Top 5 Open Educational Resource sites

So... have you heard about Open Educational Resources (OER)?  Well, if you haven't, then you're potentially missing out on a whole load of good stuff which is freely and openly available for you to enrich your teaching (and / or learning).  How great does that sound?  I've gathered together some of my favourite OER sites for you to explore.

But, first of all... a little introduction to 'why open education matters' which I thought you might like!




Jorum

Jorum - the free online repository from JISC

This is a JISC-funded service and you'll just find lots and lots of free online resources here for you to look at and reuse.  Not only that but there are also discussions forums available where you can share ideas as well as plenty of support resources to get you started.

This isn't just about what you can access, however, it's easy to share resources too provided you're a member of a Further or Higher Education institution.  Great stuff!


Merlot

MERLOT Multimedia Educational Resource
for Learning and Online Teaching

An OER Granddaddy having been around since 1997, Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching or MERLOT (which is far easier to say!) is a community for sharing online open resources and there are thousands and thousands of them available from activities and learning materials to links to external resources.

Although there is inevitably a bias towards American resources (as MERLOT is based at the California State University) and it can feel a little dated at times, you can search or browse what they've got and normally turn up goodies from all over the place which makes a visit well worth while!


OER Commons

OER Commons from ISKME

Another OER site this time created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) from the United States and this one has been around since 2007 and aims to create a knowledge base around the use of OER as well as providing a platform for sharing and reuse of resources.  It's easier to search rather than browse due to the high proliferation of secondary school-level resources and the tools to refine your search make this a straightforward process.

One of the nicest features about OER Commons is the Open Author tool which is part of contributing a resource.  It basically allows you to create a resource from a number of different elements - video, images, sound, text etc - in a simple editor so that you can share it with others using OER Commons.


Creative Commons Search

Creative Commons Search

I really like the simplicity of the Creative Commons Search site.  If you're not after searching for open courses but what you're after are individual resources, then this is an excellent place to start.  There are two main choices for licenses that you can modify - use for commercial purposes or to modify, adapt, build upon - and selecting these will generally reduce the amount of results you get, but will turn up resources which give you more flexible options for re-use.

Essentially what this site does is to offer easy access to Creative Commons searches from lots of different places - Flickr for fabulous images, Open Clip Art Library for a cornucopia of graphics, music from Jamendo and ccMixter and cc-licensed video from YouTube.  It's an excellent starting place and very simple to use.


OER Glue

OER Glue - simple and lots of potential

OER Glue allows you to glue together OER (unsurprisingly!) from around the web (YouTube, Wikipedia, the OpenCourseWare Consortium etc to create courses which can then be shared, remixed, copied etc.  You can also find courses to take yourself and then, using their little toolbar in Chrome, find other people studying that course which could help boost the interactivity and community further.

I've included it here because I like the idea of it and think there's some potential with this... plus there are some good looking courses to which it links... but... to be honest, I found it a rather confusing experience and somewhat flaky!

So, there you have it.  Five sites for OER loveliness!

Do you use OER in your teaching / learning?  What sites would you recommend?

Sarah

Event report: ALT-C 2012 - A First Time Delegate

I’d been wanting to attend the ALT-C Conference for the past few years - and this time actually made it - and was presenting a short paper!  I’d heard great things about the conference from previous years and now was the opportunity to experience it for real.  I attended on Tuesday and Thursday.

The University of Manchester

Venue
Hosted by the University of Manchester it was easy to get there from Sheffield and attendees came from a variety of places both across the UK and internationally.  As the conference was hosted mainly in one building it was very easy to switch between sessions and make good use of the break-time for meeting new people (and drinking coffee).

Welcoming Address and Keynote
The welcoming address and keynote opening keynote provided many thoughtful ideas.  Nancy Rothwell implied that students would prefer online content as an addition to face-to-face contact, rather than a total replacement.  Eric Mazur took us all on on a journey about understanding, attention levels and the perils of explaining concepts in didactic lectures.  Apparently students’ brains are more active when asleep then when attending lectures!  The solution to this: time for thought, interactivity active questioning and participation.  Also touched on the idea that being confused is not mutually-exclusive to understanding something better.  Those students that feel confused are often more engaged and have a better understanding of concepts than those that think they know and consider themselves not confused.  Confusing - but makes sense!


Sessions
There were so many sessions to attend  - but I was able to plan in advance using the live timetable on Crowdvine.  I decided not to follow a theme - but pick based on interest - hoping to sample a broad range of themes and issues.

Disruptive Technologies in Higher Education proceedings paper in the Problem Solving Research Session provided a great overview of the current relationship between higher education and technology: Highlighting the difference between sustaining technologies (enhancing existing provision) versus disruptive technologies (replacing and change to a different system).

Directly following this was a paper on Preparing the foundations for video-based practice-placement support: establishing the role from a students’ perspective.  This explored the issues over providing support to students on placement via video conferencing.  Main point to come out was that this is a great way of providing support to students but with potential issues over the amount of emotional support that could be given if a student was struggling or upset if this was the only support available.  What if the student was ‘hiding’ the true extent of problems?  All issues to be considered.

Pecha Kucha are one/two words that I still have trouble saying correctly!  Attending PK Session 2 was a whirlwind - with so many great presentations.  For me, the stand-out one was given by Lindsay Jordan about getting students on an Initial Teacher Training Course excited and engaged with technology.  Initially apprehensive, students were asked to produce video work for assessment.  After quite a lot of struggling the end results were not only amazing but the students, now as teachers, have gone on to inspire their students in the use of technology and video. Lindsay was dressed as a miner all the way through - to exemplify the ethos that it can be hard or embarrassing to do something - but it gets you positive attention and can produce great results.

Screenshot of Study Day Presentation

On Thursday morning Extending opportunities for life-long learning in a digital age was a workshop looking at issues between programmes, institutions and employers in enabling lifelong learning.  For me the main point coming out was how the rigidity of institutions are often a barrier to enabling innovative programmes.  In order to provide a good experience the devil was in the detail of getting systems working, or alternatives setup in order to provide courses and resources for workplaces or individuals outside the ‘usual’ context of college or university.

Experience of Presenting
Presenting my short paper about An experience of adapting to the changing reality of study-day based education was an excellent experience.  The audience were warm and had many questions after the paper - and the facilities which were available to present were great.  The presentations by Teresa Mackinnon and Robert Farmer were also food for thought and covered similar issues. A great atmosphere was created within the session.

Richard Noss giving the closing plenary

Conclusion
On reflection the conference was a great experience!  Not so large it was totally overwhelming, but big enough to meet plenty of new people and new ideas.  The breadth of the sessions and topics covered both highlighted the wide areas and issues that learning technology touches upon but also the collective approaches, discussions and focus that are ongoing.  Looking forward and hoping to going to ALT-C 2013 at Nottingham.

James Little. 


Further Links
Storyify: ALT-C 2012 sfy.co/n93l
Paper I presented available on Crowdvine site: altc2012.alt.ac.uk/talks/28056
ALT Conference Website http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/

Weekly Learning Technology Digest... 27

Image by Susan Sermoneta, under a
CC BY 2.0 license

Busy, busy... with an extra slice of busy on top. That just about sums up these next few weeks in the world of Higher Education.  New year.  New students.  New courses.  New systems.  New approaches.  All new and shiny!  But underneath the new and shiny is a lot of work to get it up and ready so I'm sure that up and down the country there are learning technologists buried in an avalanche of stuff as we kick off the new year!

And, as I always like to give a tenuous link into the week's digest... in amongst all that busy, shouldn't we make time for a little break?  I think so!  Kick back and take a wander through the weekly learning technology digest...

• The first thing I think is worth a read this week is about our own Gary Wood and the work he did with his first year Linguistics students which won him the Google / ALT 'Apps in Learning and Teaching' Award - plus, it's got a lovely little video of the launch event for 'AllAboutLinguistics' where you get to hear his students talk about their use of Apps. Go Gary!
• Talking of Google, Mashable reported this week that Google+ has 400 million members and while it's debatable as to what they actually mean by this (the fact that someone clicked a button to sign up for an account is not the same as them actually using it) you have to admit that those are pretty big numbers! They do say that 100 million users use Google+ each month so if you haven't looked at it in a while, maybe it's worth taking another peek?
• ... and while one service expands... another one does things that make you wonder if keeping their users happy is part of their plan.  The website ifttt.com (if this then that) has been forced to remove Twitter triggers and this is indicative of a trend with Twitter to try to keep users on their site rather than opening up tweets to other services.  Free services always come at a price!
• If this makes you nervous of free online services, then how about backing up some of your online stuff?  MakeUseOf had Quick, Easy ways to download photos from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Google+ and more as one of their articles and it's definitely worth a read!
• JISC Digital Media also had a great article on Using Digital Media for Teaching and Learning and though it's pretty long, it covers areas such as how you can use digital media, where you can source media, examples of how others have done it and a heads up on the legal side of it too. Very handy and worth bookmarking for reference.
• The Guardian's Higher Education Network also had a handy article on Student Engagement: 20 points for students unions and academics to note and there are some nice ideas which came out of a live chat hosted by the network.
• Whilst writing up an article on OER, I came across the Blended Learning Toolkit from the University of Central Florida which has a US-focus (and hence some of the materials may not be as relevant as others), it's still a good place to stop off and there's a MOOC you can sign up for too which starts next week.
• And one final link for you... YouTube testing feature to quiz you while you're watching a video and to help with flipping the classroom, this could be a really useful addition to your online tools (especially if, like us, you have Google Apps at your institution)
• Oh, maybe that wasn't the final link... if you were reading this as part of your efforts at improving your procrastination skills... then this video from LifeHacker could be one you really need to see!
  

Right, that really is me done!  Enjoy the start of the Academic year!

If I've missed anything from this week's weekly digest, do drop me off a comment below as I'd love to see what interested you this week too!

Sarah

Event report: ALT-C 2012

ALT-C 2012 held at
the University of Manchester

Since I'm not long back from ALT-C (the annual Association for Learning Technology Conference) which this year was held at the University of Manchester, I thought I should get some notes written up on the themes, resources and highlights I picked up during a very full three days.  Lots to enjoy, lots to think about, lots of questions to take away... so... here's my take on ALT-C 2012.

Keynotes and themes
The conference theme was 'A confrontation with reality' with keynotes from Eric Mazur (Harvard University), Richard Noss (London Knowledge Lab and Institute of Education) and Natasa Milic-Frayling (Microsoft Research Cambridge) and all three took an analytical look at technology enhanced learning.

Eric Mazur is renowned for his work with electronic voting in the classrooms (clickers) and he talked with great humour about the way in which traditional education has focused on transferring knowledge into students' heads - with the main issue being that the really important stuff isn't happening in students' brains en route!

Eric Mazur illustrating brain activity
during lectures

In fact, he illustrated that students are typically more asleep in lectures than in their beds with the only other activity that matches the flat brain activity of class being watching television (see picture).  The theme of using data rather than anecdote as a platform on which to discover what really works with course design ran through his keynote.

He encouraged an active, interactive approach which teaches by questioning, which encourages confusion (being confused and wrong, it turns out, is better than being certain and wrong!) and discussion.  His data shows a correlation between the amount of discussion increasing and the number of students who understand concepts increasing - though, I would imagine the law of diminishing returns will kick in at some point!  It's not so much 'the lecture is dead' more the 'dead lecturing style is dead'.  Lots of food for thought!  If you're interested to read more, his slides are available online.

Richard Noss at ALT-C

Richard Noss and Natasa Milic-Frayling continued the research-driven theme.
Both made the point that it's the people underlying the technology which are critical to the success of technology enhanced learning.  Natasa talked about the health of the community and needing the tools to measure this and Richard talked extensively about collaboration and the fact that it's people who change the world, not the technology.  Even if, as he pointed out 'the knowledge that powers the world is less and less visible' he made the point that you still need an inspired teacher to help you understand the things that are difficult to bump into by yourself.

People are the key, and understanding learning and the processes of learning ripples through the use of technology across the education sector.

The University of Sheffield at ALT-C
It was great to see that we had a couple of our Learning Technologists - James Little and Luke Miller - presenting on their work in the School of Nursing and Midwifery and the School of Health and Related Research respectively.  James was sharing his experience of blended study-day based education and Luke was introducing his tool for creating online content, MOPE which he's blogged about here before. And it was fantastic to see that Gary Wood, Associate University Teacher in the School of English had won the Google / ALT Learning and Teaching Award for their work on allaboutlinguistics.com.  Brilliant stuff - very well done Gary and congratulations to your students as well!  

Links and resources
As ever, I picked up a hefty number of links and resources from ALT-C... (I went with a view to looking at issues of curriculum development as well as assessment and feedback)... so here are a few for you to have a look at when you have a moment or two...

• Supporting Responsive Curricula (SRC) project led by Manchester Metropolitan University where they're re-writing the whole undergraduate curriculum in a very ambitious timescale.
• UG-FLEX led by the University of Greenwich which is trying to enhanced curriculum development processes underpinned by integrated systems.
• PREDICT (Promoting Realistic and Engaging Discussions in Curriculum Teams) from City University London and there are some really nice resources for curriculum and programme design there.
• FASTECH - a JICS-funded project based at Bath Spa University and the University of Winchester which is attempting to enhance student assessment and feedback - lots of good resources here.
• UCISA 2012 Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning for higher education in the UK - and since we took part in this survey, it's particularly interesting to see the cross-sector results.
• Rough Guide to Curriculum Design from Birmingham City University which is worth a look even if their processes / systems don't match our own.
• Viewpoints from the University of Ulster - looking at tools and approaches to support reflective / learner-centered course design
• Open University Learning Design Initiative - I took part in a workshop where the pedagogical features card sort was used and again, for curriculum design, this looks to be a handy conversation starter as part of the design process.

As ever, I feel sure that I missed a lot of sessions from the conference which I wanted to attend but due to various other commitments I couldn't do so.  However, it was good to catch-up with people from various different institutions / make some new connections, see what's happening and where and get a feel for the state of technology enhanced learning across the field.  Last year most people seemed to be head down and implementing VLEs, this year it's more about main-streaming and the curriculum in response to our changing learners' needs and expectations.

An intense few days!  Next year's theme is 'Building new cultures of learning' with keynotes from Stephen Downes and Tara McPherson and it'll be held at the University of Nottingham - the learner is centre stage.  And that's excellent to hear!

Did you manage to get to ALT-C either in person or online?  What did you make of it?  What were your key themes / messages?  Did you enjoy it?

Sarah

Weekly Learning Technology Digest... 26

Image from Nomadic Lass, under a
CC BY-SA 2.0 license

Is that the new year I can see on the horizon?  Why, yes it is!  Which means that our new students will be coming through the doors imminently and getting into their learning lives here... and it's going to be busy!!

Very busy.

Which is why it's important to take a bit of a break and catch up with some learning technology bits.

Let's go...

• Is MOOC more than just a buzzword from The Guardian - well, apparently it is.  But, it's not perhaps buzzing in the context in which you might have thought it was.  It's not so much about university education as global / open learning.  And that's where and why it's so interesting.
• This reminds me, there was a great podcast from JISC on this too - Delivering free online courses how open can we be - and if you have a few minutes, this is worth a listen.  Openness = lack of hurdles to jump over = freedom = innovation was one of the messages that I picked up.
• Game on: using computer games to captivate your class also from The Guardian appeared.  and I really rather liked this article.  A lot.  Not least because it shares real experience but gives some resources and pointers for other educators.  And I really do like something which goes beyond just 'telling' about something and helps you move towards real use instead!
• Google releases Course Builder, takes online learning down an open-source road is a really really interesting development and is indicative of the power being the trend towards openness.  I did the PowerSearching MOOC from Google and the simplicity of the format worked for me.  Will be good to have a play with Google's course building tool and see what's what with that too!
• The Times Higher Education wrote that the wired campus is the key to student recruitment and one quote which really stood out from the article was this, "About half the students questioned (45 per cent) point to increased fees when asked to justify their desire for the latest technology, while 51 per cent say it will help them develop the "essential skills" they need for the workplace" - as a driver for change meeting increasing student expectations is increasingly cited and this reinforces that perspective.
• I also spotted an interesting little history (if you can call a couple of years a real 'history'!) on the use of the iPad in learning which is worth a trawl through, not least because it goes beyond the past and looks to the future which, if you've spotted all the stuff floating around about 'bring your own devices' makes this a useful one to read through.
• A little thing called the iPhone 5 was released... which inevitably got geeky hearts a-flutter.  What it means for education isn't clear, but the response ranged from luke warm to enthusiasm,  Plus ça change!  In fact, it reminds me of a quote I heard from a keynote at ALT-C last week, 'the knowledge that powers the world is less and less visible' - and I think the changes in tech are less and less visible, but their impact increasingly significant.
• You know I like to include a video if I can find something worthwhile... well... how about people's reactions to the 'iPhone 5'?  Excuse the language of the intro to this video... but the average punter's reaction is brilliant...
  
  

Right.  Think that's me done!

Enjoy the forthcoming week and I'll see you next Friday!

Sarah

A-Z of Free Online Stuff - 6. Flickr Commons

Image from Leo Reynolds, under a CC
BY-NC-SA licence

F is for Flickr Commons

Flickr probably doesn't need a great amount of introduction - it's one of the first ports of call for many for both image-hosting, and finding Creative Commons material. However one part of the site may not be so well-known to everyone, and that's its Commons search.

The Flickr Commons is a collection of images from the archives of museums and libraries across the world, which contain some brilliant vintage images, all with no known copyright restrictions (see below). You can lose a great deal of time browsing the collections, finding some beautiful, historical and at times totally baffling images.

 

State Library of New South Wales Collection

US National Archives

National Library of Australia Commons

There's some great, inspiring photographs from a range of sources in there which can be used for a good number of purposes. As with everything read the small print before you use them - the "No Known Copyright Restrictions" license isn't quite as free as it sounds, with some institutions asking for credits, links and no commercial use for their collections (as an example see the copyright page for the National Library of Ireland). However as a free source of archive pictures, which would otherwise be locked away in vaults across the world, it's a superb collection.

Another reason why the Flickr Commons is so good is that it has mobilised the very active Flickr Community to help put mysterious photos in context. For example users have helped name unknown locations in this group.

Have a search through and see what photographic treasure you can unearth!

Pete

Piloting an online writing advisory service using Google Apps

At the English Language Teaching Centre (ELTC) we offer a special writing advisory service for international students. They can sign up for a one-hour individual consultation with a tutor, bring along a piece of writing they are working on and get advice about where they need to improve their academic writing skills.

Until recently this was only available for students actually based in Sheffield. However, over the last six months or so we had received quite a few requests for these tutorials from distance learning students based in other countries or home students based in towns and cities outside of Sheffield and so we decided there was a need to offer an online version of this service. We piloted it this summer by offering tutorials to a limited number of students.

The first issue was what online tools to use to both promote and deliver the service. In the end we went with a variety of Google Apps as they are free (a major consideration!) and already integrated within the university and so familiar to a lot of the students. I wanted to avoid students having to sign up for external services and the potential confusion that might bring.

Promoting the service

We created a Google Site to promote and explain the service to students. Doing this was useful as the sharing options within the Site meant we could limit who actually had access to it and this meant that only students we explicitly targeted for the service could view it.



The other benefit of a Google Site is that you can easily integrate and embed any Google services within it. So, for example, we decided to use Google Calendar and the appointments function (link) as the sign-up form for the tutorials and this was easily embedded on a page of the site. Similarly, we needed to show them the Google Docs form they needed to complete when submitting their essay and this could also be embedded on the page. 

Submitting their writing

Once students had signed up for an appointment, they were sent a Google Doc onto which they had to copy and paste a portion of their essay up to a maximum of six pages. You can see an example of this document here. On the document they had to specify four areas they wanted the tutor to focus on when looking at their writing (e.g. the clarity of the introduction, sentence structure) and help was given on the website about how to do this. This had to be done at least two days before the appointment time to give the tutors the chance to read through and comment on the essay. 

The appointment

We offered two types of appointment for students: the first kind was simply the option to submit a piece of writing and have it commented on by a tutor. The second option was to submit a piece of writing, have it commented on and then have a video conference with the tutor to discuss it. This was another reason we wanted to use Google Apps because of the integration between Google Docs and Google+ Hangouts. It’s possible to conduct a video conference and be able to view and edit a Google Doc at the same time, obviously a tremendous advantage for this type of service. 

Using Google Docs within a Hangout

So, how did it go?

Surprisingly well. Our initial fear was that there wouldn’t be enough students interested to make the pilot worthwhile. As there was only one tutor involved in this, we could only offer a couple of appointment slots a day over a four-week period and initial take up was quite slow. However, after sending out a few more emails to students, interest picked up and in fact all of the slots were taken and students were requesting we made more available!

Some students had some initial difficulties working with the Google Doc they had to submit their writing on but a quick email seemed to easily clarify that as well as improved instructions on the website.

The process of commenting on students’ writing was very smooth, Google Docs has an excellent margin commenting system and it was very easy to indicate areas the student needed to work on. 

The video conferences went well when all the technology worked, but there were occasional technical hiccups. The biggest issue for us was the need to get students to sign up for Google+ before we could use the Hangouts feature with them. This is not done by default, so we had to send quite lengthy instructions to make sure they had done this before the meeting was to take place. The other difficulty was enabling Google Docs during the Hangouts, again not done by default and not always easy to explain how to do. But the actual integration of Google Docs is excellent, it’s better than simple screensharing as you can still see the other person and there is also the option for both of you to edit the text. 

Student feedback

At the end of the summer I surveyed all the students that used the service to get some ideas about what they liked/disliked about the service. Here are a selection of their comments:

'it was very useful to me because i live in manchester. i would have wasted valuable time and limited resources by coming to sheffield, whilst the video conference felt like a face to face encounter and was interesting to take part in at the same time.'

'the most useful thing is it saving us to go to the ELTC, and can have the appointment at anywhere, and the result can be recorded.'

'Being an international student, sometimes face to face appointment gives me pressure because I will feel embarrassed due to the errors I made on my writing. I feel more comfortable if I simply submit a piece of my work and get comments on it.'

'It's more convenient to make and appointment online than by phone or in person.'

'the tutor is really very nice and explains everything in detail.'

'make it easier to access. i say this as a mature person who is not comfortable with computers and social networking interfaces. for instance without a link to my writing i would be at a loss to retrieve it once it had been commented on. so just clear steps about what you do each time you want to submit and retrieve comments.'

'As I would like to make another appointment after I got my essay back, the other appointments are fully booked. So it will be better to have more appointments available during summer, for most postgraduates need it. Thank you.'

'i think the way to submit the essay is a little confusing.'

The responses were positive enough for us to continue with the pilot this term and this will give us the chance to try to refine the submission procedure and provide more slots to students. We’re hoping that this will really become a useful service to all the distance learning students at the university.

It's a matter of policy....

Like another eight or so Institutions around the country, Sheffield has relatively recently become a full “customer” of Google Apps for Education (GAFE). After moving our student email service to Gmail in 2009, and then a phased transition of our staff email service about 12 months ago, we then enabled Calendar, Docs and Sites for all staff and students alike.

With its readily usable platform that enables collaborative working amongst our students, and apparent popularity, there’s lots to like about using Google Apps in learning and teaching. In the last year we’ve seen a few really exciting examples of innovative practice, and there’ll no doubt be more to come. But before we just wade in with wholesale promotion of using the Apps with our students, we need to think about some of the broader issues, starting with policy and guidelines. Here are some of the areas I’ve identified over the last few weeks that require such attention.

Acceptable use policy

Now in many ways this is an easy one to start with. We will all have generic codes of practice and regulations governing the use of IT facilities, which will be provided by our respective IT services. Many of the things contained in these are in fact inherited directly from JANET. Equally many of these can be directly applied to the use us of Google Apps too. Google also have their own regulations to which we must adhere. There are no massive surprises here - all the usual suspects are covered including non-distribution of bulk commercial emails, copyright infringement, virus/malware distribution, reverse engineering of the products and other generally unlawful activities. It might be worth considering providing a localised version of the Google terms which might seem more digestible to staff and students  - Google don’t for example specifically mention obscenity or pronography although these areas would almost certainly be covered by any educational institution’s own regulations. These latter of these areas are covered in the slightly more prescriptive Google+ acceptable use policies, as are matters such as “Hate Speech”, which is perhaps not surprising as this social networking platform is not directly associated or tied to an Institutional domain, although slightly confusingly can be accessed using your Institutional GAFE credentials.

Image by maistora CC -BY-NC-ND

Copyright and IPR

It is always essential to ensure that your copyright and intellectual property rights are safe when using a third party service, especially when it means that your data is being stored at a location not owned by your Institution. However, the GAFE terms and conditions clearly state that we retain IP over the information we use or store with the services, as below:

“As between the parties, Customer owns all Intellectual Property Rights in Customer Data, and Google owns all Intellectual Property Rights in the Services”

Some concerns were expressed publicly recently about Google’s use of our data, with the release of Drive, although these were really misinterpreted in what could be described as a bit of  knee-jerk reaction. The reality is that  in running a service such as Drive, Dropbox, Skydrive or iCloud, we need to license the service providers with the right to copy our content just to make the services work at all. It’s not really that much different to what we allow our local IT services to do when we copy files to a shared drive, or when they perform routine backups. Brian Kelly recently wrote an excellent blog post about exactly this.

In terms of using GAFE for learning and teaching, this also means that the IPR in any students’ work created or hosted using these will follow the same policies that govern other work they do. I mentioned this specific area (point 12) in a recent blog post about copyright - it’s important that we recognise our students IP and act responsibly to safeguard this.

Of course the other major issue we need to be rigorous about here is ensuring that third party copyright is not infringed when using the GAFE suite. We’ve blogged about these issues a number of times recently, as summarised in this post. The infringement of copyright is no doubt explicitly prohibited in all our acceptable use policies, and heavily implied in Google’s too. There is an added potential risk when using the GAFE suite though, as they are partly designed to facilitate easy and accessible web publishing. So if a student incorporates a copyrighted image into a Google doc, hits the “Publish to the web...” option on the File menu, and then pastes the URL into an open group in Facebook, we are now potentially responsible for a worldwide copyright infringement. So there'll be no excuses about hiding behind the metaphorical closed doors of the Institutional VLE this time....

Related to these acceptable use and copyright issues is the placing of a disclaimer on the home pages of any Sites published through the domain. Several Universities in the US and UK are now insisting on this with a specified wording, which should to some extent isolate the Institution from any negative consequences arising from the site’s existence, such as those specified by Oxford Brookes in their terms and conditions for Sites usage.

Privacy and e-Safety.

Some of the privacy issues with the GAFE products has been touched on above. What has received less attention however are some of the issues relating to the use of Google+. The Hangouts feature of Google+ appears a very attractive option for online conferencing. Not only does it provide free web conferencing, with full audio and video support, but members of a Hangout can also easily work collaboratively on  shared Google Docs. Hangouts can also be timetabled by scheduling them as events, and they can also be recorded, using Hangouts On Air. This however is where we’ve encountered a slight problem: Currently, to enable a recorded Hangout On Air, it has to be streamed to an unrestricted YouTube channel first. Although this channel can be restricted after the Hangout On Air has been recorded, there’s nothing to stop anyone who locates the channel to both watch and comment on the conference as it’s happening. We’ve tested a few here, and sure enough, within minutes of starting the Hangout On Air, we’ve received a number of unsolicited comments from users completely beyond our control. In addition to this, the person who instigates the Hangout On Air takes full responsibility for any potential copyright infringement that could occur during the session. We currently feel that the risks for abuse  and lack of enforceable e-Safety precautions with these types of conferences are so severe, that it’s our current policy to strongly recommend that people do not use them in their teaching. Please note that this only applies to the recordable Hangouts On AIr, and that normal Hangouts do not suffer from this. For those wishing to record their hangouts, we would recommend using a screencasting tool instead. Sarah has also blogged about this a while ago when this feature first became available.

Another area that has implications for privacy and e-safety is when looking at the potential use of Marketplace Apps. Although many of these in the “Edu” category are aimed at content for schools, some may seem attractive in HE settings too. Whilst we don’t currently have these published as University policy, our Information Officer, Chris Willis, has been looking at some guidelines in conjunction with colleagues at other Institutions.  Factors that should be considered generally revolve around what information these Apps require to work from users’ accounts, and whether they require read/write access to Calendar, email or Drive Apps, as they are provided by third-parties who are not governed by the contractual agreements we have with Google themselves.

Although not technically policy as such, it may also be worth us thinking about allaying some of our students’ and colleagues’ fears about these issues with some more general information and guidance.  Again Oxford Brookes have taken some steps in this direction with their Google Worries FAQ.

Guidelines for Assessment.

There are a couple of specific issues we need to address if we are going to adopt more widespread use of the Apps for assessed work - and given the collaborative nature of the work that they facilitate, we can definitely expect to see interest in this increasing.

The first is the issue of handling the actual submission itself. We need to give guidelines to academic departments on how best to do this. Broadly there needs to be some transfer of ownership and sharing permissions on the Google Docs or Sites, that enables the students to hand the work over to the lecturer, or department. As part of this there needs to be a way of “locking down” the submission so that the student can’t subsequently alter their work. One way of doing this would be a “systems” approach. This would mean a semi or fully automated way of getting the Google Apps infrastructure to manage transfer of ownership, and shifting the students’ privileges to “read-only”. We understand that colleagues in other Institutions are actively pursuing this. The other way would be to adopt a “process” approach, in which students would manually transfer ownership of their work to a staff or departmental account, and then this account holder could manually change the students access to read-only. There are pros and cons to each strategy - the systems approach might take longer to develop but would possibly be more scalable and sustainable, whereas the process approach could pragmatically be applied quicker, but could also lack scalability or sustainability, and would be prone to aspects of human error. For this latter reason I would personally argue that this task would be better handled by an admin team, with shared responsibilities for the whole assessment process, rather  than an individual academic staff member (accepting if we may that the type of creative flair that enables academic genius doesn’t always readily lend itself to processual robustness, if you get get my drift). We have in fact recently modelled this manual approach in a Biomedical Science module (using Sites) and is does indeed work - in this case we used a user account created specifically for the module, and used the email notification system to create an audit trail to monitor the submissions. In either approach, enforcing a naming convention on Docs or Sites would be a really good idea, and this is also addressed in Brookes’s Sites policy.

We would also need to consider business continuity issues in the submission process. For example. access to GAFE for our students is via our MUSE portal. If the portal were down in close proximity to a submission deadline, it could prevent students from being able to complete the submission. We would need a series of contingencies to handle this, including having a way for the student to officially report this if asking for a deadline extension, or by circumventing the problem all together by enabling access to the Apps via an alternative route. We’re currently investigating doing the latter by using Google’s own authentication processes.

Handling potential plagiarism detection with this kind of submission will also no doubt be question that needs addressing. So how, for example, can we advise students who create assessments in Sites submit their texts to TurnItIn to check their originality scores? No doubt doable vie one approach or another, but something else we need to be able to have a policy and/or guidance on.

We also need to address the issue of retention of the assessed work after submission. At Sheffield we currently require academic departments to retain assessed work for one year after the students’ graduation, but for six years in the case of a grade challenge or appeal.  For work submitted as Google Docs, either of the two approaches above would work, as long as the ownership per se of the document was given to the Institution, as ultimately the students’ accounts will be deleted after graduation, and so their work will disappear. The situation superficially looks slightly simpler with Sites, as these belong to the Institutions’ domain already. However we do need to be careful. There could be a scenario in which a group of students collaboratively author a Site, and in doing so, embed text content authored using Google Docs, owned by one of their accounts. As we understand, if they transfer ownership of the Site to the department, but not those individual Documents, when their accounts are ultimately deleted (or if they accidentally delete the Doc or change its sharing permissions themselves), this text will disappear from the Site. This is definitely an area where the Devil lives in the detail, and we are still looking at what other scenarios might lead to this problem, and how they can be mitigated.

Accessibility Issues

There are known accessibility issues with some components of the GAFE suite. These have been excellently summarised in a recent presentation given by Shirley Evans from TechDis.  Google are themselves aware of this, and we understand work is ongoing to address these. As Shirley herself has said, we don’t know exactly how many specific issues have arisen with the Apps over the last few years, mainly because as a profession, we tend to talk to other learning technologists rather than students themselves. To this end I have raised an enquiry with our Dyslexia and Disability Support service here at Sheffield to see whether any such issues have arisen - and perhaps colleagues in other Institutions using GAFE could consider doing the same. That way we might be able to collaboratively construct some kind of assessment between us. Accessibility issues become particularly important if we’re planning to use the Apps for assessment.

When Students and Staff Leave

As mentioned above, when students leave their accounts are eventually deleted. Although we don’t have to take responsibility for looking after the stuff in their filestore, it equally doesn’t hurt to give them a bit of advice on how best to deal with this. We currently address this by giving them advice on the use of the Takeaway tool, which copies all the contents (excluding Sites) to a local drive, and also how to transfer ownership of their files to a personal account here. For those wishing to extract the text from Sites, you can use the tool created by the fantastically named “Data Liberation Front”, available here.

Staff may have many documents that require transfer of ownership back to the Institution when they leave. From our perspective we would be mostly concerned about any teaching materials or assessed work created or delivered using the Apps. Again this transfer might be better done to a departmental account rather than to any one individual.

Policy and the Learning Technologist

I’m aware that much of this is really a work in progress, with reference to other Institutions where these issues may have been dealt with. In some cases, such as those regarding the use of GAFE for assessment, putting the Apps suite under such a magnifying glass does in fact expose broader gaps in our policies. We currently have no blanket Institutional policy regarding e-Assessment, although we hope to address this as part of our new e-learning strategy.

I also think that there’s a an important general point here for those of us working as learning technologists. We need our academic colleagues to develop and test innovations in the field. But it’s our professional responsibility to take a step back, and ensure that we can support these in robust, sustainable and scalable ways. Formulating policy might seem a bit dull to some*, but it’s an essential component of this. Some of the issues raised here might have to stay on the "too difficult pile" for now, but it's important to have at least acknowleged and thought about them.

If anyone has got any brilliant ideas for handling any of the above do please share them with us - I’’ll buy the person with the best idea a pint (or some appropriate variant of) at ALT-C if you’re there......


* I would actually much rather spend time playing with BuzzTouch ;)

Graham

A-Z of Free Online Stuff - 5. EasyPrompter

Image from Procsilas Moscas, under a CC
Attribution licence

E is for EasyPrompter

Sarah recently covered Evernote, so instead I'll go for EasyPrompter. It's a simple, browser-based teleprompter, which allows you to paste in text and have it scroll up the screen as an autocue.

Once you've pasted in your script, you can change the size and speed, and there are other options such as displaying elapsed time and reversing the text. The latter is used if you're using a real autocue setup, in which a laptop's display will be reflected in glass over the lens of a camera, meaning the speaker is reading the text while looking straight into the camera.

I find EasyPrompter very useful when reading scripts out to record a podcast. Having the script scrolling up the computer screen to read out is far better that squinting at printed pages, and prevents you rustling papers while you're recording.

It can be used when recording video on a webcam, but be mindful that your eyes will be looking just below the webcam at the text, with your eyes obviously moving backwards and forwards across it as you read, meaning you will be appearing to look off-camera and therefore a little shifty...

You're never going to get past this completely without an actual autocue, but you can minimise it. A solution is to use a separate camera rather than the webcam, set up on a low tripod (or on top of a pile of books) behind the computer screen with the camera poking above it. Rather than sitting in a position right in front of the computer as you would for a webcam presentation, sit further back from the screen, zooming in to get your head and shoulders in shot. The will result in your off-camera eyeline not appearing so pronounced as if you were sitting right in front of the camera.

The video below shows what I mean. As you can see I'm still looking slightly off-camera on the second part, but the effect is much less jarring.

If you're reading from a script I'd definitely give EasyPrompter a go.

Pete