A couple of weeks ago I went along to OER18. There was a lot to like about the event and so much I’d have loved to hear more about. Here are some of my favourite ideas from the talks I attended…
Helping staff understand copyright for reuse
Glasgow Caledonian found that understanding copyright was a barrier to their staff reusing content so made a quick, self-service copyright advisor. It’s very easy to use and has a traffic light system to indicate whether you can go ahead, need to investigate further, or can’t use the resource. The advice is cc-by licensed so could easily be repurposed, and they are currently developing an HTML5 version.
Approaches to institutional repositories
Southampton have developed EdShare for managing and hosting open content, with EdShare Hub now being developed to bring together content from the institutions using EdShare. It has been integrated into their systems and processes with their comms and marketing team use EdShare behind their iTunesU and their medical school having MedShare. For further information see this presentation on EdShare from the ALT 2017 Winter Conference.
Edinburgh have an OER policy but they don’t have an institutional repository. Resources are shared on whichever online platform is most appropriate. They have accounts on Vimeo, Flickr, and similar services and through this approach hope to encourage true openness and adaptability. They also have a media asset management platform called Media Hopper.
Teaching API’s through Google Sheets
Martin Hawksey ran a good session, introducing the basics of APIs using a practical Google Sheets / Flickr exercise. Martin’s slides and the associated worksheet are available for reuse (cc-by).
Microlearning: TEL cards
Daniel Hardy and Matthew Street from Keel showed us the cards they had produced to promote various practices to staff. These sit within the VLE. The TEL cards code is available on GitHub.
Provocations
In the Breaking Open session, we were given a series of provocations relating to who is excluded from or disadvantaged by open education practices. I like the way we (in groups of 6 or so) were asked to interact with these provocations:
- Choose one of the statements to work with
- What is the worst case, the worst things that could happen
- What could you do to make that worst case happen?
- What are you doing that might be contributing to the worst case?
The session worked well, although on my table at least there seems some defensiveness and a fixed idea that: open = good. I appreciated having contributors videoconference in and form their own virtual workshop table for the activity. Further information including the provocations are on the Towards Openness site.
Lightning keynotes
The final keynote was left open and people were invited to, during the event, come forward if they would like to give a 5 minute reflection during this session. Honestly I was a little sceptical about how this would work but it was fantastic. I was particularly pleased to see two of the people whose earlier sessions I had found most interesting, Taskeen Adam and Prittee Auckloo, giving their take on what they had seen.
Inspiring student projects
Addressing shortage of materials / perspectives through OER
Lorna Campbell, in her keynote, mentioned an Edinburgh project addressing lack of materials around LGBT+ healthcare, with students adapting existing materials.
Welsh Wikipedia content
Jason Evans, National Wikipedian at the National Library of Wales, works with university and school students to help them write and contribute to Welsh-language wikipedia. Basque universities have used a similar model with their students.
Moving witch trials data to Wikidata
Ewan McAndrew from Edinburgh talked about working with MSc Data Design students to move an existing Access database of information about witchcraft trials onto Wikidata to make it available to researchers. Students also produced videos using the data.
Geoscience Outreach course
Stephanie (Charlie) Farley from Edinburgh talked about a course within Geoscience on co-creation of OERs. Students are paired up with community organisations, schools, etc and work to produce a piece of science communication or educational resource for that group. Students have produced events and apps and board games, as well as video and learning materials. The university hires student interns over the summer who work with selected students to polish their projects and promoted them as OERs.
