We are setting up a new honours degree programme which will involve use of onlin
We are setting up a new honours degree programme which will involve use of online resources for work based blended learning. I was asked to demonstrate some the resources and approaches that might be useful. This is one of the quick examples that I was able to knock up(*) and some reflections on how Open Education helped me. By the way, I especially like the last bit about “open educational practice”. So if the rest bores you, just skip to the end.
(*Disclaimer: this really is a quickly-made example, it’s in no way representative of the depth of content we will aim for in the resources we use.)
Making the resource
I had decided that I wanted to show some resources that would be useful for our first year, first semester Praxis course. This course aims to introduce students to some of the skills they will need to study computer science, ranging from appreciating the range of topics they will study to being able to use our Linux systems, from applying study skills to understanding some requirements of academic writing. I was thinking that much of this would be fairly generic and must be covered by a hundred and one existing resources when I saw this tweet:
‘Why Critique Research?’ Newly developed RLO from @UoN_SHS HELM http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nursing/sonet/rlos/ebp/research_critique/ … #elearning #research #ukoer #oer @UniofNottingham
That seemed to be in roughly the right area, so I took a look at the University of Nottingham’s HELM Open site and found an Introduction to Referencing. Bingo. The content seemed appropriate, but I wasn’t keen on a couple of things. First, breaking up the video in 20sec chunks I fear would mean the student spend more time ‘interacting’ with the Next-> button than thinking about the content. Second, it seems a little bit too delivery oriented, I would like the student to be a little more actively engaged.
I noticed there is a little download arrow on each page which let me download the video. So I downloaded them all and used OpenShot to string them together into one file. I exported this and used the h5p WordPress plugin to show how it could be combined with some interactive elements and hosted on a WordPress site with the hypothes.is annotation plugin, to get this:
How openness helps
So that was easy enough, a demo of the type of resource we might produce, created in less than an afternoon. How did “openness” help make it easy.
Open licensing and the 5Rs
David Wiley’s famous 5Rs define open licences as those that let you Reuse, Revise, Remix, Retain and Redistribute learning resources. The original resource was licensed as CC:BY-NC and so permitted all of these actions. How did they help?
Reuse: I couldn’t have produced the video from scratch without learning some new skills or having sizeable budget, and having much more time.
Revise: I wasn’t happy with the short video / many page turns approach, but was able to revise the video to make it play all the way through in one go.
Remix: The video was then added to so