POCKET

This will be my final blog post on POCKET before I leave the project to take up a new role at the University of Manchester. It has been a very interesting project to be involved with and hopefully the lessons learned can be taken forward within the partner institutions and within the community as a whole. At the recent CETIS/OpenLearn OER event at the Open University, the POCKET team were invited to present their outputs and experience of working on a project producing Open Content. It was a good opportunity to share knowledge and discuss challenges ahead of the  new JISC OER programme.

Outputs from POCKET are available at the following links:

• Open Content on OpenLearn: http://labspace.open.ac.uk/tag/index.php?id=7791
  • This content will also be available from JorumOpen
• Interoperability wiki: http://jisc-pocket.pbwiki.com/
• Collaboration area on OpenLearn: http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3452
• Project website (which includes the content development kit and project documents such as the Quality Plan and Needs andTechnical Analysis): www.derby.ac.uk/pocket

With these outputs freely available POCKET hopes to support the OER community even after the project funding has finished at the end of this month. Watch out for upcoming publications on the project, including: an article (currently undergoing the review process) in The IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies Special Issue on Open Educational Resources, due to be available in Summer 2009; a paper for ED-MEDIA; and a paper and poster at this year’s ALT-C conference.

An important aspect of POCKET is the creation of sustainable Open Content that can easily be re-used and re-purposed. Therefore complying with educational content related interoperability standards is an integral part of the project.
In the project plan it was agreed that standards for the project would include:

The following software and tools were useful as part of POCKET:

Useful sources of information and support during the project have included:

As POCKET comes to an end this month I will use this blog to help me reflect on the project as a whole and what has been learned though it.
New Skills
I feel that I have learnt many new skills from my role as Learning Technologist including:

External events I’ve attended include: the RSP Repository Service Day; JISC CETIS E-SIG meeting; OSS Watch workshop; CETIS annual meeting; SUETr Interoperability training event; the Jorum Forum event; CETIS/OpenLearn OER event
I’ve also had the opportunity to get my CMALT accreditation, which I feel will be a really valuable asset to my future career.

On Wednesday I attended the CETIS 2008 Conference: Technology for Learning, Teaching and the Institution, which took place at Aston University. I was very keen to attend this conference because the work CETIS do on interoperability standards is very relevant to POCKET and I have been in regular communication with Wilbert Kraan on this issue regarding the POCKET materials. Myself and Dave O’Hare from POCKET were also very keen to attend the OER Programme Scoping session as this concerned the upcoming JISC OER Programme call which will hopefully be a way to carry on POCKET when the project finishes in March.

To begin the OER Programme Scoping Session David Kernohan from JISC gave an overview of the JISC Open Educational Content Programme. David spoke about the reasons behind this programme: how universities used to be the font of all knowledge but now the Internet has changed this. He also spoke about the cost of creating learning materials from scratch each time and how this time and money could be spend if material was reused. This would also lead to an improved quality of teaching resources. Other benefits mentioned included how releasing content can benefit institutions by enhancing their reputation and therefore their financial situation. The programme will provide funding not just to create content but to develop institutional processes regarding OER.

The RepRODUCE (Re-purposing and Re-use of Digital University-Level Content and Evaluation) project was mentioned and the lessons that they had learned through this project were discussed. Certain needs were highlighted, including a need to work with current academic practice (not against it) and a need for high quality, free to use materials.

Amber Thomas from JISC then delivered a presentation on Technical Infrastructure for Open Educational Content, which covered the technical requirements that JISC are proposing for projects under the OER Programme. Requirements included:

- Content must be stored and available in JorumOpen: It is hoped that JorumOpen will act as a showcase for current practices in the UK.
- Content should be released under a Creative Commons license

The final presentation was given by Li Yuan from CETIS on Open Educational Resources Opportunities and Challenges for HE. Li talked about the different meanings of open in different domains: open access (social); open standard (technical); and open licensed (legal). She also showed some examples of OER initiatives such as: MIT (relies on paid staff, costs £2m per year); Utah State (learners can gain credit); Rice University (material provided by volunteers - community driven OER initiative); Open Michigan (student centred OER initiative); OpenLearn (uses web 2.0 services and social networks); Stanford University (has more than 500 lectures on YouTube).

Li also mentioned: individual OER initiatives (such as David Wiley’s Introduction to Open Education and Russell Stannard’s multimedia training videos); pubic initiatives (such as Wikipedia); and national initiatives (such as ParisTech OCW and JorumOpen).

Li spoke about the issues and challenges involved in OER initiatives, including sustainability, IPR and copyright, quality and interoperability.

After the scheduled presentations there was then plenty of time for discussion and debate around the OER programme. Questions raised included:
Where was the content going to come from?
What will success look like?

Patrick McAndrew from the Open University also spoke of the experiences of OpenLearn where 7000 registrations on OU courses have come from OpenLearn - this works out to be worth about £4 million! OpenLearn brings a high quality of interest in OU courses. OU Cloudworks was also mentioned, which is a popular site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas, experiences and issues.

Overall the two main aims of the OER programme emerged as being:
1. Changing practice
2. Getting content out there

I found this session very useful and interesting to see how JISC were planning the OER programme and what it aimed to achieve. I was a bit disappointed (and surprised) at the lack of priority placed on the issue of interoperability as I believe that this must be a priority if content is going to be truly open. My experience of interoperability on POCKET has also taught me that interoperability is not an easy/straightforward issue and it is one that should be considered at the beginning of any OER initiative (not as an afterthought at the end).

I greatly enjoyed the end keynote given by Dr Stuart Lee, Director of Oxford University Computer Services. I also was interested to hear about how Oxford University are in the process of migrating their VLE to the open source Sakai.
Stuart Lee spoke about how there was no wow factor anymore when it comes to e-learning (except when something goes wrong!). The main focus of his talk was the importance of engaging, not only with learners, but with academics for successful e-learning projects. I found this really useful and as I work so closely with academics on POCKET I could really relate to the points Stuart was raising.

Stuart argued that lectures are always going to exist as they are cost effective and students and practitioners both want them. He went on to say that the language of e-learning is not always the language of the practitioner and that it is important to understand the problems and barriers that lecturers face. Practitioners will use something if they think it will be helpful, so it is important to show them something that will meet their needs in an area they can contextualise. In this way visualisation is important: lecturers will ask ‘can I see myself doing that?’.

Stuart ended his keynote by describing most e-learning tools as Chindogu: things that cannot be for real use. He also highlighted the fundamental interoperability issue - people.

Yesterday the POCKET team, along with colleagues from the University of Derby and the University of Bolton attended a demonstration of Xerte at the University of Nottingham. Julian Tenney, the lead developer on Xerte led us through the demonstration along with his colleagues John Horton and Pat Lockley.

The description of Xerte on the Xerte Project website is:

Xerte is a suite of powerful tools for creating interactive e-learning content for the Flash platform. Xerte is open source software, in use all over the world.

The POCKET team were very keen to find out more about Xerte and how we might incorporate it or collaborate with the developers as part of our project.

Julian began the demonstration by explaining the idea behind Xerte, which is to empower people to create their own learning material. The Xerte project has created tools to allow this. Xerte was first released in 2006 and is primarily aimed at developers as it requires a certain amount of scripting. It is in use all over the world and was released as open source software in August 2008.

Accessibility was a high priority in the development of Xerte and the team have worked closely with TechDis. When Julian presented some materials that had been created in Xerte, text to speech had been built in and the material could be navigated throughout just by using the keyboard.

Some of the projects that had been created using Xerte were large and contained a lot of content, multimedia and interaction while others were at a smaller scale, with simple multiple choice questions. This helped us to see the range of material that Xerte could be applied to. Many staff and students from the University of Nottingham have created learning materials using Xerte and needed little or no technical support.

Julian explained that the plan for Xerte was to become browser-based so that instead of downloading and installing an exe file, anyone with a web browser could log on and create materials simply and effectively. Editing is done directly in the browser, so there is no need to upload any content. This would also allow collaboration with other users in developing content. These tools are built on the Xerte runtime engine, which is also to be made freely available to the wider community. All files are stored on a server and templates on a database. Version 1.0 will be released in January 2009.

The Xerte Online Toolkit contains a wide range of interactive options, including:

• Image viewer (which allows zooming in and out of an image: useful for very detailed photographs)
• Flash paper (which allows zooming in and out of a document)
• Hotspots
• Quizzes
• Third party feeds: Googlemaps and KML; Flickr; Wikipedia; YouTube; RSS feeds (Although including this type of material contains a certain amount of risk as you can never be sure what will appear)

To include a file created with the Xerte online toolkit on a webpage, the file is provided in the form of a link and also code that can be included on a webpage. Xerte will export material as a zip or SCORM package. There is an RSS feed of all content produced by Xerte online.

Everyone who attended this demonstration of Xerte was very excited and impressed with the potential of Xerte to create really engaging, interactive and highly accessible learning objects. One concern raised was that there was no version control available, so when a Xerte learning object is edited and previewed online it automatically replaces the earlier version. However the Xerte team are accepting suggestions on further developments to Xerte on their mailing list.

The question for POCKET is how can we use this toolkit in our own project. We discussed the possibility of writing a wizard file (xwd) to incorporate the OU XML schema (only working within a subset of the schema as the whole schema would be too complicated). However this is complex development work and would be time consuming to achieve, although it is something I would definitely like to try out.

Another option might be to use Xerte with academics to produce learning objects:

• This content can be exported as a package file into a VLE like Blackboard, as it is exported as SCORM
• The CETIS Transcoder tool could be used to convert the SCORM package into an IMS Package
• The IMS package could then be uploaded onto OpenLearn

At this stage the POCKET team are keen to try out Xerte and see what we can produce!

Now that POCKET is starting to work with more external partners, I have been thinking more about the content editing process. Working with content authors at Derby, the various stages of editing have so far been discussed in face-to-face meetings. However this will not always possible and it would benefit the project and also address sustainability of the materials if we could find another solution.

One possible solution could be for academic content authors to use the ‘User Revision’ option on OpenLearn.

Instructions for using the User Revision option:

1. First you have to login or register on OpenLearn, then go to the unit you want to edit.
2. Then look down the right hand menu and you will see a tab labeled ‘Versions’
3. Under this tab click on the ‘Make a copy for revising’ option
4. It may take a few minutes but when the page refreshes it will show the revision copy of the unit (you’ll also see under the ‘Versions’ tab that there is now a version labeled ‘User Revision’)
5. You’ll see a tab in the right hand top corner of the screen labeled ‘Turn editing on’
6. If you select this tab your page will change to show the various editing features.
7. If you just want to amend typos, you can go into each section (by clicking on the headings) and you’ll see three tabs at the top of the screen: ‘View’ ‘Edit’ and ‘Revisions’
8. Select the ‘Edit’ tab and you will be able to directly edit into the text. You have to write a short description of the changes you’ve made before you can click the ‘Save’ button.

I plan to add these instructions to the POCKET content development kit and make this editing facility an option for the content authors involved in POCKET. The ability to edit directly onto OpenLearn means the authors will still be able to edit the units when the project has finished.

Another factor to note at this stage is that when you re-upload a unit tags that you applied to the original unit are not saved. For example I’ve tagged the POCKET units under the tag ‘POCKET‘, but I have to re-tag them every time I edit and re-upload the unit, even if it is just a minor change. It would be useful if there was an option on OpenLearn to save the tags on a unit when you re-upload it.

The University of Westminster has won JISC’s ‘Outstanding ICT initiative of the year’ 2008 for websites which build upon pioneering work using video to mark students’ work. Lecturer Russell Stannard used screen recording software to record himself walking through various Web 2.0 technologies with a voice-over, which were then uploaded to a newly-created website available at this link: www.teachertrainingvideos.com. The site, which is openly accessible, quickly proved popular and rapidly built into a bank of over 30 videos, with lecturers frequently requesting new topics.

Its success led to the creation of another resource: www.multimediatrainingvideos.com, which offers free training videos in using more complex multimedia programmes like Flash, Director and Photoshop. In its second month, the site received nearly 60,000 hits.

These are websites that I plan to incorporate in the various resources I’m putting together for the staff development workshop at Derby. I think this is an excellent resource that staff would be very interested in. It also makes me wonder if we can include some similar video training work in our POCKET collaboration area on LabSpace, particularly now we are beginning to work with more external partners.

The Sakai Project

The Sakai CLE is a free and open source Courseware Management System. It features a set of software tools designed to help instructors, researchers and students collaborate online in support of their work–whether it be course instruction, research or general project collaboration.

This could be an interesting platform to test our POCKET materials, as the software is available for download or there are sites online set up as testing areas.