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 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…

There is still a lot of development work to do on assessment and feedback. The power point presentations are not informative enough. I need to write texts to make them more useful and also plan to do audio of those texts. I tried voice-overs but there were technical difficulties when I used the power point software. MP3 recorders work better.

Producing these OER materials is exciting and worthwhile. However, uploading your teaching materials is not enough. You need to provide text, audio or video to fill in those gaps which would normally be dealt with through interaction between learners and teacher and learner.

Feedback from our colleagues on the project has been very useful in helping us to get the level of detail right. I just need to find the time to devote to this.

Rosalind Duhs

Saw the news article about iPad Officially Passes the Higher Education Test along with the discussion on iPad in Education in ALT forum recently and felt quite interesting.

OER is about portability and re-usability. As the OER developers, we need think again about the file formats we are using, and how to make our OERs more accessible and adoptable. We are already using HTML and PDF. But EPUB format is missing which is great for iPad. Maybe we should try convert some of our handbooks into eBooks?

With the increasing popularity of iPad,  there is no doubt more people will access the OERs from their iPads. So it’s important that our OERs are iPad friendly!

See this THES article for news of the future OER university, to which we may potentially be contributing: http://tinyurl.com/6ysygh3

Just about to deposit our first release of the resources into JorumOpen. But realised from this week’s  Elluminate session that JorumOpen is no longer exist. Instead all Jorum resources are now in one single database.

It might mean simple platform for Jorum. But be aware that when you search for resources , you will be presented with one single list of resources,  shared under different licence options – Creative Commons and Jorum EducationUK. The latter, which was also introduced recently by Jorum,  allows users to access and use a resource in UK Education for any non-commercial purposes that are conducive to education, teaching, learning, private study and/or research.

It is also interesting to know that new Jorum widgets and API have been developed and will be available for us to use soon. I certainly want to try the widgets on the OER@UCL website, or the  project website?