active service

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Melissa Highton

Yet another Open Educational Resource (OER)  project winning success for LTG:

The announcement from JISC:

JISC is delighted to announce that the University of Oxford has won the grant for the ‘JISC World War One (WW1) Open Educational Resources (OER)’ project. This initiative will collect and release digital learning content as OER in an easily accessible online platform to provide an academic-driven corpus of reusable scholarly resources that seek to readdress World War One and its cultural, historical, and political context.

The project will surface the highest quality OER through a series of expert commentaries created by some of the most notable academics in the field of World War One studies and related disciplines. Alongside these thematic directory areas of additional expert-curated OER and dynamic libraries of relevant resources from the wider OER community will be made available. The project will innovatively revisualise a series of OER to showcase the full potential of using open material to seed academic debate.

Due to the breadth of academic engagement with the project, it is hoped that some of the core motivating factors for JISC in undertaking this work will start to be addressed e.g. encouraging new academic interpretations around WW1 to challenge received notions of historical fact and build on new areas of research and study. It will also provide new insights into the global nature of the conflict and provide new ways by which students, learners and researchers can engage with and draw out fresh perspectives in one of the most taught and researched periods of European and global history.

The project is an exciting collaboration between the teams at the University of Oxford responsible for the First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Great War Archive (funded under the JISC Content and Digitisation Programme), and the Oxford Open Spires, Triton, and Great Writers projects (funded under the HEA/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme Phases 1, 2 and 3). This project team will therefore bring together a wealth of experience from pedagological and content perspectives to create a unique and timely open educational resource that brings the people, events and places of WW1 back into sharp relief for the benefit of education and research.

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fair access fair

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Melissa Highton

Mostly, in LTG, we help colleagues to make their materials more open. Sometimes, we help  to keep them more closed.

WebLearn now has a new security option, requiring two- factor authentication for secure areas.  Secure areas are used for such  high stakes activities as preparing exam papers. (This is not an invitation to try hacking in!)

Authentication projects explore the technology around the presentation of two or more of the three  factors : ‘something you are’, ‘something you have’, and ‘something you know’.  

It seems to me that access to rather a lot of the Oxford experience  depends on presenting these same factors.

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do you have a digital experience?

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Melissa Highton

Care to tell us about it?

I invite you to shape the future at Oxford by contributing your thoughts via a handy online survey.

Survey for students: http://tinyurl.com/digestudent

Survey for staff: http://tinyurl.com/digestaff

 The project is investigating students’ use of digital technologies in their studies and social lives, in order to enhance both the learning experience and the supporting technologies provided by the University. More ambitiously, it aims to lay out a vision of the systems and services that will be needed to support learning for the next five years. DIGE is co-ordinated by Oxford University Computing Services and the Student Systems Programme, actively supported by the Oxford University Student Union. The survey should take 10-15 minutes. All responses will be stored anonymously and you will not be identifiable in the project reports.

 Thank you for your help.

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get ahead

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Melissa Highton

ITLP , the LTG teaching and training team, extensively survey course participants for feedback, and have done so for over five years. We get a high response rate (often in excess of 60%), with genuine, rich feedback in the survey comments. We also handle several hundred individual enquiries and comments via email each term. This has enabled us to build a robust view of how our programme is perceived by the University and how it should be developed.

This term we are offering our Research Skills Toolkit events in week 1 and week 8 and the comments are already flowing in.  Research Skills Toolkit sessions offer you a hands-on encounter with a range of IT and Library tools and skills to support your  work. These events are a collaboration between OUCS and the Bodleian Libraries. Each session is tailored to the interests of an academic division or a group of departments.

198 research students took part in the First Week, and they were overwhelmingly positive (94%) about the event, and its value to their research. If you haven’t signed up for week 8, do so now.

“It crammed a fantastic amount into two hours, and I think it’s an inspired idea to have this kind of taster session.”

“So much available to make our lives easier that I never knew about!”

“I learned so many valuable things, and I really enjoyed having experts available to answer questions on each tool. Thank you so much for this opportunity!”

“The venue was set up in such a way that you could work individually or have discussions with the helpers and/or the other attendees.”

“ I thought the event was excellent. I liked the format of ten tables and thought all the staff were very warm and friendly and clearly experts in their fields.”

“Just wanted to let you know that one of our students is absolutely thrilled with the Skills Toolkit event this week. He said it was one of the best events he had ever attended.”

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in schools

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Melissa Highton

To confound the outsider, not only is there a college called ‘University’, but also a building called ‘Schools’.  When I first arrived at Oxford I was impressed  how many colleagues seemed to be having meetings  ‘all day in schools’. So much outreach and admissions work going on!

Our new OER project ‘ Great Writers Inspire‘ is targetted at materials for schools. 

The project will create and assemble a substantial new body of open content with a literary theme (focused on engaging new students) to be released through a new online web portal.

The materials will be grouped around a set of specific writers and thematic collections, curated by subject specialists and steered and evaluated by the demands of the subject community. There will be a concentration on textual materials with embedded illustrative audio and video together with new publishing methods that include a substantial set of material released as ebooks for mobile devices.

The material, intended to provide an engaging introduction to a typical humanities undergraduate education, will be available to be reused in education worldwide and will be an innovative introduction to the wider UK open educational resources movement.

All material will be released under a suitable open content licence and published as downloads and feeds for use in perpetuity. Of course.

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content curator

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Melissa Highton

During December I had the very pleasant task of curating a collection of Oxford OER. To sit behind each door of the OUCS OpenAdvent calendar I chose  items from our several collections of unique content hosted at OUCS.  Content which spoke about giving, family,community, ethics and religion.  

Drawing on the Oxford OpenSpires podcasts, The Great War Archive,  Woruldhord and the Oxford University Text Archive, the task was easy because we have so many beautiful and valuable gifts  to share.

The exercise was particularly appropriate because it is those same commitments to giving, sharing and community which have enabled each of these collection to be created in the first place. All of the content is released by Oxford University colleagues under creative commons licences which encourage use and re-use in educational settings.

You can see the full collection in the Open Advent blog.

The calendar was promoted via  twitter campaign and during December we drew thousands of hits to our webpages and gained many more followers for our social media. I hope we also spread a little joy.

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working in the media

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Melissa Highton

2011 was another very good year for LTG media production.

MPU  filmed and edited with 21 departments, 12 colleges, the museums and the libraries.

We covered VIP visits including Michelle Obama and Ban Ki Moon.

We video conferenced to over 30 countries.

 250  people filled the Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre to hear Garr Reynolds’ presentation about presentations.

Sessions about Twitter and LinkedIn filled as soon as they were advertised. 

 50+ teams of undergrads and postgrads entered the Campus MovieFest event.

 6.5 million podcasts were downloaded from iTunesU.

 1,000 podcast items were processed and made live.

 50 new series were added to the collection of Oxford lectures.

 Since launch in October 2008  1,700 speakers have released Oxford content through iTunesU and podcasts.ox.ac.uk.

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open publication

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Melissa Highton

Making academic OER easy: Reflections on technology and openness at Oxford University

Melissa H. Highton, Jill W. Fresen, Joanna Wild

Due to its stringent entry requirements, academic reputation and world ranking, Oxford University in the United Kingdom is perceived by some as being a closed, exclusive, and elitist institution. As learning technologists working in the institution, we have experienced an enthusiasm amongst academic colleagues for openness in publication and practice enhanced by new technologies, which reflects their long-demonstrated commitment to publication and the dissemination of new knowledge. Advances in digital technologies and the emergence of online platforms for global dissemination have enabled Oxford University seminars, lectures, and public addresses, many by famous figures, to be shared with an international audience. This article charts the journey Oxford has made in opening up educational content and describes the ways in which we have worked to ensure that the value added by technology aligns with current academic practice in the institution.

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not just for Christmas

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Melissa Highton

Open educational resources from Oxford University are published with Creative Commons licences so you can download them, keep them, enjoy them, share them and use them in your own teaching or research.  Each day of December until the 24th, we will post a resource which has been published as part of one of our recent OER projects. These will include images, podcasts, opendata tools, agentbased models, ebooks and videos. Enjoy

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/openadvent/

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assistance needed

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Melissa Highton

The Student Digital Experience (DIGE) workstream is a collaboration between the Learning Technologies Group (LTG) in Oxford University Computing Services and the Student Systems Replacement Programme (SSRP) in the Academic Administration Division. It runs from 1st October 2011 until 30th April 2012 and has two principal objectives:

1. Map the current ‘landscape’ of the digital services and systems that Oxford provides for both students and staff in order to support teaching and learning, and also to support student life in general: for example, OxCORT, GSS, Nexus, WebLearn, SOLO, OxLIP and Mobile Oxford. This landscape is to be mapped in terms of a) the architecture of these services and systems and b) how they are experienced by students and staff.

2. Research, and document, the University’s vision for the future direction of these services and systems over the next five years; set out a series of recommendations to faculties, departments and administrative units.

The project is seeking to recruit two graduate students to assist its work for up to 15 hours a week each. The appointments will start as soon as possible and will run until 31st March, 2012. An hourly rate of £11.86 is payable.

Main duties

 Contribute to the design of data collection instruments.

 Participate in data collection, particularly interviews and focus groups.

 Participate in data analysis.

 Contribute to the preparation of formal project reports.

 Attend meetings of the workstream team and of the Workstream Implementation Group (WIG) which is overseeing DIGE.

 Carry out any other project-related activities that arise during the employment period, and for which the individual has the appropriate skills and time available.

Person specification

Education to at least a bachelor’s degree in a social science.

Interest in the use of digital technologies (websites, software applications and devices) to support students’ academic and social lives, both those technologies provided by the Universities and those that students obtain themselves.

Experience in the use of qualitative research methods, in particular interviewing, and an awareness of computer-based methods that can support data collection and analysis.

Ability to pay attention to detail while keeping the broad picture in view.

High personal motivation and self-management; ability to take manage conflicting commitments, meet deadlines and make progress without direct supervision.

Excellent interpersonal skills, including the ability to communicate confidently and effectively with undergraduate and postgraduate students, administrative and support staff, and, if required, academic staff.

The ability to work effectively with others, co-operating with colleagues in different departments and responding in a flexible manner to changing circumstances

Team-working skills that would provide support to the project managers in ensuring that the progress of the work is kept on track.

Experience of writing research reports (desirable).

To apply for one of these positions, please send a letter briefly describing your experience and how you believe you meet the criteria outlined in the person specification to the Project Manager, Kat Lee.

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