OxTALENT- Teaching and Learning Enhanced by New Technology

The entry form for the 2011 ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Award  is now available. Are you a star?

The closing date for entries is 26 May 2011.

The inaugural Digital Media User Group event was held on a March Wednesday evening at OUCS and a full Isis lecture theatre enjoyed 3 very different talks.

Alison Kahn showcased her work with the Pitt Rivers Museum working with archive  anthropological footage taken early last century, and mapping that footage to objects in the museum. Using high resolution still photography, the objects are captured to archive standard and the film can be tailored to multiple audiences and purposes – from TV documentary purposes to specialist teaching support. The end results were captivating and showed the objects in high enough resolution to be useful as graphical study aides

Maarten Roos showcased some of the work he has done in supporting and promoting the work of numerous Science based projects using the skills he has developed as a serious filmmaker. His work with the VIRTIS space instrument is worth a closer look. To join the group contact: stephen.eyre@oucs.ox.ac.uk

Championed by Rowan Wilson a project created by OUCS has won a £20,000 prize from the Intellectual Property Office, part of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. The Fast Forward competition asked Higher Education and Research institutions to come up with ideas would improve the management of intellectual property and knowledge exchange. Project Hagen is building a web application that advises knowledge transfer professionals on exploitation models and licence choice around open content and open source software. The project has grown out of the work of OSS Watch, the JISC-funded open source software advisory service and Ripple, a JISC project to help the release of open educational resources.

WebLearn now makes it very easy to embed items from Oxford Podcasts (podcasts.ox.ac.uk) into a site. First, add the ‘Oxford Podcasts’ tool to your WebLearn site via ‘Site Info’.
Second, click on “Browse the Oxford Podcast Collection” to view the podcasts available. You can search for podcasts by Division or by keywords in their titles or descriptions.
Third, select a podcast and continue adding it to your site.

A detailed ‘How-to’ guide is available here: http://bit.ly/eukbru.

 Dr Stuart Lee; University of Oxford, Oxford
Week 4 Thursday 10 February 2011
Digital Research and Teaching: A Twenty Year Voyage in Humanities Computing
 

Dr Sian Bayne; University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh
Week 6 Thursday 24 February 2011
Assessment ‘born digital’

Over eight million people have downloaded more than 2,000 audio and video podcasts from the University’s site on iTunes U over the past two years. These podcasts include lectures, interviews with researchers and information for potential applicants. They regularly feature in the global iTunes U top ten, and often top the chart.

 ‘When I give a lecture perhaps there are 70 people there, but it’s another thing altogether to have 50,000 downloads of your podcasts,’ says Dr Simon Benjamin, a researcher in Material Sciences. ‘These days there’s a lot of encouragement from the funding agencies to do as much outreach as possible. Podcasting has helped me present my research to a wider audience.’

While podcasts on iTunes U are designed for private listening and viewing,the University is also making podcasts available for free, non-commercial reuse and redistribution. Around 600 open educational resources – including audio and video podcasts and ePublications – have been made available thanks to the OpenSpires project run by Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS). Contributors in areas ranging from Medical Sciences to Classics have received positive feedback from schools and colleges that have used the material in teaching. ‘I’m really pleased to have made my lectures openly available,’ says English lecturer Dr Emma Smith. ‘It’s also great to have released ePubs of related plays – both the plays of Shakespeare as published in the First Folio in 1623, and lesser-known worksthat can be difficult to access outside specialist libraries. I hope that this material will be enjoyed as widely as possible.’

Audio and video have been used particularly successfully in studentrecruitment. Video interviews with current students and admissions tutors,and audio discussions and animated films about the stages of the application process, are all providing potential applicants, their parents and teachers with an insight into the University. Last term video was used to create a ‘VirtualOpen Day’ online to give potential graduate applicants – particularly those overseas – more information about the collegiate University. By showing the diversity of the student body, video also helps to challenge the stereotypical image of Oxford often perpetuated by the media. The University website’s Wall of 100 Faces, featuring interviews with Oxford students from diverse backgrounds, has been viewed more than 150,000 times since its publication 18 months ago.

While audio and video output is increasingly being made by departments themselves as technology becomes cheaper and easier to use, professional production expertise is available via the Online Media Producer in the University web team, the Media Production Unit (MPU) and OUCS (see websites below). OUCS also offers podcasting courses and has produced a practical guide on how to use IT tools to assist with outreach and public engagement. The MPU also provides a video conferencing service. Facebook and Twitter are also being used by the University to publicise news stories, research findings, and stages of the admissions process.

Rather than waiting for audiences to visit the University website, theseplatforms enable news to be ‘pushed’ as each message posted on these sites causes a surge of interest in the University webpage it promotes. The University’s Facebook and Twitter pages currently have a combined following of 130,000 people. As Peter McDonald of St Hugh’s neatly summarises: ‘In the late 19^th century Oxford was one of the pioneers of the university extension movement, which enabled audiences around the UK to hear what some of its lecturers had to say on a wide range of topics. Projects like OpenSpires are the 21st-century equivalent; though with the benefit of the web, the audiences are now global and even more diverse.’

http://www.ox.ac.uk/staff/publications/blueprint/

The Higher Education Academy has seeking nominations for the 2011 National Teaching Fellowship Scheme. Up to 55 awards of £10,000 will be made as recognition of individual excellence, with the award designed to support each National Teaching Fellow’s professional development in teaching and learning pedagogy. All higher education (HE) institutions in England Wales and Northern Ireland are eligible for the Scheme.

Further education (FE) institutions which have 100 or more full-time equivalent students on higher education programmes directly funded by HEFCE or HEFCW are also eligible. The deadline for entries is 23 March 2011. Full details are on the Academy’s web site at http://tinyurl.com/2uuj77x.

The call for proposals for full proceedings papers, demonstrations, symposia, workshops, short papers, and short presentations (ePosters) at the 18th international conference of the Association for Learning Technology is now open. The conference will be held at the University of Leeds, UK, 6-8 September 2011 
The call closes on 21 February 2011.

Applications for short-term fellowships in open educational resources (OER) are invited by The Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE).  Short-term fellowships are designed to provide foundational knowledge in the production and use of OER to those with little or no prior experience.  The Fellowship consists of distance learning elements and a one week intensive residential course in Milton Keynes.  Priority will be given to applicants from STEM subject areas although all applications will be considered.  The closing date for applications is 24 February 2011.