On behalf of the JISC/HEA UK Open Educational Resources (OER) Programme I am delighted to announce the completion of the OER Rapid Innovation Strand. (also available as a PDF and downloadable file) These solutions address a range of issues that we identified in our original call for proposals, and they specifically address: how to create … Read more
Tuesday 13th November saw the final programme meeting for the UK OER Programme 2009-2012. An aim of the programme had been to find sustainable practices for the release of OER, and there were many success stories shared. It seems to me that the funded programme marks the start of a general move towards greater OER … Read more
This post is my reflections on the emerging conclusions from the JLeRN Experiment. Applying a new approach to an old problem Followers of technology trends will have noticed some of the big themes of recent years include cloud storage, big data, analytics and activity streams, social media. Technologists supporting education and research have been using … Read more
Opportunity to preview and contribute to a book about the technical themes emerging from three years of the UK OER Programme Extract from Lorna Campbell’s blogpost: The OER technology directions book that Amber, Phil, Martin and I drafted during a book sprint at the end of August is now almost complete. We even have a … Read more
One of the findings that has emerged clearly from the UK OER Programme and from the UK Discovery work is that for a healthy content ecosystem, information about the content needs to be available to many different systems, services and users. Appropriately licensing the metadata and feeds is crucial to downstream discovery and use. The … Read more
Further / Higher Education (F/HE) in the UK is in the fortunate position to have talented and experienced developers working in its organisations, driving both service development and applied research. Because of this, developers in F/HE frequently contribute to a particularly rich source of technical innovation to the sector. At ALT-C Paul Walk and I … Read more
JISC Observatory have launched the draft version of a new report on eBooks in Education. This report updates previous work researching the usage and adoption of ebooks within academic institutions and examines recent developments that are shaping how academic institutions can respond to growing interest in ebooks: As ebooks become mainstream and the percentage of … Read more
At ALT-C in early September I ran a session with David Kernohan on Openness: learning from our history. The theme of the conference was ” a confrontation with reality” so it seemed fitting to explore the trajectories taken by various forms of openness. What follows is just a short thought piece that I contributed to … Read more
Last week I attended a very engaging conference organised by Wikimedia, focused on the uses of Wikipedia in Education: EduWiki . I was on a panel discussing openness in HE and I also I gave a keynote on 21st Century Scholarship and the role of Wikipedia. I’d produced a visual (infographic/poster/prettypicture) which I blogged and … Read more
This is a summary of notable developments around work on technology issues around learning materials, mostly by JISC. It’s aimed at the technical and semi-technical and comments/additions are very welcome. Update Back in late May we ran our first Dev8ED. It was a great event, with developers supporting course data, curriculum design and delivery, distributed … Read more