POCKET

Sarah and I have a meeting next week with the University of Exeter to begin the transformation process of their module material. To prepare for the meeting I have read through all of their module material and made notes about how the material can be transformed into open content. This led to the creation of a new content development plan which details the process of the transformation of module material into a single OpenLearn unit. I have uploaded this map onto our POCKET collaboration space on OpenLearn.

The Creative Commons website also has a page on case studies of projects that use Creative Commons Licenses. At the end of POCKET we might consider writing about our experiences on the project here, as the Creative Commons Licenses is an important part of the project.

On Tuesday I went to the Buxton campus to visit Louise Buxton, content author of the Customer Service Skills module. Progress is going well on this module and there are currently three units uploaded onto OpenLearn in various stages of development: Introduction to Customer Service; Responding to Customer Needs; and Market Research Methods.

Louise has rewritten a lot of the material to address the copyright issues of quoting from various websites and books and also to provide feedback on various activities included in the material. Louise has also rewritten the introductions for all of the units to make them more detailed.

We discussed some of the longer external articles that are included in the material for various units and Louise has said that she will pick out the relevant information and rewrite them to avoid any further copyright issues.

We also discussed the tagwords that can be included in the metadata file: I will take keywords from the unit material and include these in the metadata file and if there were any other tagwords that Louise wanted to add she would let me know.

We agreed to meet in two weeks time and in the meantime we’ll stay in touch via email.

On Monday I met with content author, Antonios Platsas who is writing the International Economic Law module from scratch for POCKET. We both agreed that progress on this material is going very well and that the POCKET team and Antonios have a very strong working relationship. Antonios has even said that he would be very keen to write another module (based on European law) to be broken up as units for POCKET.

There are two units from this law module currently uploaded onto OpenLearn: Introduction to International Economic Law and The World Trade Organization. Antonios has also written all the six units and there are only minor changes and expansions to make. These changes include the writing of all the learning outcomes for each unit. We arranged to meet again in three weeks time, although we will stay in touch by email until then.

The WTO have some interesting interactive learning material on their website:

WTO Distance Learning Gateway

WTO eTraining

This is very relevant to the law module module being developed for POCKET, as unit 2 is all about the World Trade Organisation. The interactive activities contained on these two sites will hopefully give us some inspiration and ideas for our POCKET material. I have sent a link to the content author and we can discuss it further during our meeting on Monday.