Suzi's Notebook

OER18: a new hope

A couple of weeks ago I went along to OER18, a conference on open educational resources. I'd been once before back in 2013 and as this year's was in Bristol I was really pleased to have the chance to attend. These are my, somewhat tardy, notes from the event...

Though I’m by nature a bit of a cockeyed optimist (in every sense) I’m finding hope a bit thin on the ground at the moment. My impression is there’s a lot of this about, living as we do in interesting times. So this slide, from Catherine Cronin’s talk, struck a chord with me:

“To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.” Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

And for me, OER 18 was above all a very hopeful, positive event.

I was also very pleased to see lots that was critical, self-critical too. People were questioning who benefits and whose voices are amplified when you make things open, and how you can foster genuine participation. This reminded me of debates around open software and how open it really is - and many years back of reading A Room of One’s Own and thinking it should be required reading for open software advocates.

The conference gave me renewed motivation and the chance to meet a lot of fantastic people doing a lot of fantastic things. But there was plenty on the practical side too so here are some of my favourite stealable ideas...

Helping staff understand copyright for reuse

Glasgow Caledonian found that understanding copyright was a barrier to their staff reusing content so made a quick, self-service copyright advisor. It’s very easy to use and has a traffic light system to indicate whether you can go ahead, need to investigate further, or can’t use the resource. The advice is cc-by licensed so could easily be repurposed, and they are currently developing an HTML5 version.

Approaches to institutional repositories

Southampton have developed EdShare for managing and hosting open content, with EdShare Hub now being developed to bring together content from the institutions using EdShare. It has been integrated into their systems and processes with their comms and marketing team use EdShare behind their iTunesU and their medical school having MedShare. For further information see this presentation on EdShare from the ALT 2017 Winter Conference.

Edinburgh have an OER policy but they don’t have an institutional repository. Resources are shared on whichever online platform is most appropriate. They have accounts on Vimeo, Flickr, and similar services and through this approach hope to encourage true openness and adaptability. They also have a media asset management platform called Media Hopper.

Teaching API’s through Google Sheets

Martin Hawksey ran a good session, introducing the basics of APIs using a practical Google Sheets / Flickr exercise. Martin’s slides and the associated worksheet are available for reuse (cc-by).

Microlearning: TEL cards

Daniel Hardy and Matthew Street from Keel showed us the cards they had produced to promote various practices to staff. These sit within the VLE. The TEL cards code is available on GitHub.

Provocations

In the Breaking Open session, we were given a series of provocations relating to who is excluded from or disadvantaged by open education practices. I like the way we (in groups of 6 or so) were asked to interact with these provocations:

• Choose one of the statements to work with
• What is the worst case, the worst things that could happen
• What could you do to make that worst case happen?
• What are you doing that might be contributing to the worst case?

The session worked well, although on my table at least there seems some defensiveness and a fixed idea that: open = good. I appreciated having contributors videoconference in and form their own virtual workshop table for the activity. Further information including the provocations are on the Towards Openness site.

Lightning keynotes

The final keynote was left open and people were invited to, during the event, come forward if they would like to give a 5 minute reflection during this session. Honestly I was a little sceptical about how this would work but it was fantastic. I was particularly pleased to see two of the people whose earlier sessions I had found most interesting, Taskeen Adam and Prittee Auckloo, giving their take on what they had seen.

Inspiring student projects

Addressing shortage of materials / perspectives through OER

Lorna Campbell, in her keynote, mentioned an Edinburgh project addressing lack of materials around LGBT+ healthcare, with students adapting existing materials.

Welsh Wikipedia content

Jason Evans, National Wikipedian at the National Library of Wales, works with university and school students to help them write and contribute to Welsh-language wikipedia. Basque universities have used a similar model with their students.

Moving witch trials data to Wikidata

Ewan McAndrew from Edinburgh talked about working with MSc Data Design students to move an existing Access database of information about witchcraft trials onto Wikidata to make it available to researchers. Students also produced videos using the data.

Geoscience Outreach course

Stephanie (Charlie) Farley from Edinburgh talked about a course within Geoscience on co-creation of OERs. Students are paired up with community organisations, schools, etc and work to produce a piece of science communication or educational resource for that group. Students have produced events and apps and board games, as well as video and learning materials. The university hires student interns over the summer who work with selected students to polish their projects and promoted them as OERs.

Wiki etiquette for group projects

Draft guidelines for students.

Be polite and show respect to other members of your group.  Give praise for good contributions and make your comments constructive.  But…

Don't take it personally when people comment on or edit your work.

Dive in, add text and edit other people's work.  It's how wikis are designed to work.  If you make a mistake you can always revert to an earlier version.  But…

Avoid radically altering other people's work, especially if you don't agree with them.  Seek out a way to reach agreement by talking to them about it directly if you can, or by using comments or the discussion forum.

Structure the information on the wiki by using section headings, lists, and by breaking it into sub-pages where appropriate.  Review the wiki regularly to make sure it's tidy and the structure's still appropriate to your content.

Reference your work and give full credit to sources, as you would in any other assignment.

Grading multiple-response questions fairly

I've been looking for a sensible way of scoring multiple-response questions (question where the student may select more than one answer).

An attractive approach is put forward in "CAA - It's a MUGS Game! Does the Mathematics of CAA Matter in the Computer Age?" by Michael McCabe and David Barrett (Portsmouth).  Their system gives a mean undeucated guesser's (MUG's)  score of 0 and awards partial marks for partial knowledge of an answer.  They show that this can be achieved by setting:

• score for each correct choice = number of incorrect choices
• score for each incorrect choice = - (number of correct choices)

They touch on the importance of making the mark scheme clear to the students (I think that lots of practice quizzes, with feedback, are the only realistic way to achieve this).

As they point out, their mark scheme is only valid if you tell the students how many responses are correct for each question.  If you simply say "Which of the following..." you just have a series of t/f questions.

They promote the idea of using mathematics to generate other fairer mark systems, for example by using the correlation coefficient to mark ranking questions, but point-out that this would require CAA systems that can handle non-integer grades.

The benefit of being there

With a couple of conferences / events coming up that too many people at work want to go to, I was thinking about the benefit of attending events - not being that you learn anything you wouldn't have learnt from a few hours research on the web (often, even less time) ... but that you come away feeling inspired.  Creating Passionate Users recently expressed very similar thoughts in in their post about SXSW Interactive.

I wonder to what extent the same ideas apply to the discussions about recording lecturers.  In my experience so far, many lecturers are at one entranced by the idea of being recorded and fearful that students won't attend the lectures .. and that it's all a big government ploy to further slash spending on HE.  And even to my other half, a lecturer, I sometimes find myself saying ... so what if it is.

Supposing inspiration and motivation can only really be delivered face-to-face.  Will there be no impact on student attendance - will they come anyway?  Will lecturers who are at the "inspiration" part be less likely to see attendance drop if lectures are available online?  Should students be made to keep attending, for the good of their own motivation?

Checklist for recording lectures with Camtasia

Preparing for the lecture

• Test your presentation on a PC running PowerPoint.  Camtasia will only run on a PC.  If you usually use a Mac it's sensible to test on a PC before the lecture as presentations can look different on a Mac.
• It will help the students if you give the slides meaningful names.

Starting the lecture

1. Check the radio mic it is switched on
2. Put on the radio mic
3. Open your PowerPoint presentation
4. Click the "Record" button in the toolbar.  The first slide of your presentation will appear, with a box in the corner allowing you to check the computer is picking up your microphone.  
5. Say a few words into the mic and adjust the recording volume if you need to. The audio levels should go into the green, possibly into the yellow but not into the red.
6. Click the "Click to begin recording" button

In the Camtasia PowerPoint toolbar, there are a number of icons:

• Record (red dot icon): begin the presentation
• Record audio (microphone icon): on/off
• Record camera (webcam icon): on/off
• Show camera preview (webcam and screen icon): on/off
• Camtasia options (hand pointing to list icon): includes set whether to record mouse cursor, which input to record audio from, test microphone levels.

Audio problems?

If the audio doesn't seem to be working, check that:

• mic and receiver are both switched on
• receiver is plugged into a microphone socket on the computer
• in the toolbar, "Record Audio" is selected
• under "Camtasia options", there's an advanced audio settings button - this will allow you to check that Camtasia is trying to pick up the audio from the right place.  For example, it could be trying to record the speakers rather than the microphone.  Or there may be more than one place ("jack") that the microphone could be plugged into, and it may be recording from the wrong one.

After the lecture

1. A prompt will appear at the end of your lecture.  Click "stop recording".  
2. You'll then be asked where you want to save the file.  Click on "My Compuer", then select "C:" and the folder called "UNIV10001".  You should find a folder with your name - save the file in there.  It doesn't matter what the file name is, but don't overwrite existing files.
3. Remove the radio mic and switch it off.  

Finding good podcasts

Now that so many universities are making lectures available online, I wonder if anyone has a system for reviewing and rating them, or for sharing related material.  As the material is on such a diverse range of subjects and each lecture is likely to be an hour long I doubt that one person, or even one blog, could handle the task.

A site reviewing lecturers as well as lectures might be appropriate (and sites for reviewing lecturers already exist - such as Rate My Professors) ... but I'm not entirely sure how useful what 18-year-olds studying full-time think about the lecturer or material would be particularly relevant to me.

There are several sites listing available educational podcasts:

• Open Culture's list of university podcast sites
• Eliteskills.com's list of resources is well organised and highlights video as well as audio lectures

There's also been a converation on lifehacker about transcribing podcasts. The conclusion so far seems to be that it's still a task for people rather than machines, but there's some useful advice in there.

eLearning Reading List

Online journals of eLearning:

• JUTLP (Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice)
• JALN (Journal of Asynchronous Learning Netwoks)
• JLD (Journal of Learning Design)

Events round-up

Some (potentially) interesting events that I've heard about recently.  No firm plans to go to any of them at the moment.

13 March - JISC Conference - Birmingham

22 March - Shock of the Old 6 - Oxford - £90 (academic)
A one day conference in Oxford on Web 2.0 (and "related collaborative technologies").  Call for papers currently open.  Looks very broad.

16 May - Virtual Fieldwork in Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences - Worcester - Free
"This one-day conference seeks to explore, in a relaxed, informal atmosphere, some of the pedagogical and technological aspects of virtual fieldwork... In addition, there will be an opportunity to try out some of the equipment and software used in producing virtual fieldwork content.

10-11 July - Computer Aided Assessment Conference - Loughborough - £460 (early bird)
Topics covered are expected to include accessibility, case studies, evaluation, free text and speech, item banking, national and international initiatives, novel question and assessment design, peer and group work, pedagogy, policies and procedures, services, standards, student experiences, training and support as well as tools and services.

Math teaching of the future

Keith Devlin in Edge's questions for 2007 (what are you optimistic about) thinks that we are finally in a situation to get maths teaching right.

At one end of the spectrum he suggests that mobile phones to deliver learning materials in poor countries - and takes a swipe at the $100 laptop project.  At the other he also suggests that 3D virtual worlds are an ideal environment to teach mathematics, particularly basic mathematics.

Maybe not the beacon of hope the reader might have been looking for in these days of doom and gloom, but something to distract you for a few moments none the less.

Keith Devlin's response: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_2.html#devlin
Edge's questions for 2007: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_index.html

Geography elearning projects funded by GEES

There are two elearning projects among the small projects funded by the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences subject centre (GEES) for 2006/07.

e-Learning or a-Gimmick? Evaluating the use of rich media in Geography fieldwork
A project based at Exeter, looking at the use of rich media in onsite fieldwork.  They'll be using ipod, PSP and mobile phones to deliver the material and evaluting the technology compared to (and/or combined with) traditional formats such as workbooks and handouts.

Enhancing Feedback Opportunities for Students through the use of Podcasting
Based at Chester, the project is not entirely clear to me from the description but it sounds like staff will be providing individual verbal feedback to students in the form of podcasts.  This feedback will be delivered using the students eportfolios.  The process will then be evaluated.

For a complete list, see the small scale learning and teaching projects for 2006/07.