Dissertations and OER Hub

This presenter is arguing that dissertations should be published using open attributions. He wants to integrate the option to license openly into the doctoral process. Interesting. 

The next session was the one I wanted to hear, on the OER Hub, presented by folks from the UK Open University.  They wanted to provide a structure, a place for collect open resources.

He talked about the Learning Space at Open University, explained more extensively here.

Evaluating open texts

Dilbert - i like to have opinions, but not informed opinions. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-10-07/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DilbertDailyStrip+%28Dilbert+Daily+Strip%29

This session is dissertation research on the quality of open textbooks and how to measure that. I was hoping that he would present us with the

8 themes with two groupings

Technology ( related to the digital nature of the book)
Navigation
Access
Performance
Interaction

Content ( would be in any textbook)
Revelance
( other items that I didn't catch)
The research is still in process, so the takeaway that I wanted, how to evaluate the quality and could I use the tool to evaluate open course library resources.

The second part was also on adopting open textbooks in community colleges. Research showed that the adoption of Flat World Knowledge books had positive outcomes. I am using a Flat World knowledge text in my American Government class, so it is always nice to see this kind of info.

Viualizing Learning Data

This is a presentation from the Open Learning Initiative.  You may have heard about their open courses and incredibly powerful software behind them. Anyone can use these courses for instruction and we have a grant funded group in SAM teaching a statistics course through OLI.

I've personally been very interested in learner data and how faculty can use it to improve teaching and learning. I presented on this topic earlier this year at Whatcom CC. 

Also, Canvas, through Canvas Analytics, makes it really easy to see the data that is gathered and see what you can do with it.

OLI has created an instructor Learning Dashboard that helps instructors take the data and do something with it.  Howver, it is hard for faculty to know what to do with the data. 

I think Canvas makes what they are talking about pretty straightforward, but it is useful to think about how to talk to people about what to do with the data they get.  The cool thing that takes this OLI effort to the next level is they are thinking of integrating this info right into the course, so while you are working in your course, a flag might pop up next to an outcome that students are not meeting, so you as faculty can act in real time to address where students are struggling.

MIT Scholar

MIT Open Courseware is something that many of us are familiar with. MIT puts up syllabus, course notes, sometimes lectures and asssignments from all of their courses. They are not distance learning courses, they are meant to be a repository of resources for faculty, contributing to the community of scholars. They have over 2000 courses up there.

9% of their visitors are faculty, 40-some percent are students.  The big surprise is that another 40-some percent are independent learners - folks just learning for their own edification.

With those folks in mind, they have crafted some new courses called MIT Scholar. These courses are more courses, rather than just a materials repository. They pull together work from several classes on the same topic. They structure the materials in more of a course structure, with units or modules, etc. They are supporting community through OpenStudy ( website that facilitates online study groups).

Independent learners and students alike are enjoying this new format. However, creating the courses take significantly more effort on MIT's part to create.  Creating one of these courses is the equivalent of 7 regular classes. They only have limited resources, so as they create scholar classes, the regular classes are less current. So, they are trying to determine how to move forward. They are also wondering how these scholar courses work with MITx, the MOOC effort.

MIT Scholar - 12 courses

Best practices in open and online teaching

This session was presented by some K-12 educators from Utah. They made some useful points about how to think about why using open resources is important.

They emphasized how essential it is to have a detailed curriculum map before looking for OER. In essence, you have to know where you are going if you successfully want to get there. I blogged about Course Maps in my Stephanie Plans a Class blog.

They recommended using Google advanced search and OER commons as good resources for OER.

Slides and recording of this presentationhttp://openedconference.org/2012/program/day-1/day1-11am-c680/ 

Collaborative Book writing

There is a group in South Africa called Siyavula that is coming up with open textbooks.  They have written several books and last year the South African government printed out millions of copies of their books and gave them away to students for free. How cool!

As they tried to ramp up their book library, they determined that this could be efficiently done in authors workshops in a weekend. This model is based on the idea that bringing a diverse group together will create a product is better than something that comes from just one person.They bring a bunch of subject matter experts together, break them into groups and have the different groups.  All are volunteers, most haven't written in this way before.  They are using Google Docs to create the books. They usually have more than one workshop that they work on the book.  A couple of their recent books took 3 workshops.

They are giving badges to people to recognize their work on the project.  The badges will recognize not only writing, but some of the support work that folks do on the project.

Siyavula

Mozilla and open badges

Badges are an alternate method of credentialing. If you finish one of the popular MOOCs, what evidence do you have of your achievement? Enter the badge.

 

Mozilla is trying to put together a new badges ecosystem.  You can create your own badges that capture any kind of learning.  They are working on creating a universal standard.  They are making the badge more than just an image file, the image will be embedded with metadata that tells people about the badge, who issued, it, what was achieved, etc.

 

Badge backpack - a place to collect all of the badges in one place. Can categorize them - job oriented badges, hobby oriented badges, etc. Can push them out to social networks.

 

Openbadges.org.  You can go through an experience learning about badges and the backpack and earn your first badge.

 

(on a side note, I really like the clean presentation of their powerpoint slides) 

 

Resources

Badges earned online pose challenge to traditional college degrees. chronicle of higher ed.

Grades out, Badges In - Chronicle of Higher Ed

Language teaching resources

This session had presenter from New Zealand who presented many resources.

Spindle podcast - Automatic speech recognition. Only 30% accurate, but good in identifying key words, wordle , creates good words for tagging.

Toetoe blog - alannah's blog

Flax language resources - flexible language aquisition - this was very cool. If you teach English, you should check this website out. Alannah has some videos explaining how it works.

TED Talks have transcripts that were crowd sourced.

Business model for open education

Ariel Diaz from boundless learning spoke on open business models. Boundless is pretty controversial in reverse engineering learning materials and is engaged in big lawsuits.

The Boundless website has students type in the name of their expensive textbook and it aligns each chapter of that book with open sources that say basically the same thing,allowing students to learn really well without buying the text. It looks lovely and has a nice, mobile friendly interface. If creates flash cards and overview quizzes and allows aggregation of notes to make study guides. They also have smart notes that summarize the top issues from each chapter - sort of a cliff's notes for each topic and chapter.

They currently have 8 subjects and have the top 3 or 4 books in each subject. It is free now, but eventually it will be a student pay model.

They are doing some internal studies to see if student learning is similar with the OER.

Unfortunately, he never actually got to the part about open business models. However, I got to talk to him during lunch.  He said that what he hinted at during the talk, the student pay model, is the way they hope to make it happen. However, he thought there were lots of differnt models out there, some which have not even been thought about yet.


Boundless.com
Openstax.com

Open Ed conference

I'm in Vancouver now, at the open Ed conference. It is my first time at this conference, but it is a well established group.

Gardner Campbell did an amazing keynote that can't really be adequately summarized. His basic idea was that there is a lot going on with open education, but that as it has gained traction, it has moved away from what it was all about. He went on to posit that real open education fostered a deep level of thinking that we rarely approach in higher Ed. He talked a little about this elusive level of deep thinking, noting that even giving examples of it would undermine our ability to think deeply about it.

Useful lessons learned from QM research

Sometimes, when I'm talking about QM, people want to know "how do we know this works?". Well, the QM rubric is completely based on the research, but one still needs to determine whether it's application actually makes a difference.

In this session, we learned that it does improve student satisfaction, that it creates faculty professional development. Interestingly, one study showed that, in a college that had adopted QM, even faculty with no QM training improved, as people shared ideas and QM best practices with each other.

One interesting problem that QM has is that it is now so widely adopted that the elements proposed by QM for course design are being built in from the get-go, so it is harder to show evidence of change after a review.

Accessibility of online instructional materials : 15 aspects to consider

This should have been a good presentation, but it was sort of painful. The presenter was delayed by tech trouble and then spent the majority of the remaining time talking about the background and the history.

When he finally did get to the topic, he was nearly out of time and rushed through the points. Oh well, here are my notes from that session.

Are students getting the same kind of access / experience at the same time? This is increasingly the focus of federal OCR investigations. It is no longer sufficient to rely n accommodations. W need to build accessibility at the front end, not try to work around problems later.

Checkpoints in the metadata

Documentation
Text access - is the text there as text so it can be read by a screen reader
Text adjustability - change color, size, spacing
Reading layout -
Reading order - order for digital resources corresponds with the visual layout
Structural markup - lists, columns, headings, tables
Tables
Hyperlinks - can be seen and activated
Color and contrast
Language
Images - non text alternatives for images
Multi-media - is there a transcript
?
Interactive elements - things can be operated by keyboard alone

Painfully boring. Good information, but bad presentation. Finally got up and left.

Brain based design

This session, from folks at the Univ of Cincinnati, was certainly the most entertaining of the day. The presenters talked about some basic ideas that could inform instructional design that would promote universal design (addressed by QM standard 8). Here are my notes from the session:

Visual structure - wherever possible
Take stuff out of paragraphs
Turn into bullets or lists.
Help them to visualize the info
Use design to reduce fear and anxiety
Use rubrics
Built in redundancies - put the same info in several places to make it easy to find
Model schedule for students to know how to move through the course
One pager on how to be successful in the course
Learning guide (aka to do list)
Multiple opportunities to revise
Clear info on when feedback will come
Induce ease, not strain
Tolerance for error
More low takes assessments
Let students try things without worrying about failure
We look for patterns
Use same words for same tuff
Identify things (include the word "link" after links - especially helpful in Canvas)
How do we respond to accusations of "spoon feeding"? Making it easier for students to learn is a good thing. Go back to cognitive load argument, so student mental energy goes into learning.

Idea - use canvas videos for syllabus tour

Walk through of a QM - friendly LMS course template and checklist

There are several presentations on the topic of course templates. Templates make it much easier for a college to insure many QM standards are met.

The college presenting this session was a private college with a 4-person design team, including the faculty. So , this model is quite different from our instructor driven, solo process . Still, I thought we could take several things from it.

As we move to Canvas, it would not be difficult for us to create a template that folks would have available as an optional starting point. This could be modified by division or department. The template can also be a learning tool for faculty to use as a jumping off point for creating their own course templates. Of course, more
Variation in templates directly counteracts one of the major benefits of a template - consistency.

Quality Matters conference

I am at the Quality Matters Conference in Tuscon,AZ. The keynote was about federal regulations related to distance learning. This was very interesting for me, but I imagine it felt irrelevant to many attendees,especially faculty. Indeed, I spoke to a faculty member from Skagit who is here and thought it was a complete waste of time.

However, one important takeaway was about the last date of attendance for online students. I've been doing it based on the last login date. However, if we get a financial aid audit, they'll be looking for the last date of academically related work. For example, a paper submission, discussion post, etc. that is easy to track and will be even easier with Canvas, but we'll need to get the information out. I think it also ties nicely with my effort to get faculty to have attendance activities in the first week to use as a basis for dropping students for non- attendance.