Open educational resources: shared solutions for higher education

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are a response to a need for more flexible licensing of educational materials. The OER Movement aims to create materials which can be exchanged and recombined for educational purposes. In the Higher Education sector, some universities (notably MIT) have led the way in putting their course material and lectures online. One of the effects of this has been a greater diversity in student access and recruitment[1]. However, there are many different approaches across the Higher Education sector, and most UK universities control access to some or all of their course content, licensing or selling the Intellectual Property to partner institutions

Developing research capabilities in FE lecturers through practitioner led action research

This is an ESCalate development project led by Ian Minty of the UHI Millennium Institute and completed in 2007. The main aim of this project was to help develop research skills in Further Education lecturers who are involved in both Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) delivery by establishing a mainly online discussion group to support practitioners. Many staff within the colleges that form UHI now teach at both FE and HE level and are increasingly expected to engage with research. However, currently there are limited links between the more traditional research establishments and staff in the colleges. Traditionally, however, college staff have not engaged in research and have therefore not necessarily developed the required skills. This project's aim was to support the development of basic research skills for such staff through the planning and execution of a small-scale project that related to one aspect of the individual's teaching practice. Action research was chosen as a methodology since it is by definition small scale and rooted in practice. It includes a final report and separate appendice

Film adaptation for knowing audiences: analysing fan on-line responses to the end of Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012)

Critics of film adaptations of literary works have historically evaluated the success or failure of the movie on the grounds of its fidelity to the original book. In contrast popular arguments for medium specificity have questioned whether fidelity is possible when adapting one medium to another. This article follows recent academic work which has focused awareness on the processes of adaptation by examining evidence of reading and viewing experience in online and social media forums.      The broader research project explored the online Twilight fan community as an example of a ‘knowing audience’ acquainted with both novel and film. Here we focus on the strong response within fan forums to the surprise ending of the final film adaptation Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012). The research uses the forum, blog and facebook page as sites for evidence of reading experience as defined by the Reading Experience Database (RED). The analysis sheds new light on the tensions that exist between fidelity and deviation and the article positions fan audiences as intensive readers who gained unexpected pleasure from a deviation from a canon. It argues that fans are also collaborators within the adaptation process who respect authorial authority and discuss the author’s, scriptwriter’s and director’s interpretation of the novel for the screen. The research identifies the creative and commercial advantages to be gained from a collaborative and open dialogue between adaptors and fans.  Keywords: Adaptation, fandom, online fan communities, Twilight, reading experience, film, audiences, fidelity, canon, collaboration, screenwriting, franchise, Stephenie Meyer, Melissa Rosenberg, Bill Condo

Universities and article copyright

In all the debates about copyright and intellectual property in recent years, the battle lines have tended to be drawn between librarians and publishers. This neglected what in some ways is the most important player of all, the employer. There seems little doubt that the university owns the copyright in articles, and universities are beginning seriously to turn their attention to this. Whether the article is in printed and/or electronic form probably makes no difference in law to ownership, but custom and practice are important here. A study has just been completed by the Centre for Educational Systems at Strathclyde University at the request of the Funding Councils to review current practice and benchmark the present position against future action. Higher education has turned itself into big business and as a result is beginning to contemplate more fully how to manage its assets. The total turnover in the sector now exceeds £10 billion pounds per annum. An 'average' university will have a turnover in the region of £120-150 million, less than half of which comes directly from the state. More than half of funds now come from a combination of overseas student fees, competitively tendered research grants, endowment income and intellectual property rights. This last can increasingly represent several millions of pounds and the figure is growing. Quite apart from some of the ownership questions raised below, staff structures are increasingly organized to allow some staff additional research time for the benefit of all. Universities have no other purpose than the creation, dissemination, understanding and development of knowledge, and it is inevitable that intellectual property asset management is an area of growing concern

Synthetic approaches to tryptophan based dipeptide alkaloids

Imperial Users onl