Year: 2017

Day 3: Structuring your module

Reading Time: 3 minutes

A number of years ago, a range of school templates were developed for My Dundee – and most users have continued to use them, however, it may be that format is not as appropriate as it could be for your particular module, and the way that you teach it, especially if you want to move to a more blended learning approach.

However, Blackboard offers a range of different approaches to laying out a module, and we will look at these today.

 

Over the last 2 days we have encouraged you to think about the types of content that should be in a module, we’ll now start to think about different way of arranging material. Typically – and this is true of Universities the world over, it’s not just Dundee – staff have put material in their VLE on a weekly basis; sometimes making a very long list of materials (perhaps they were aiming to minimise the number of clicks students have to make, or perhaps they didn’t know how to create folders). Others have created a folder a week, but then only had 1 item for some weeks – which leads extra clicking for the students.

However, not all modules are taught in clear “weeks”. You may have a theme that covers several weeks, or perhaps the module is project based, and students are building a lot of the content as they develop it.

To cater for differently structured modules (courses, in Blackboard speak) there are a number of pre-defined options. In the resources section, you’ll find a link to the range of types of structure they have pre-defined – and downloadable .pdf files explaining a little more about them.

There are, of course, conventions that you’ll want to maintain, for example, ensuring that assignment related materials, whether that’s a Turnitin dropbox, or instructions for how to upload a podcast, are all kept together, in an area with a name that your department has adopted.

Screenshot - expedition based Structure
Click for larger version

 

In the resources section, there’s a link to Blackboard’s descriptions of the different structures.

We have created a few examples using the sample material – they’re set so that you can self enrol. Most of the content is hidden from students, so once you have enrolled, contact Emma Duke-Williams, and I will upgrade you to Instructor (so, be careful if you have a play to not edit content that others may want to look at!)

If you want to experiment altering your own course, you have two options.

1: Request a sandbox module from elearning.
2: Have a go in your module. Note that all content the change adds is hidden from students, and it doesn’t alter your content. However, it does add new links in the left menu that students can see.

 

Blackboard’s information on Course Structures Includes downloadable files describing the different setups.

Iowa State’s information on Course Structures (have a look, in particular, at the Game based approach example)

One of the structures was called “Constructivist” – if that’s a term you haven’t come across before, here is a brief slideshare that summarises it. It’s highly likely that, as a good teacher, you’re already employing this approach – without calling it constructivism.

I’m sure many of you have seen Padlet – as it’s something we often recommend. For unfamiliar with it, it’s a shared white board that all can add comments, images, etc. to.

We’ve created one for this session Module Makeover and hope you’ll share ideas for what you’d like to do.

Day 4: Adding Interactivity 1 (Quizzes)

Head, full of cogwheels and a questionmark
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Head, full of cogwheels and a questionmark
Created by “Tumisu”; shared on Pixaby with CC0 licence.

Most academics know that students value having formative assessment within a module (even if they don’t always access it as often as you might like). Today, we’ll have a look at the Quiz tools that are in My Dundee, and some of the other options that you might want to us, to enable students to engage with formative assessment.

If you haven’t looked at the quiz tools in My Dundee for some time, you might be pleasantly surprised to find the range of question types that are now available.

screenshot
Click larger version

Blackboard has descriptions of all the question types, and information about scoring options etc.

As formative assessment is primarily to find out what students don’t know, so that they can learn it, one useful trick can be, rather than thinking of multiple choice questions to cover key facts, to have short answer questions – that aren’t automatically graded. You can then skim the answers given by students, and give support in class for common misconceptions. (This method can also be useful to start to build up possible answers for multiple choice, as you’ll be including common errors, rather than errors you think the students might make).

Another option for involving students in this process is Peerwise. It allows you to get students to create multiple choice questions for each other – which gets them to engage with the content, and to identify what the key concepts are.

David Martin (Life Sciences) has used this, and has a playlist of videos to help you get going as a tutor. (Hint: To start, click on the “Get Started” link in the upper right of the screen, don’t try to find Dundee in the large search box!)

How would you see your use of formative assessment in your modules? Do they lend themselves well to multiple choice and other objective question types, or do you feel there are other ways that work better with your cohort?

What do you feel about peer / self assessment? Both My Dundee and Turnitin allow you to set up peer assessments for essays etc, to allow students to reflect on each other’s work – and both allow you to create a series of questions to help the students comment on others work.

If there are any students reading this – what are your feelings on self/peer assessment? Have you had to take part in peer assessment, either at University, or in school/College? What value did you get from having your work peer assessed? What  did you gain from assessing someone else’s?

Blackboard quiz creator

If you are using the basic question types in Blackboard, there are a number of sites that allow you to create a file of questions, and import them into Blackboard.

  • Newcastle – this allows you to include feedback; and it creates a zip file for import into a pool. Once you have input your text, click the “Blackboard” button to generate the zip file.
  • College of DuPage – an overview of other’s tools, (including Southern Idaho, who developed the original tool).

Supporting research

  • Kivunja, C. (2015). Why Students Don’t Like Assessment and How to Change Their Perceptions in 21st Century Pedagogies. Creative Education, 6(20), 2117–2126. https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2015.620215
    Covers assessment generally, rather than just formative, but makes suggestions for approaches to assessment generally.
  • Raes, A., Vanderhoven, E., & Schellens, T. (2015). Increasing anonymity in peer assessment by using classroom response technology within face-to-face higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 40(1), 178-193. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2013.823930
    While this looks at Classroom response technology, it covers peer assessment generally. The options we have in Turnitin and Blackboard allow for the peer assessment to be anonymous.

The Distracted classroom

A series of posts on The Chronicle of Higher Education, looking how technology can distract students, but also how staff can use it to engage students in the classroom.

Question the guru

Many of you will have read Phil Race’s books, and will have seen some of his presentations. In August, he’s offering to answer your questions! August Project: your questions please . So far, he’s not shared any questions on his site, could someone from Dundee be the first?!

As we all know designing MCQs isn’t as easy as it could be. You may have seen this before, as Phil Race uses it frequently – though it’s been used by quite a lot of others, and appears to have originated in Australia.

Day 5: Adding Interactivity 2 (Communication)

Figures linked by lines
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Figures linked by lines
Created by Open Clip Art Vectors, shared on Pixaby with CC0 licence.

Today, we’ll focus on communication, both between students, and from staff to students. To start, though, lets think about the welcome message. Earlier in the week, Natalie looked at a welcoming message. We’ll start by looking at some ideas for getting video communication going.

Video

Welcome video

A welcoming video can be very powerful, not only for distance learning students, but also for campus based students, who may be looking at the module before the first class. Blackboard has a list of the type of things that work well in an introductory video – and have a look at the first link in that which is a Prezi going into a little more detail, including some practical suggestions for when you are creating them.

Student videos

One way to get students to interact could be to get them to create their own videos – we are currently investigating video platforms that would allow students to create and upload videos to a server (more on that when we have it fully up and running). For the time being, however, we have Kaltura. Students can create a video on their phones, and then upload using Kaltura to a discussion post in My Dundee. Simply click the “Mashup” link, select Kaltura, and then Add New on the next screen.

Alternatively, students may prefer to upload to YouTube, but they need to think about privacy issues; a video uploaded to Kaltura is only visible to those within the University who have the link.

Lecture preparation videos

Witton (2017), looking at pilot of video capture at Wolverhampton, found that the most useful type of pre-recorded videos, according to the students, were lab demonstrations of what they would be doing in practical classes.

Here at Dundee, we’ll be running a similar pilot this academic year – as already noted, we’re in the process of setting this up – more when we have got it all in place. However if you are interested in finding out more, comment below or contact eLearning. We also have a (very wee!) video production team, who may be able to help you – contact eLearning if you want to find out more.

Synchronous video

For a number of years now, we have had Blackboard’s Collaborate video conferencing system. This has been difficult for some users, as it involved the installation of a Java based client. For the past year or so, we have had access to Blackboard Collaborate Ultra – which has a much newer technology base. If you have new versions of browsers it will work without any need to install anything. (If you have an older browser, you’ll have to have Flash installed). It also works on Android and iOS phones/tablets.

Collaborate Ultra is updated frequently, so, even if you looked at it 6 months ago, you may well find it has newer features; below is the latest video Blackboard have produced to outline its key features (August 2017)

We have looked at video – though by no means all possible uses of video. Are there others that you have used or are considering using with students?

How else do you get students to engage with each other? How much do you find they engage with it? Do you feel it matters if they don’t?

We also have a range of tools available via Office 365, many of which can be used by groups of students. One tool that you may like to have a look at is Class Notebook. You may also have spotted that once you have signed into My Dundee – you’re automatically signed in to Office 365 (and vice versa), now that UoDIT have started to implement Single Sign On.

There are many other ways that you could get students to collaborate – we used Jane Hart’s top 200 tools as the link of the day in an earlier post; she links to many collaborative tools.

Students, if you are reading this – how to do you engage with other students? Online? Offline? Do you use different methods for communicating with classmates to those you use for communicating with your friends and family? How would you like staff to communicate with you?

Collaborate Ultra

Related research

Byrne, A. (2016). Podcasting for Learning and Assessment in Undergraduate History. Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching, 8(12). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.21100/compass.v8i12.258 Also applies to other disciplines!

Manathunga, K., & Hernández-Leo, D. (2016). PyramidApp: Scalable Method Enabling Collaboration in the Classroom. In K. Verbert, M. Sharples, & T. Klobučar (Eds.), Adaptive and Adaptable Learning: 11th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2016, Lyon, France, September 13-16, 2016, Proceedings (pp. 422–427). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45153-4_37 This article looks at how collaborative tools can be used with very large groups, to get discussions going, without overwhelming individuals.

Other materials

The NMC / Educause have published their horizons report for over 10 years, this summarises the 2017 Higher Education report. Communication and Collaboration are seen as being key. The full report is available to download online. 

 

While Sugata Mitra focuses on children’s learning, the points he make apply to everyone; regardless of age. This is a TED speech he gave in 2013.

 

 

Learning X 2017-18 Season kicks off with Module Makeover

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Building on the success of last semester’s first Learning X series theme on Copyright, we’ve planned a whole Season of Learning X for the 2017/18 academic session.  If you missed our first series, Learning X is our online approach to supporting learning and teaching in a digital world and consists of short and snappy online guided learning activities relating to everyday learning and teaching practice.  By developing a themed approach we hope that groups and individuals can learn together and develop learning conversations and networks.  The beauty of delivering this online is that you can join in when you want and the content will always be available.  We’re developing Learning X as a hybrid pedagogy approach and each series will be accompanied by a complementary workshop so that staff can meet up and ask further questions, get additional advice, tips and support.

The new season kicks off on Monday 7 August with a Module makeover series designed to help you get your modules ready for the start of the new session. Module makeover will encourage you to think about developing a module checklist to ensure you have all the key information ready to view for your students.  It will also point you to online learning on the web to help inspire you and highlight some tools and approaches that you might not be aware of. There will also be a Module Makeover workshop/surgery on Wednesday 9 August from 10.00-12.00hrs in the Eduzone in the Library.

The Learning X 2017/18  season Semester 1 schedule continues as outlined below.

28 August: Copyright – this series returns refreshed for a rerun with an accompanying workshop on 7th September.

2 October: Learning Footprints – this series will explore concepts such as digital residents and visitors together with personal learning environments and networks and also discuss privacy and safety in digital learning habitats.

9 October: Digital Scholarship – here we’ll be making use of the Open University’s OpenLearn module on the Digital Scholar to help highlight how we can harness digital approaches to our work around the scholarship of learning and teaching here at Dundee.

In semester 2 we’ll go on to explore themes such as learning design and assessment and we’ll publish dates for these once they’re confirmed.  In between our Learning X series  we’ll also be publishing one-off episodes to in response to direct requests we receive from the learning and teaching community and also focussing on innovative teaching approaches.

If you have suggestions for other topics and themes that we should be looking at over the next year please let us know.

What is Learning X?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Welcome to a new online, informal, programme we’re calling Learning X. It will look at various topics in learning and teaching, and should give you food for thought, as well as some practical tips.

Over time, Learning X will publish “seasons” of blog posts, each running over the course of a week or so. They’ll contain activities focusing on learning and teaching activities (usually, but not exclusively, using technology).

(more…)

Introducing: Searching, Using and Sharing.

Metaphorical depiction of Corporate Capitalism fighting the Public Domain with Free Culture being offered as the 'Achilles Heel'.
Reading Time: 2 minutes

When staff want to add materials to learning resources, whether they are resources they’re intending to use in class, or material to supplement learning that they want to put into My Dundee, they are used to checking the materials to ensure their accuracy. However, a big concern of staff at present, is ensuring they have the relevant permissions to use them. For many educators, this is a minefield, and may even deter them from finding valuable resources.

Over the course of next week, we will look at how you can search for resources, images, audio, video, research data, or even complete learning resources that others have created. We’ll focus on how you can ensure the material you can finding has the permissions that allow to use it in your teaching. We’ll then look at how you might use these to engage your students.  Finally, we’ll look at how you could share the materials you have created with others – even those outside Dundee.

What is Copyright?

This is what Wikipedia says about copyright:

“Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution. This is usually only for a limited time. The exclusive rights are not absolute but limited by limitations and exceptions to copyright law, including fair use. A major limitation on copyright is that copyright protects only the original expression of ideas, and not the underlying ideas themselves

Copyright is a form of intellectual property, applicable to certain forms of creative work. Some, but not all jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and “moral rights” such as attribution (Copyright, 2017)

To reproduce a copyrighted image, piece of music, animation, video, etc. you may have to pay to reuse it for your own purposes or get permission from the creator of the original work to use it. In other cases, permission for sharing may have been granted by the original creator – it is these resources that are developed with the intention of being shareable that we are concentrating on next week.

Metaphorical depiction of Corporate Capitalism fighting the Public Domain with Free Culture being offered as the 'Achilles Heel'.

“BATTLE OF COPYRIGHT” flickr photo by Christopher Dombres  shared into the public domain using (CC0)

References

Day 2: Searching – Licensed Resources

Neon 'Open' sign
Reading Time: 3 minutes

We have looked at open-licensed images, such as the Creative Commons licenses, pre-approved for reuse and sharing. The images used on this blog come with Creative Commons licensing terms – we know that we can use them, because their owners granted permission. Please note that using material available for free or licensed for reuse, should be rights cleared, and that you include an appropriate attribution.

Information

The focus of today is on introducing tips to searching and reusing high quality resources that are licensed but available for your teaching. One of the challenges that many academics face when preparing material for use online, is the uncertainty of how to source third party material copyright cleared for educational use. The most common infringement is the unauthorised copying and uploading of images and journal articles. In order to best protect yourself against unintended infringement, we recommend you take a look at the excellent list of resources available for reuse that the Library and Learning Centre (LLC) subscribes to.

Open - written in lights
Attribution: © Finn Hackshaw 2016, used under a Creative Commons Zero license – CC0 1.0 via Unsplash

Embedding video in Blackboard

While you may have found Blackboard’s ‘Mashup’ tool useful for Yuja (the University’s video service) and YouTube, it can be a bit more fiddly to embed other video tools. This video shows you how to use embed codes that bob and other licensed services use.

Finding relevant material

In this activity we would like you explore the library’s Types of Resources – electronic resources that includes e-books, e-journals as well as video, image and sound repositories. The subject guides are useful for pointing you to subject specific resources – but don’t ignore other subject areas, you might well find useful resources.

  1.  How might you re-use the material for your teaching or your own development?
  2. What are the advantages and disadvantages for using licensed material, in particular, what are the terms and conditions for re-use as these can vary and what are the restrictions for use in the VLE?
  3. How do you feel about searching for licensed images using the library’s collection as opposed to searching for material ‘out there’ on the web?

Please post a comment to share your views about one or two of the resources that you’ve looked at. You are encouraged to comment on each other’s entries and you may wish to take notes in your blog, tweet or anything related to this activity.

Note: While most content can be used via your Dundee authentication off campus wherever you are, some, e.g. bob  (Box of Broadcasts) are limited to the UK only.

LinkedIn learning (Lynda)

The University subscribes to LinkedIn Learning (used to be called Lynda). You can login using your University email address – note that it may ask you if you want to link it with your existing LinkedIn profile, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. While this predominantly covers Business, Creative and Technology courses, if you’re in other fields you may find that some of the Office 365 videos are useful to get a greater understanding of what you can do with the tools we have. For example, there’s one on using Office 365 teams

Resources and guides

Uploading e-journals and articles downloaded from the web into the VLE is not permitted. Instead of uploading articles create web links to the articles into your module or use the Library’s online Reading Lists service.

Link of the day

Instructables is a fun resource for exploring and for sharing resources on how to make things. Always read the terms and conditions for use.

Instructables – Explore. Share. Make.

Day 3: Searching – Beyond images

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Over the last two days, we have concentrated primarily on images; both those that are creative commons, and those that are licensed via the University. However, many staff want resources that aren’t images to support their learning resources. If you looked at the State of the Commons report in the first day of this course, then you’ll know that Creative Commons licences are applied to all media types. We will be looking at some of these today.

Information

Text

Over recent years, the concept of Open Access for publications is becoming more well known. In addition to open access journals, there are other sources of content. For example, how would you feel about pointing your students to the blog of a well known researcher in your field? In the field of Open Educational Practices, I might point students to Viv’z Blog. (and, yes, that is a ‘z in the name!) For an alternative to expensive text books, there are a number of open book initiatives; Wikibooks is part of the Wikimedia foundation, while the Open Text book library has books covering a range of subjects. In addition, a number of University Presses include freely downloadable .pdf versions of their publications (e.g. Athabasca, Cambridge [select Only show open access] – and there are others)

Source: Piled Higher and Deeper (25 Oct, 2012) Open Access Explained

Audio.

You may well be used to using podcasts for personal interest, but have you found any that are useful for your students? As well as videos, TEDTalks are also available as audio. Alternatively, Freesound gives you lots of different creative commons licensed sounds, and the Free Music Archive is just that.

Video

For videos, as well as TED and YouTube, you might want to have a look at Videolectures.net – which has a vast database of lectures, not all in English. It covers lectures, conferences, tutorials, keynotes…

Data.

Increasingly, as research moves towards open access, so data is also being shared. As well as the UK Data Archive,  there is also Wikidata. If you are interested in data that others have processed, you may find some useful resources in Figshare. One of the most visually appealing ways of presenting data is Hans Rosling’s Gapminder site.

 
Source: Gapminder Foundation (22 March 2009) 200 years that changed the world (with Hans Rosling) Shared with a CC licence

Open Educational Resources

Many of these resources have a role in education, even if they were designed for other uses. There are also many materials that are specifically called Open Educational Resources (OERs). They may be small (e.g. a video, a quiz, etc) or large (a whole course). They are usually tagged (labelled) with additional information to help you select material that is the correct level for your students – though as always, you know your students, you know what they have already covered – the description was the one the creator at the time felt correct. One useful source of these is OER Commons. Closely related to OERs are MOOCs. The main difference between a MOOC and an OER that’s a whole course is the timing. A MOOC has a starting point and an ending point. This can enable far more interaction to happen between learners and tutors, (as with any distance learning course), but you are tied to someone else’s schedule, which may not fit with your teaching plans. The University of Dundee runs a number of MOOCs on Futurelearn, you might want to have a look at some of them. Perhaps you’ll be involved with one in the future.

Over to you

We have given you a vast number of links in the previous page, you may only have had time to look at one or two – and those links we have given you are only the tip of the iceberg for what is out there. What we’d like you to do is to find a resource for a module you’re teaching; ideally, of a type you haven’t thought about including in a module before. You might want to use one of our sources, or you might have read about a different repository you like; perhaps one that is very much centred on your subject area. How easy was it to find, and, crucially evaluate the material, to see if it was useful for your students (or yourself, if there’s something you want to learn). Are there other repositories that you have found valuable in the past that haven’t been listed here? How easy do you think it would be for students to use these resources to find additional material to support coursework? How would you feel if a student referenced a YouTube video, or a TED talk, or an OER from another University in an assessment?

Resources

Once you have found some resources, you may well want to include them in your module on MyDundee. While you can provide a link to a resource, it makes your site more visually appealing if you can embed them. If you haven’t done this before, here are guides on the Blackboard Help Website (you might find some of the other help pages useful for other aspects of your use of MyDundee.

If you are a Moodle user:

Yesterday, when we asked you to look in the library databases, we mentioned that some of the sources were audio/video resources. Remember, if you are using these licensed resources, you’ll have to make sure you check the licence agreement. In particular, Box of Broadcasts requires that the viewers are in the UK (as well as being members of the University).

With all of the external resources, as well as evaluating them for content, you should try to locate the original version. When searching for resources, you may come across Sci Hub – treat this with caution, as many of the papers are pirated.

Creating your own resources

As a starter, you might like to look at the UX Comic Pattern Library. This is a set of powerpoint (and Keynote) slides that have graphics on – which you can rearrange into images (think Fuzzy Felts on screen!). The links to the downloadable Powerpoint / Keynote files are right at the bottom of the page. If you create anything and would like to share it – add a link to it in the comments.

Link(s) of the day

OEPS (Open Educational Practices Scotland) has a range of materials – there’s a link from that page to their own site; both sites are worth exploring if you are interested. You may have seen JORUM in the past; JISC is no longer actively developing it, but many of the items in it have been moved to their App Store. This includes some offline activities.

 

Day 4: Sharing Resources

Sharing symbol
Reading Time: 4 minutes

We have looked at some of the resources that the University licenses to use in teaching and introducing you to the world of open content that’s free to reuse with a Creative Commons licence.   Now our focus turns to material that you have created and how you can licence, publish and share it so that others can make use of it too.

Information

There are a lot of ways to publish and share content. Where you decide to publish your work will depend on the type of content and the audience that you want to reach and how you want to licence it.  Photographs, pieces of writing, videos, presentations, data and 3D models can all be shared in different places, with some platforms better suited to particular types of content.  It’s important review the terms and conditions of any publishing platform you choose to make sure that you’re not transferring or losing the rights to your own work.

If you’ve decided that you want to share your content as an open educational resource (OER)  think about which Creative Commons (CC) license you want to use. The Creative Commons website can help you through this decision-making process and give you more information about how to share your content.

If your work is in a Word document or PowerPoint presentation you might want to take advantage of the CC license plug-in for Microsoft Office. You can download this from the Microsoft website, however it’s is only available for PC users and isn’t yet compatible with Windows 10.

One thing to remember before you share your work anywhere is to make sure that you always keep a back-up copy of your original.  It’s not unknown for web platforms to go out of business so always, always make sure you have an original safely filed.

Publishing to your own Website

Perhaps the easiest way to publish and share your content is to have your own website or blog. Blogging software like Blogger, WordPress and Weebly have become very popular publishing platforms. We now have LearningSpaces, which is a hosted version of WordPress. If you’re interested, contact us via Help4U to request a site.  Another option is Reclaim Hosting where for a relatively small annual fee you can register your own domain and run your own site.

Video

The most popular places to post video content are YouTube and Vimeo.   From here it’s easy for anyone to share your content vis social media channels and to reuse it through the use of embed codes and mash-up tools. Whilst YouTube is more popular, Vimeo has several advantages, the licencing is clearer and if you decide to update your video the new version simply overwrites the old, which means that anyone who has embedded it will see the latest version.  You can also allow people to download your video if you are happy to share it that way.

Photographs and images

For the photographers amongst you Flickr is a good option to go with.  You can select an all rights reserved or CC licence for your work, it also lets you set a default licence so that all your uploads are automatically licensed as you want them to be.

Presentations

Slideshare is to presentations what Flickr is for photographs.  It too lets you set a default CC licence but you can set different licences for each individual presentation that you share.  Slideshare is also good for sharing PDF files and it’s become a popular platform for sharing presentations and handouts from conferences. You can easily reuse content from Slideshare again by using an embed code and share to social media channels.  Here’s an example from Jesse Stommel from University Mary Washington that has as an OER theme.

If you are creating a presentation, video or a larger OER or MOOC, then you will need to take care to share it with the same licence as the original components. It may be that you have different licences for specific items. For example, you might have used some images that could be modified on the basis that you attributed and shared alike, whilst others were used on the basis that they couldn’t be modified. Therefore, it’s important that you include a reference to the attribution of individual elements and you’ll probably need to share the overall resource on the basis of the most restrictive of the licences covered in your content.

Make sure you double check how the original work you are modifying was licensed.  Here’s an example of piece of work that was shared from the Medical School.  It’s a 3D model of the larynx which built upon an original model from The Database Center for Life Science in Japan shared on CC Attribution-Share alike licence. This re-worked model has been shared under the same licence and you can take a look at it on Sketchfab.  It was then re-used further by a student in this video and here too it has been re-shared under the same type of CC licence.

Over to you

We’ve covered quite a lot this week so take time now to reflect on the key thing you feel you’ve learned or discovered.  If you have time share it in the comments.

Also if you’ve found this useful and have ideas of other topics you would like us to cover in the future please do leave a comment.

Resources

There’s a growing movement around open education internationally and a desire to share open knowledge. Check out the Open Knowledge Network to find out more about the types of projects in this area.

Link of the Day

Open education practice and the movement around OER are becoming a growing focus for educational research.  A special edition of the Journal of Internet and Media Research in 2014 focussed on open learning and included five chapters from the book ‘Reusing Resources: Learning in Open Networks for Work, Life and Education’ edited by Allison Littlejohn and Chris Pegler.  Have a read of Allison and Chris’ editorial on Reusing Resources: Open for Learning to delve deeper into the world of OERs.

Day 5: Using open educational resources

Open Educational Resource Logo
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Over the past few days you’ve been picking up tips on how to search for openly licensed content and introducing you to some of the collections that the University licences. Once you’ve found content you’re going to want to use and today we’ll begin to explore some ways that you might do that that which are a bit more appealing than giving students a list of links in a Word document or in the VLE.

Information

If you want to share licensed resources in your teaching the easiest way to do this is through the University reading list software, if you’re unfamiliar with this check out the information on the LLC website.

Reusing online resources is very much like referencing in a research or scholarly article you need to make sure you reference your sources and provide the appropriate attribution.  If you re-use a picture in PowerPoint, a video or an online learning resource it’s important to remember to give attribution. It’s worth checking out the Creative Commons guide on best practices for attribution for examples of how to do this well.

Given that you need to include attribution it’s helpful to think about how you manage and organise the different resources that you want to use, modify and adapt in your teaching.  There are lots of ways you can file your links and resources, some people bookmark sites in their web browser, some file in a Word doc or an Excel file, some might even still write the details on a file card and file it in A-Z file box.  There are other tools that you can use such as social bookmarking tools like Diigo.  These work as an extension on your web browser and let you save the link, add comments and tags and save to lists too.  It’s easy then to search and find links that you’ve saved going back several years.  If you’re working on a project you can create a project tag so that you can easily filter and find the resources you’ve used.  Diigo and Delicious allow you to keep your bookmarks private or public if you opt for public you can share them easily with a class or colleagues, here’s a link to my saved bookmarks on copyright.

An easy way to keep track of any images you might use is to make use of the new Creative Commons search where you can create an account and save and tag images into lists so that you have a record of the ones you want to use.  It also generates the attribution credits so that you can easily copy and paste it in where you need it.

Curating content

A key role in teaching is being the guide on the side and signposting students to learning and this is where existing resources come into their own as we can point students to open textbooks, videos, data sets, 3D models and weave them into our own teaching narratives.  In this role we’re essentially curating content, creating digital handouts and there are growing numbers of digital tools that allow us to do this in more visual ways.  Here are a few examples which have free level accounts that you can try out.

Scoop.it allows you to curate content from the web add comments and then publish to a topic page.  It also lets you autopost to Twitter, Facebook and other sites so learners can engage through their favourite channel.  You can also embed Scoop.it into MyDundee.

Wakelet allows you to use to build learning stories that pull in content from multiple sources. It’s easy to embed YouTube videoes, Slideshare presentations, Flickr images, tweets from Twitter or Facebook posts you can embed any weblink.  Once you’ve published your story you can easily update it and continue to build on it.

Another great way to re-use content is to use a blogging tool like blogger or WordPress which we’re using here.  Blogs are an easy way to create and publish content and it’s relatively easy to embed images, videos and other forms of re-usable content just like this RSA Animate version of a Ken Robinson Ted Talk below, which was s simple cut and paste of the YouTube url.

Over to you

Take your pick form one of these activities:

Try out the new Creative Commons search feature and search for an image and post this into a PowerPoint slide, Word document, or your blog and then copy and paste the attribution.

Explore one of the content curation or bookmarking tools, you can create a free account on one of these and give it a try or do a search to find examples of how Wakelet, Scoop.it, blogs etc are being used in learning and teaching. You can explore one of my Scoop.it topics to get you started.

Could you see how these tools might be useful in your teaching or if you’re a student could they be a useful way to organise usefullearnign resources?

Let us know what you think in the comments section.

 

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LearningX by Centre for Innovation and Technology in Learning (CTIL), University of Dundee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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