Su White

Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources

It seems self-evident that life for teachers would be simplified if there existed a large corpus of relevant resources that was available for them to reuse and for inquisitive students to download. The learning object community has worked for the past decade and more to provide the necessary infrastructure, standards, and specifications to facilitate such beneficial activity, but the take-up has been disappointingly small, particularly in University and Higher Education, which is the subject of this research. The problem has been that practitioners have not deposited their teaching resources, or have not made them openly available, in the quantity that would achieve critical mass for uptake. EdShare and the Language Box are two initiatives that have concentrated on the issue of facilitating and improving the practice of sharing, the former in an institutional setting and the latter in a subject community of practice. This paper describes and analyzes the motivations for these projects, the design decisions they took in implementing their repositories, the approaches they took to change agency and practice within their communities, and the changes, in practice, that have so far been observed. The contribution of this paper is an improved understanding of how to encourage educational communities to share.

Critical success factors for e‐learning and institutional change—some organisational perspectives on campus‐wide e‐learning

Computer technology has been harnessed for education in UK universities ever since the first computers for research were installed at ten selected sites in 1957. Subsequently real costs have fallen dramatically. Processing power has increased; network and communications infrastructure has proliferated; and information has become unimaginably accessible through the Internet and the World Wide Web. However, perhaps because higher education institutions are resistant to change, educational technology in universities has not managed to match the ubiquity of technology in everyday life. The reasons for differences between everyday experiences and those higher education and may lie in higher education practice. Higher education practice reflects the wider agendas of institutions manifested through their organisation, structure, culture and climate. These factors may particularly impact upon the potential for higher education to embrace and manage change in its educational activities; especially technology enhanced learning such as blended learning and e-learning. This paper briefly reviews the progress of educational technology, then identifies critical success factors for e-learning through an organisational perspective derived from studies of six UK higher education institutions.

Harnessing Insight into Disciplinary Differences to Refine e-learning Design

Many different teaching methods are used to support learning in higher education. Research into the relationship between the knowledge traditions of fields of study and their most appropriate teaching methods identifies clear differences between the appropriate which are the most suitable in different disciplines. Increasingly, blended approaches to education are being introduced, integrating e-learning with face-to face methods. However, major influences on our understanding of the potential of e-learning have come from psychological and educational perspectives, which are not, of themselves, clearly associated with specific disciplinary needs. This paper identifies e-learning approaches which particularly suit specific disciplinary preferences. It surveys students to identify methods which they believe are particularly relevant to their studies. Their responses support the case for taking a disciplinary perspective when developing blended approaches

CAWS: a wiki system to improve workspace awareness to advance effectiveness of co-authoring activities

Crucial to effective collaborative writing is knowledge of what other people are doing and have done, what meaningful changes are made to a document, who is editing each section of a document and why. This is because awareness of individual and group activities is critical to successful collaboration. This paper presents the problems that surround co-authoring activities, and the advantages of using CAWS are explained and compared with other implementation and techniques for collaborative authoring. This co-authoring wiki based system (CAWS), aims to improve workspace awareness in order to improve user.s response to the document development activit.

Brave new world: can we engineer a better start for freshers?

The crucial importance of first experiences in shaping future success has been widely acknowledged. Creating the best foundations in large cohorts of students from diverse backgrounds presents special problems of its own. But a secure foundation can enhance student achievement and improve retention - and the students may even have fun too. Research has suggested that building learning communities can enhance student engagement and achievement. This paper examines how introducing non-technical activities can establish sound foundations for a university career by a) addressing objectives in the wider curriculum and b) promoting non-technical skills and experience of group working. A set of changes introduced to five degree cohorts in our academic school were designed to complement enhancements to our technical curriculum introduced during many years of debate and consideration. The changes have impacted upon generic and technical educational experiences. The paper presents an evaluation of the programme of changes through two iterations from the perspective of both faculty and student

MOOCs: What Motivates the Producers and Participants?

Within the current educational landscape, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have stimulated extensive interest and hype in a short time. It has been asserted that these open courses are no more than a prelude to the disruption that traditional Higher Education Institutions will experience from the growth of on-line education. Meanwhile, institutions are making increasingly significant investments to produce MOOCs, and learners are enthusiastically enrolling in large numbers, often in tens of thousands. The analysis presented identifies a spectrum of motivating factors for universities, and suggests likely areas for future attention and developments. It further identifies a range of motivations for learner participation, which may not be identical across cultures and which MOOC providers might wish to take into account.

Personalisation of MOOCs

Researchers in the field of educational technology are paying huge attention to the widespread adoption of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the study of learning online. MOOCs are discussed in many angles including pedagogy, learning sustainability, and business model. However, there are very few discussions around MOOCs personalisation. In this paper, it is aimed to examine and analyse the literature on personalisation of MOOCs to identify the needs, the current states and efforts to personalise learning in MOOCs. The findings denote that the pedagogical design of MOOCs is currently insufficient due to massive and geographically dispersed learners with diverse educational backgrounds, learning requirements and motivations. Many believe that personalisation could address this lacking in MOOCs. Among the most popular services being proposed or implemented in the literature are personalised learning path, personalised assessment and feedback, personalised forum thread and recommendation service for related learning materials or learning tasks.

Perspectives on developing and assessing professional values in computing

This paper discusses how to ensure that students attain professional values important to the workplace by integrating them into computing curricula. It describes a survey of the attitudes of students, faculty and professionals in computing towards the teaching and assessment of such values. The results show that these groups share a set of professional values, though students are less convinced of their importance in the work environment. There is broad consensus on the specific behaviors and attitudes reflective of these values to be developed in the curriculum. The groups differed in their opinions of whether these attitudes and behaviors could be workably assessed.

Breaking down the barriers: an architecture for developing and delivering resource based learning materials

In this paper we explore the barriers which currently exist to the successful integration of computer based materials into everyday teaching and learning. These barriers are both technological and cultural. We argue that a major shift in educational practice will not take place until we change the whole philosophy of the culture of production of computer based learning materials to that of a resource based approach. Such material should be integrated with, rather than isolated from, standard computer applications and should be easily customizable and extensible. We suggest an architecture which promotes this approach based on Microcosm, an open hypermedia software platform which has been developed at the University of Southampton. We use examples from the Scholar Project at Southampton to demonstrate how this approach can be successfully applied on an institutional basis.

Quality assurance and learning technologies: intersecting agendas in UK higher education

This paper looks at developments in the use of learning technologies in UK higher education, particularly in recent years. It examines the agenda items for learning and teaching associated with the use of new technologies that have emerged in the context of the current agenda for quality assessment and assurance. The paper considers the ways in which the two agendas work in a complementary manner, and the ways in which they create tensions. Finally, it considers the likely path of future developments and considers a way forward in which existing tensions may be reconciled.