Each year the Sakai Foundation runs a competition to recognise and promote innovation in using Sakai (WebLearn at Oxford) for teaching and learning. The winners have travel expenses and conference registration paid to attend and present their innovations at the Sakai USA Conference in June 2012.
Online entry will be available from 1 January 2012, and the closing date for submissions is 2 March. The WebLearn team encourages you to consider submitting an entry and is happy to provide assistance.
Last year’s winners (including Shirley Bennett from the University of Hull, UK)
Please contact Jill Fresen to express an interest in submitting an entry.
In association with JISC, the Higher Education Academy is pleased to invite the submission of abstracts for case studies on a range of topics pertaining to Open Educational Resources. Funding has been provided by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to enable us to offer grants of £2,000 for the production of evidence-informed studies on the theme of pedagogical development from OER practice.
In these case studies, individuals or teams from higher education in England are invited to share their experiences of OER practice, situate these within the wider context of OER and offer a model of best practice for the Higher Education sector.
The OER case study series aims to create high quality, publishable, open material to support, inform and guide the HE sector in the creation, use and re-use of Open Educational Resources under the following topics:
o OER and student as producer
o OER and student satisfaction
o OER and staff development
o OER and teaching quality
o OER and distance learning
o OER and public engagement
o Changing the OER culture of your institution
o Barriers to OER
www.heacademy.ac.uk/funding
HEA launches UK travel fund
The HEA has launched a travel fund to help UK staff and students attend conferences, network meetings and special interest groups that are being run in the UK. The fund is open to individuals or teams wishing to attend events which related to the HEA’s seven priority themes of: assessment; education for sustainable development; employability; internationalisation; flexible learning; retention and success; reward and recognition of teaching.
The JISC, on behalf of the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) invites tenders to create a syllabus of open digital resources and related training courses. This syllabus is intended to foster the development of a new generation of “digital entrepreneurs” within institutions and organisations who can support the long term sustainability and exploitation of cultural, educational and not-for-profit digital content.
The JISC, on behalf of the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) invites tenders to research the techniques and strategies being deployed by grant-funded digital content project leaders (e.g. project managers, senior responsible owners, collection developers) in eliciting host institutional decision makers (e.g. Provosts, Vice Chancellors, ICTHeads) support for the long term (post grant) development and sustainability of cultural, educational and not-for-profit digital content.
http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/wp/
Information about this call for projects is now available .All projects will involve the collection and release of OER. In addition, each will demonstrate the application of this activity in responding to identified opportunities and challenges for the sector.
This is a category of three awards for this year highlighting examples of best practice identified by the OxTALENT committee.
Julia Richardson received an award for the audio admissions tours. The tours are a mobile learning and podcasting initiative by the admissions team to provide walking tours of the University suitable for applicants and their families. There are currently 6 audio tours available with accompanying map handouts. Prospective applicants can download podcasts and listen on their own portable audio players. Each tour covers a different subject theme and set of landmarks is narrated by an admissions staff member and recent Oxford graduate, allowing those who use them to wander Oxford guided by the voice of a recent student providing useful information.
Victoria Nash of Oxford Internet Institute won her award for making use of synchronous online technology and live webstreaming for their Virtual Open Day. Virtual open days are often static web pages or videos to watch online. OII chose to take the risk of doing it live on the web, taking questions from those watching all over the world.
The University College Alternative prospectus has received much interest and acclaim this year for being innovative in rethinking how an alternative prospectus should look. Although the result is a paper document, it is far from traditional and has been very popular amongst students. Anne-Marie Canning won her award for her use of Facebook, Flickr and other social digital media to crowd-source her content from students and distribute her completed publication.
Showing creativity, originality, impact and sustainability the Best Student Use of IT award went to Helen Ginn for her CMol iPhone and iPad application designed for easily viewing 3D renditions of biological molecules. The app enables undergraduate students, PhD students and researchers alike to analyse proteins on the go. CMol aims to deliver beautiful, colourful and interactive depictions of proteins downloaded from the Protein Data Bank. CMol is the first application on the iOS App Store to provide in-depth tools to analyse the structures of biomolecules and has sold over 450 copies to date in 35 different countries.
There were two runners-up prizes. The first was awarded to Oleksandr Zhurakovskyi, for his Organic Chemistry Reference Resolver tool. Currently used by 140-360 users per day. The tool is designed to facilitate reference retrieval from chemical literature. It recognizes a citation presented in a number of formats and redirects the user to the corresponding article webpage. The overall search time is reduced to about 15 seconds per reference. In addition to the web interface, there are browser extensions for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome as well as a small HTML-widget.
The second runners-up prize was awarded to Hannah Kirby for the design of the Hyper-Literary Oxford Map, an easily interfaced web-based software available to all on Google Maps, mapping each Oxford college to a list of literary figures to have studied there, hyperlinked to examples of work by or about each. Three walking routes additionally guide those interested in particular genres. The map has proved a great success already with both visitors to the city and students accustomed to its sights. It will form a part of the launch of Oxford’s bid to become the UNESCO World Book Capital in 2014, and has also been requested for embedding on the University Admissions and OUCS sites.
Posted in OxTALENT
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This year Daniel Ostendorff won the award for Best Student Podcasting for his initiative to produce podcasts for scholars outside of Oxford. One of the many things that makes Oxford a great place to study is the calibre of scholarship presented at the many weekly seminar’s offered for graduate students. In January, Daniel began working with the African Studies Centre and the History Faculty to make three different weekly seminars available to scholars abroad (whether on field research or at another institution) via podcasts. Along the way, he has had the opportunity to help make other great presentations accessible, includingKofi Annan’s talk at the Sheldonian and the annual Fischer Lecture presented at Rhodes House, both in February of this year.
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Tagged oxtalent2011
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The award for the best Academic Podcasting Series went to the Department of Anthropology who have created a large amount of user interest, provided high quality educational content, and generated positive user feedback. Anthropology is a varied field, covering everything from relationships, beliefs and migration to diet, health and human evolution. Podcasts have provided an excellent opportunity to share some of the many ideas currently of interest, both with fellow anthropologists and with members of the public. Although only a small unit, the department proactively produced 48 podcasts in one year and have made their content available via Oxford Podcasting Portal and iTunesU.
Posted in OxTALENT
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Tagged oxtalent2011
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The winner of the Best Academic Research Image category was Biochemistry DPhil student Jamie Zhan with The Eye. Showing technical merit, originality, and artistic vision the image was created when pouring away chemical dyes used to visualize the proteins. The bright blue solution streamed down and was collected at the drain from a radial path. Fascinated by the combination of the color and shape, Jamie saw an image of an almost perfect eye.
Runners up in the category were Andre Neves for People and Bridge and last year’s winner, Letitia Ochoa, for her photograph of a new species of from the Bromeliohyla family.
Posted in OxTALENT
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Tagged oxtalent2011
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