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Guardian HE Live Chat: Open Access in Higher Education, 28/10/2011, 12-2 BST

By Ulrich Tiedau, on 28 October 2011

After a talk point and a poll, the Guardian Professional Higher Education Network wants to give the subject of open access the full consideration it deserves.

To coincide with Open Access Week, on Friday 21 October, from 12–2pm BST, the live chat will consider the various ways in which higher education can become – and is becoming – more open. We will consider what the challenges ahead might be and what policy shifts, as well as cultural shifts are needed.

Guardian Q&As or live chats are always informal and the aim is to share knowledge, experience and allow us to curate a ‘best bits’ full of interesting tips/links on the given subject from our network and for our network.

research teaching relationship – under development

By UCL Women's Liberation, on 9 August 2011

Re-reading the content for the first draft of ”the research teaching relationship’ block I’m overcome with doubts! Is the research teaching nexus qualitatively different to designing a teaching session, or assessment? Is it more abstract?  It is impossible to discuss this topic without theorising, and considering the theorising of others…  but does that mean that it is possible to engage with designing a teaching session or assessment without theorising? Surely not…   I can see the annotated bibliography is going to be particularly important, but I don’t expect people to start reading this all in the original. Does that mean I have to write an overview  or sketchy ‘guide to the territory’ in the introduction? What sort of practical outcomes would be useful as a result of the activities?

Comments welcome…

Xerte Online Toolkits – an ideal OER creation tool?

By Man Yang, on 13 May 2011

Having heard of Xerte a number of times since starting on the OER project but never had a chance to look at it, I was delighted to find that there was a workshop Content Creation in an Open World: Xerte Online Toolkits and the Xpert Repository on the first day of the OER11 conference that took place in Manchester this week.

The Xerte Online Toolkits is an Open Source content creation tool developed by the Information Services team at the University of Nottingham with the help of JISC Techdis. It allows non-technical staff to quickly and easily build rich, interactive and engaging resources with high levels of accessibility already built in.

I was very impressed by this powerful suite of browser-based tools. The wide discussions on “Your ideal OER creation tool” recently suggest people like the OER creation tool to be cross-platform/web-based, easy to use, have the ability to search for and use existing OER content built in, and encourage creativity through the ability to mash-up and remix text, images, audio, video etc. Xerte plus Xpert, which is a repository of open educational learning resources, seem to match the requirements here.

We were giving a USB flash drive with the toolkits on and I can’t wait to get this installed and tried on my machine.

UKPSF Mapping

By uczajah, on 18 February 2011

I met up with Richard Atfield – OMAC Open for Business project leader – a few days ago.  He was interested in our approach to mapping our resources to the UK Professional Standards Framework. We are extending what we do in our accredited course, which is to map our learning outcomes, assessment tasks and activities against elements of the UKPSF.

One interesting thing that came out of our discussion was that the two projects were using mapping for different purposes. Richard was keen to develop a scheme that would aid discoverability whereas I viewed mapping as a quality and evaluation tool – an aid to making our resources fit for purpose.

I’m broadcasting, but is there anyone out there?

By UCL Women's Liberation, on 16 February 2011

I’m finding it harder than I thought to convert activities I’ve done many times in face to face classes to individual study materials!  Even where I had a really clear task specification, if it is read by someone alone out there it is completely missing any context.

So, Ive been busy writing introductions to each activity,  a sort of preamble of all the things I might say when I ask people to do the task in a face to face class. It is very different to have these written down as I make  spontaneous remarks, putting my pre-written task in the context of that particular class, and the history of discussions we’ve had in it. I guess when I introduce a task in class I’m selling it to that very particular audience, and so I might do it in different ways with different groups. When I speak I’m locating the activity in the ongoing history of our relationship, and trying to link back to what was said or done earlier and forward to what we’ll be doing later in the course. By writing down these spontaneous remarks as introductions I’m addressing an imagined reader with whom I have no history and will have no interaction. I wonder what they will make of them…

Interim Programme Meeting

By uczajah, on 28 January 2011

The Interim Programme Meeting began with information on project documentation (we must submit our Interim Report by 21 February) and useful updates on accessibility and evaluation & synthesis – I will look at the document on “outputs” before writing the interim report. Materials from these sessions will be available soon.

In the afternoon, the OMAC strand projects had their own session. It was interesting to hear updates from the other projects – and good to know we are all feeling the pressure of a one-year project timeline.

In the OMAC session, we discussed the question of “community”,  how an OER community in the area of HE learning and teaching can be developed and maintained, whether we have a sense that such a community exists.  Interacting with one another’s blogs was one strategy suggested.

It was nice to make contact again with Richard, from Open for Business.  We hope to meet up again to talk about common issues.  This meeting was also the start of a week’s close collaboration with DELILA. We are paired together for evaluation and we share a critical friend.  The train journey to and from Birmingham gave me a chance to talk through a number of issues with DELILA project director, Jane Secker.

Start tweeting…

By Man Yang, on 27 January 2011

CPD4HE starts tweeting now as we are gearing up for the first release! Follow us on Twitter and be the first to hear news from the CPD4HE project!

HEA workshop for OMAC projects

By uczajah, on 26 November 2010

This workshop on Tuesday 23 was an opportunity to find out about other OER projects in our strand and to hear the latest on the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) from the HEA. We also found out that the consultation on the new PSF is due to begin this week.
One good outcome of the meeting was that the HEA agreed to produce a set of tags for the UKPSF standards, core knowlege, activities and values. If we all use these tags it should help potential users identify useful resources.

OER@UCL

By uczajah, on 11 October 2010

We have come up with the idea of having a UCL top level web page about OER – a space that will show internal and external visitors a snapshot of OER activity in the institution. it might also be a focus as we develop our institutional position on OER.

It’s been agreed that oer@ucl can be linked from the main UCL Teaching and Learning web pages.
Please contribute URLs for OER projects and related activity plus suggestions about other content. We hope to make this web page live within a couple of weeks.

Welcome!

By Man Yang, on 11 October 2010

Welcome to the new CPD4HE project blog. We hope to use this space to share the project information and discuss any issues relevant to the development and use of Open Educational Resource (OER).