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#coursedata demonstrators – Oxford Mobile Course Booking app -

The aim of this ongoing series of posts about the various #coursedata demonstrator applications is to give an overview of the different ways a standardised course data feed can be used. One of the use cases voiced when we were commissioning demonstration applications was that they might allow someone in a bus Queue in Bangalore to find a course. Whilst the CoMoBo app  is possibly more parochial, it builds on existing Mobile technology, and certainly allows a bicyclist in Banbury to find a course, and register upon it.
The demonstrator harvests XCRI-CAP data from Oxford Open Data (and potentially other sources in the future) and allows mobile devices to request data through an API. Built on a stack of Open Source code from OxCRI, Erewhon and OxCAP projects, It displays a searchable geo-sensitive course directory to students.

This is important in Oxford which has more graduate students than it does undergraduates, and offers a very large number of training courses, by departments, divisional offices and Doctoral Training Centres. The Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) 2011 Report on behalf of Post-Graduate Taught Students highlighted the need to make it easier for these students to access information about training opportunities and to enrol for places.
At the #coursedata event in Aston in January Tim Fernando presented an overview of the technologies deployed to meet this need, and was asked which parts of it were Open Sourced. The answer was “All of it”. Check it out on Github:

github.com/ox-it

Digital literacies and European TEL research

I was lucky enough to have a workshop accepted at ARV13 this year, a European symposium in which participants attend linked workshops on themes in TEL research.

Although the workshop was not funded by Jisc, I took the opportunity to raise awareness of the Developing Digital Literacies programme, and especially the Exeter Cascade project which I have been helping to take forward. In my own session I spoke about the contribution we can make to building a conscious, critical approach to the use of digital technologies as a key attribute for graduates entering a digital world, and also a value that institutions should have when they invest in digital technologies and approaches.

‘Critical’ is a word that sees a lot of (over?)use in discussions of higher education and in the writing of course outcomes. What does it mean in relation to digital technologies? For me it has a number of aspects:

Repertoire – Being a skilled user of one device, service or system has its limits: critical use means moving fluently between systems and being able to confidently choose and adopt technologies as they become available. Repertoire also gives users a more discriminating approach to technologies in use, and allows us to develop practices ‘against the grain’ of technology’s obvious intended purposes.

Creativity – Unless we are producing artefacts and representations in digital media we are unlikely to understand how digital media work on us as consumers. The ‘student as producer’ movement plays out in the digital sphere in important ways.

Play – Associated with creativity, we know that ‘peer supported experimentation’ is one of the best ways to become confident and familiar in a new environment, real or virtual. People need time and space to play with technologies in a low-stakes, complex environment without clearly defined goals.

Awareness – Technology use arguably implies a responsibility to reflect on the forces behind the screen. What real materials are our devices composed of and how are they sourced? What resources of energy are consumed for virtual services to be delivered? What relationships of production and consumption exist so that we can enjoy the apparently limitless capacities of the internet?

Safe and ethical behaviour – For me this is closely related to critical awareness. Rather than learning the ‘rules’ of safe and ethical behaviour online, a critical awareness of how digital systems work, how data is collected and used, how public and private are blurred etc allows us to develop our own values and negotiate them with others.

The overall workshop topic was TEL: the crisis and the response., and the aim was to discuss how technology enhanced learning has contributed to a number of crises we observe in formal education, and how it might also support helpful responses to crisis. The group involved in the workshop continues to collaborate on a number of writing and research projects including a special issue of linked papers, a proposal to ALT-C, and a contribution to the Grand Challenges for TEL Research (2013):  ‘How can TEL contribute to resolving educational inequalities?’ Contact us via the blog if you are interested.

There were contributions from several people associated with JISC projects including Simon and Peter from Greenwich Digital Literacies in Transition, speaking about new pedagogies. On the third day we heard from other workshop groups and contributed to discussions on how priorities for TEL research are being shaped across Europe. The JISC community may be interested in outcomes from the workshops on ‘Data Analysis and Interpretation for Learning Environments‘, ‘Teacher-led Inquiry and Learning Design‘, ‘Technology support for reflecting on and sharing experiences across contexts‘ and ‘Establishing a European infrastructure for TEL‘. This last was organised, like the Grand Challenges project itself, by the European TELEARC consortium. The Grand Challenges will be written up and produced in book form – more details will be available via the usual JISC mailing lists.

My slides on critical digital literacies (no notes) are here.

Assessment and Feedback webinars

We are continuing to disseminate and discuss the work of the Assessment and Feedback programme and related projects through a series of webinars. The webinars are free and open to all and will be hosted in Blackboard Collaborate. Go to bit.ly/afwebinars for further information on the sessions and to register. You might want to bookmark/get feeds from this page for information on future events.

Using open source assessment and feedback tools
Friday 15 Feb 12-1pm
One of the strands in the Assessment and Feedback programme has been focusing on developing existing open source tools and adapting them for use in organisations beyond those they were developed in. As the projects draw to a close, this webinar will share some of their common experiences and findings. Some of these have been captured in a summary from Wilbert Kraan (Jisc CETIS), who has been supporting the projects. The session will include an overview of the work and presentations from the projects with opportunities for questions and discussion.

Peer review and the development of evaluative skills
Monday 18 Feb 12-1.15pm
The webinar will be led by Professor David Nicol. Peer review is defined in this webinar as a reciprocal process where students produce written feedback reviews on the assignments of peers and receive feedback reviews on their own assignment. Prior research has reported on the learning benefits of receiving feedback reviews. Very few studies have explored the merits of feedback production or the cognitive and learning processes that this activates. This is the subject of this webinar. Participants will first engage in a peer review task and will then reflect on, and discuss, the review process from different perspectives. Participants’ reflections will be compared and discussed in relation to recent literature and studies of peer review. The assumption in this webinar is that an important task for teachers should be to help students develop the capacity to judge the quality of their own work while it is being produced (Sadler, 2010). This cannot be achieved merely by transmitting feedback information to students, even if the feedback is of high quality.

NB. In the first 15 minutes of this webinar you will be asked to engage in a short writing and reviewing task. Having an experience of reviewing will help you appreciate more fully the research findings which will be discussed, and the unexplored potential of peer review. We will ask that your written responses are submitted electronically. Anonymity of submissions is guaranteed and contributions will not be shared without permission. Spaces for this webinar are limited so book now to avoid disappointment.

Programme-focused assessment – the PASS project
Monday 25 Feb 12-1pm
Prof Peter Hartley will lead this webinar outlining the work of the HEA-funded PASS project. The project aimed to address the issue of designing an effective, efficient, inclusive and sustainable assessment strategy which delivers the key course/programme outcomes. Further details to follow although you can now register for the session.

A preliminary evaluation of the e-Feedback Evaluation Project (eFEP)
Friday 1 March 12-1pm
The aim of the eFEP project is to evaluate the use of spoken and written e-feedback when these modes of delivery have become standard practice within a Higher Education Institution. The evaluation focuses on current practice in modern languages at the Open University in terms of the quality of the feedback itself; staff and student perceptions; and student engagement.In order to test the extent to which the lessons learnt at the OU are applicable to non-distance learning contexts, we are also conducting a smaller-scale evaluation of the use of e-feedback at the University of Manchester. The aims of the session are:
• To outline the work done so far and plans for the next few months.
• To present the project’s recent findings from staff and student surveys, analysis of e-feedback and ‘feedback on feedback’ exercise.
• To evaluate and seek feedback on the main evaluation tools used in the project (FACT analysis tool and ‘feedback on feedback’ approach).
• To seek feedback on current plans for staff and student training (‘feedback alignment exercise’)
The presenters are Maria Fernandez-Toro and Concha Furnborough from The Open University.

#coursedata demosntrators – advanced search widget

One of the issues I flagged up in the post about the w4 demonstrator  was the lack of CPD vocabularies.
Restricted vocabularies provide a way of making sure the meaning of data is clear.
Whilst xcri-cap provides a simple clear structure for setting out data about courses, it doesn’t prescribe a particular vocabulary, as the specification itself could be used in a wide range of circumstances, and contexts. The #Coursedata programme however does have a vocabulary framework document which provides guidance on creating and publishing vocabularies for xcri-cap.

Due to the ambiguities of the English language, if for instance you were to search for decorating courses on Google using the term “stripping” some of the results might be unsuitable. (Don’t try this). By using a controlled vocabulary, context can be assured, and also meaning understood, which should result in beter search results. However this is a complex area, as indicated by Netflix being happy to volunteer $1million for an improvement in search of 10%. www.netflixprize.com/

One of the #coursedata demonstrators the AX-S widget uses a lexicon of terms based on JACS codes to provide better results which appear as the search box is completed.

The widget can be added to any webpage and use an institutions feed. The code is available on GitHub. https://github.com/igsl/AX-S-widget

More details can be found on the project blog, along with a link to a live version of the demonstrator: alanepaull.wordpress.com/category/xcri/demonstrators/ax-s-widget/

Content farming? OER and quality at #msuokc

I was delighted to be asked by Christine Geith, Karen Vignare and their team at Michigan State University to attend and facilitate at the Open Knowledge Convening linked to the AgShare2 project (which is supported by the Gates Foundation).

I’ve long been an advocate of the way AgShare has taken almost wonkish open education ideas around co-creation, student created content and multiple roots to discovery and applied them expertly to solve a pressing real-world issue. Openly available information and guidance to support farmers in sub-Saharan Africa is not just a nice-to-have, it’s a need to have. There are literally no other ways that this vital information can be widely shared.

With a co-ordinating team at MSU, and support from organisations like OER Africa, the bulk of content creation is done by MSc students at partner institutions:

• Haramaya University (Ethiopia)
• Makerere University (Uganda)
• Moi University (Kenya)
• United States International University (Kenya)

Students work directly with farmers to capture and reflect good practices, which are then released as case studies (and in other formats) for the benefit of all.

As you would expect from Christine and her team, the event incorporated delegates and presenters from a range of backgrounds and from across the world. These included those working on the project, and others active in related work. I particularly enjoyed Peter Bannatyne’s presentation on OER impact measures, which prompted a very interesting discussion, and Dr Dileepkumar Guntuku’s presentation on delivering OER to mobile phones using voice and SMS. His live demonstration of the VoIP Drupal module was an amazing reminder of how very basic technology can be used to deliver information in remote areas.

I had been asked to facilitate a session on quality assurance in OER release, which meant I was able to talk about a lot of UKOER work where projects allowed students and end-users input into the design and delivery of resources. I was keen to emphasise that our experience had been that projects had been largely keener to use existing quality processes, for instance

• Existing institutional processes around teaching quality assurance, where resources are used in formal teaching before being released.
• Existing web-copy processes, where resources are included on institutional websites
• Peer-review (either formally for research-based resources, or informally where resources are published on blogs or social media.)
• Authorial reflections and review – where academics and content creators use the occasion of open release to critically reflect and improve on their resources.
• And assessed work, where materials are created by students and assessed for academic credit.

There are different quality requirements for different models of OER release – for instance a project aiming to change cultures and promote open academic practice would need a very different approach to a project where content is commissioned and then released openly. Part of quality (and monitoring, and dissemination…) plans depend on why we are releasing material in the first place.

Sustainability came across as a another factor here – more complex and specialised (and possibly more robust) processes added an overhead cost which may be fine for project work, but could negatively impact the progression to unfunded work post-project. There were a lot of interesting proposals to build and sell value-added services on top of open media – there is a lot of mileage in this, but it rather goes against the reason a lot of people are attracted to become involved in open release in the first place.

After the meeting, I was pleased to have chance to catch up with Emily Puckett Rogers and Greg Austic, two openness advocates based in and around Ann Arbor, MI. One of the great points that came out of those conversations was the way that the expectations of the culture of universities was changing amongst those motivated to apply to them. Prospective students are beginning to expect openness as a default position from their institution, and this is a trend that can only become more important. Perhaps it is time to see institutions have the vision to make a high-profile commitment to openness?

mmmmm Pi

Another brief interlude in the series of posts about #coursedata demonstrators.
On Tuesday evening I nipped down to the #BuildBrighton hackspace  for the monthly meetup of the Brighton Raspberry Pi user group.
For those who’ve been living in a hole for the last year, the Raspberry Pi  is a great little bare bones computer, very much in the mould of the 1980s home computing favourites like the BBC micro, and Sinclair ZX80. The board is about the size of a credit card (in fact it is exactly the size of a credit card) costs £25, and takes normal USB keyboard, mouse and plugs into an HDMI tv.

You can pop any operating system that takes your fancy onto a SD card, though most popular are a range of Linux Debian variants- like Rasbian.

At the meetup Chris Swan (blog.thestateofme.com, @cpswan) talked about the OpenELEC (Open Embedded Linux Entertainment centre) distribution of XBMC (XBox Media Centre) for RPi and MAME the popular arcade machine emulator, both of which really show off how powerful the tiny Pi is.
OpenELEC 3 is nearing completion, with XBMC 12. Once connected to a network with NAS (Network attached storage), it will stream and run music, video etc, much like an Apple Tv… but much cheaper.

OpenELEC is a stripped down Linux build, just enough to run XBMC, booting straight to XBMC. It has a minimal kernel, and drivers for TV receivers etc need selecting at build. Everything else goes on a SquashFS file called: system (read only, compressed) with a very small footprint, which fits into 256Mb – though this is now pretty academic, as storage has evolved, and is very cheap.

The evening rounded off with a 4 way LAN game of Quake 3 played on Raspberry Pi.

Afterward a conversation started on how the Pi can be used in education, and the artificial boundaries between different disciplines cropped up. When time is tight it’s hard to build in capacity to teach and learn the additional skills needed to use something like the Pi, and sometimes the technology simply ends up with the IT folk.
However the push to encourage students into STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths) is growing in importance, as Prof Brian Cox mentioned in his BETT presentation, there is a need for a million STEM graduates just to keep pace with current demand.
Which brings me to the good news that Google have stumped up the cash for 15,000 Rasberry Pis to be given away to schools.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation will work with Google and six UK educational partners to identify students who will benefit from access to a Pi. CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius and Teach First will be supporting the initiative, and OCR will put together 15,000 free teaching and learning packs to go with the Raspberry Pis.

The Brighton Pi mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/brightonpi

#coursedata demonstrators – W4… what?

W4 = What When Where Widget.
One of the questions that always gets asked about the xcri-cap feeds is “Who is taking them”.. it’s a bit of chicken and egg situation, in that in order to make it worthwhile for aggregators and search providers to accept data in a particular format there has to be a critical mass of data in that format… and likewise in order for institutions to produce a feed, there has to be a valid reason for doing so.
With the coursedata programme we have been able to do some pump priming, as the main aim of the the programme is to ensure institutional data and processes for handling that is improved… the actual format of the data is secondary to the overall improvement, but the standard allows us to quantify improvement, share tools, and create transferable skills and methodologies. As xcri-cap is a conformant implementation of the European specification BS En 15982- Metadata for learning opportunities- it also has a potentially very wide user base. Based on XML it is alos inherently extensible.
One of the early supporters of the xcri-cap standard has been HECSU who have announced they will be using xcri-cap feeds as an mechanism to submit data to their course search facility through Graduate Prospects.

They built a demonstration widget that takes the feed from the Jisc Aggregator, and filters it on some simple criteria to produce a widget that can be put on any webpage in an br.

prospectssoftware.wordpress.com/category/jisc-xcri-cap-w4-project/

A simple webform collects and refines the search criteria:

…Hit the generate button and the preview of the widget is displayed along with the embed code – familiar to all You Tube users…

The code itself can be pasted directly into a page, or edited to follow css rules.
<br src="/img/spacer.gif">