and formal learning as represented by our taught courses (and vice versa). From the patterns in the data some tentative conclusions are drawn as to the major factors that drive or inhibit such collective and/or collaborative behaviour and how we might characterise these varying communities of interest or practice

Influence of post-exercise nutrient intake on recovery and subsequent exercise performance in youth cyclists

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if chocolate milk (CM) consumption after high-intensity cycling exercise affects post-exercise recovery and subsequent exercise performance in youth cyclists, compared to a carbohydrate-only (CHO) and a placebo (PL) beverage. Methods: Eight youth cyclists (15-18 y, VO2peak = 61.8 ± 7.7 mL·kg-1·min-1) performed an exercise/recovery protocol consisting of 2 bouts of exercise, on 3 separate occasions, in a randomly counterbalanced crossover design. The first exercise bout (EX1) consisted of 30 min of constant-load cycling (40-60% Wmax), and 60 min of high-intensity intervals (alternating 2 min at 70-90% Wmax, 2 min at 50% Wmax). Subjects consumed a recovery beverage (PL, CHO or CM) immediately following EX1 and again 2 h after EX1. EX2 consisted of 30 min of constant-load cycling (60% Wmax) followed by a simulated 30 km time trial (TT). Ratings of muscle soreness and mental and physical energy/fatigue were obtained prior to EX1, 4 h post-EX1, and pre-EX2. Results: Changes in muscle soreness ratings over time were not significantly different between treatments. However, within the PL trial, soreness was significantly elevated from pre-EX1 to 4 h post-EX1 and pre-EX2 (pre-EX1, 4h-post, pre-EX2 = 44.1 ± 23.1, 67.4 ± 22.2, 68.3 ± 19.6 mm, respectively. Physical fatigue ratings increased significantly from pre-EX1 to pre-EX2 in PL. In addition, changes in physical fatigue 4 h following EX1 were greater in CHO than CM, with no other significant within- or between-treatment effects in energy/fatigue ratings. Average power during the TT was not significantly different between treatment trials (PL: 181 ± 27, CHO: 197 ± 39, CM: 195 ± 38 W) (p = 0.23 CHO vs. PL; 0.19 CM vs. PL). Conclusion: CM ingestion after exercise may confer some recovery benefits in youth cyclists, as demonstrated by the absence of elevated post-exercise muscle soreness and energy/fatigue ratings in the CM trials. CM ingestion did not significantly improve subsequent cycling performance when compared to CHO or PL beverages. Subsequent research should utilize larger sample sizes to provide more conclusive evidence to enhance the knowledge regarding the impact of CM as a recovery method for youth cyclist

Incompatibilism and the garden of forking paths

Let (leeway) incompatibilism be the thesis that causal determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Several prominent authors have claimed that incompatibilism alone can capture, or at least best captures, the intuitive appeal behind Jorge Luis Borges's famous “Garden of Forking Paths” metaphor. The thought, briefly, is this: the “single path” leading up to one's present decision represents the past; the forking paths that one must decide between represent those possible futures consistent with the past and the laws of nature. But if determinism is true, there is only one possible future consistent with the past and the laws and, hence, only one path to choose from. That is, if determinism is true, then we are not free to do otherwise. In this paper, I argue that this understanding of the Garden of Forking Paths faces a number of problems and ought to be rejected even by incompatibilists. I then present an alternative understanding that not only avoids these problems but still supports incompatibilism. Finally, I consider how various versions of (leeway) compatibilism fit with the Garden of Forking Paths as well as the broader question of whether metaphors, however intuitive, have any dialectical force in the debates over freedom