Background

BERLiN (Building Exchanges for Research and Learning in Nottingham) was a twelve-month project funded by JISC and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) that ran from April 2009 – April 2010. The central aims being to publish 360 credits of Nottingham’s teaching and learning material as Open Educational Resources (OER) and to investigate the issues faced by Higher Education institutions when doing so.

The BERLiN project identified the use of third-party materials in teaching and learning resources as one of the main barriers in scaling up open publication. Third-party materials -particularly images -were often not attributed, making it difficult for the BERLiN team to establish the copyright status of resources and so exposing the University to risks if the resources were to be published openly.

Copyright concerns such as this were echoed by other institutions involved in the JISC/HEA UK OER programme. JISC Legal provided an excellent consultancy service in the area of copyright, helping the BERLiN team by providing information on current copyright law, thoughts on risk mitigation and helping us understand appropriate ways of attributing third-party materials.

The BERLiN project has now evolved into the Open Nottingham project. One of the key aims of which is to embed the routine use and reuse of open resources across the University. Encouraging reuse will be supported through the creation of tools that make using open content easy and dissemination activities that highlight the benefits of doing so.

The Open Nottingham team has developed a new media search and attribution service, designed to only search for images, video and audio materials licensed in such a way as to be suitable for reuse. Once a search is completed, results are displayed with the relevant licensing, or for images, can have the licensing information added to the picture.  By being accessed from a website and simple search box this allows users to find media from different sources in one place and more importantly then offer to automatically attribute the media and add it into PowerPoint slides, Word documents, etc.

When searching for images, the attributor generates different size images, allowing the user to choose their preferred option. There is also the option to choose a Xerte On-line Toolkits version, allowing users to include the attributed images into interactive e-learning materials developed using the Xerte suite of tools. Xerte on-line toolkits will soon come with this service integrated into it’s easy to use tools.

The information that is attributed as part of the image is itself an image representing the license, the author, the url that the image was sourced from and the date the image was created.

The benefits of the service to academic staff are multiple.  Staff can find and incorporate attributed media into their teaching and learning materials as easily as they can incorporate non-attributed media found using other search engines. In providing this service, the site can facilitate those staff keen to publish open materials by providing results that allow them do so. In being as easy to use as current search engines, the service also has the indirect benefit to staff that it places no overhead on them to learn how to use an alternative system.

If the open community is to influence existing workflows and practices, the services must at least be as straightforward and easy to use as those being used widely at the moment, or inevitably there will be resistance to change.

Embedding license attribution into materials also simplifies copyright clearance and the open publication of resources. Time taken and costs involved in these activities can be reduced. The BERLiN project team spent many months finding replacement media, requesting permissions to use and sanitising resources in readiness for open publication. Resources making use of the attribution tool would require no such effort and thus reduce costs.

It had been originally hoped to include media from multiple sources but it became clear that this is not straightforward. Often catalogues of resources lacked options to search via license, or presented unreliable licensing information, and so exposing the service to possibly attributing material incorrectly. Poor cataloguing often meant that large sets of media could not be searched for, and for smaller sets the question of viability was raised. The service has been designed to be easily extendable, but perhaps presents a challenge to cataloguers to resolve this issue and facilitate reuse of their materials.

Other challenges included dealing with items with multiple licenses. There were many variations of this issue, such as different versions of creative commons licence in use or indeed a combination of creative commons and GNL licence. Jackie Milne of JISC legal was once again extremely helpful in this area, helping us pick through the essentials and present the relevant information.

There is also the potential for images that have been uploaded on sites we index to have been allocated an open licence by the uploader, when in fact the copyright of the image is owned by someone else. This has been managed by a clear statement available at both search and results stage stating that all items are licensed by third parties and that users should ensure they understand the terms of use within a licence. Users are informed that where any doubt exists about the copyright status of an image that they should contact the copyright holder to clarify. A link to the holding page of the media, allowing users to easily access the full metadata uploaded with the resource at the host site is also made available.

The tool is available at www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/attribution/

For more information contact:

steven.stapleton@nottingham.ac.uk (Open Learning Support Officer), or

patrick.lockley@nottingham.ac.uk (Learning Support Development Officer)

The audio should be available shortly and I will make it available here when it is.

The key note speakers at the symposium were Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the  OpenCourseWare Consortium and Brian Lamb, Manager, Emerging Technologies and Digital Content, The University of British Columbia's Office of Learning Technology. Brian Lambs presentation included him recording the crowd shouting angrily at him at his request to purge themselves of their frustration in advance of his self forecast poor presentation.  It turned out he was wrong – he was interesting – as was his description of how a colleague had set students the task of submitting articles to Wikipedia – with their grades awarded based on the status the articles received on Wikipedia.

I also went to listen to the Hum Box presentation who are making use of a comments system and academic profiles around their OER’s. This is something that we are considering doing in U-Now going forward so it was good to get their perspective.

Last week I delivered two presentations at the EDULEARN conference in Barcelona. The first was a general overview of the BERLiN project. The second was an overview of the ‘Open for Learning’ workshop that the BERLiN team created to support the sourcing, attribution, creation and publishing of OER’s at Nottingham.

The abstracts for the presentations are:

Open For Learning.doc

The BERLiN Project - A Blueprint for Publishing Open Educational Resources.doc

The workshop has been delivered in pilot form for staff at Nottingham and also for a group of tutors from OU who have been involved in the LORO project. Feedback has been good and the workshop will be available as an optional module on the PGCHE at Nottingham from September. The workshop module, along with an online resource to support the delivery of the workshop will be published openly on U-Now in the near future.

EDULEARN was attended by over 700 delegates and covered many themes including Experiences in Education, Pedagogical Innovations in Education, Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Emerging Technologies in Education.

eLearning Africa

I also presented at the E-Learning Africa Conference, which was held in Lusaka, Zambia at the end of May. Some stats from the e-learning Africa website: http://www.elearning-africa.com/ 

eLearning Africa 2010 in a nutshell:

·         1778 participants from 78 countries, 86% from Africa

·         323 speakers and chairpersons from 51 countries, 65% from Africa

·         16 ministers and one head of state from 9 countries (Angola, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe)

·         52 journalists from 5 countries (Germany, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe)

·         52 exhibitors from 16 countries

http://tinyurl.com/berlinFinalReport

It's fairly lengthy so you may want to grab a coffee/tea/glass of wine first ...

Discoverability and tracking re-use was another key theme. The OCWC are keen to push RSS for content submission (only 48 of the 145 members currently use RSS to submit to the OCWC). Building connections with end-users of OCW is a strategic requirement for many. MIT used the conference to promote Project Greenfield , a mirror site for MIT OCW and allows the OCW community to experiment with OCW. OER Africa promoted ongoing activities in Health, Agriculture, Foundation Courses and Teacher Education and promoted the idea of a ‘OER marketplace’ to provide an online platform for providers and users of OER to meet, share, collaborate and request. Tufts promoted TUSK an open source knowledge management system being used to support medical education across partner Indian HE institutions. Finally (at least as far as I saw), Rice promoted Enterprise Rhaptos an open source version of Connexions. However, tracking actual re-use of OER remains a challenge for many with a lot of discussion around how this could be achieved (MIT have explored using Turnitin), and the proposal of a working group to take these discussions forward.

Licensing was another hot topic, with many members of the OCWC promoting cc-0 or cc-by as the preferred licence. Certainly by-nc-nd is seriously frowned upon.

One of the more inspiring talks at the conference came from Hal Plotkin, Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary of Education, US, who gave a personal and powerful talk on the subject of access to education. Hal stated that 88% of the world’s population have no meaningful access to HE. Hal went on the say that growth in human capital is the only way to get out of the current financial problems and that OCW is the most cost effective way of doing this. Finally, Hal demanded that all OCW meet accessibility requirements, explaining that state institutions in the US will not be able to re-use anything that doesn’t meet accessibility requirements.

UKOER was fairly well represented, with presentations from John Robertson (Cetis), JorumOpen, myself (BERLiN) and a keynote from Malcolm Read. There are a number of national programmes at the moment, including Korea, Japan and Vietnam. However, the UK looks well placed to positively influence OER developments going forward. 

The full results are available at: http://tinyurl.com/BERLiNStaffSurvey

There has been an encouraging move towards publishing and using OER content within the University. Within the survey results, 67% of respondents saw OER as a fruitful way of building partnerships with other colleagues and institutions worldwide, with enhancing the University’s reputation and attracting better students being cited as a potential benefit by 57% of the respondents. However, 51% were neutral towards OER attracting better academic staff, with a further 54% believing publishing OER would have no impact on their personal promotion prospects. 

Time constraints (65%), fear over copyright infringement (58%) and ownership and legal barriers (43%) were cited as the three main barriers for publishing OER; whilst awareness of OER repositories (55%), relevancy of materials (40%) and time constraints (26%) were the three main barriers cited against using OER. Respondents listed Powerpoint slides (66%), reading lists (53%) and lecture notes (49%) as the three main types of resources they would publish openly, with Powerpoint slides (59%), lecture notes (46%), images (46%) and reading lists (43%) as the main types of resources they wanted to use openly. 

Enhancing University reputation (73%), sharing best practice (72%), and supporting students without formal access to HE (66%) were the top three reasons cited for publishing OER; whilst respondents cited enhancing users’ knowledge of a subject (51%), reducing development costs/time (47%) and sharing best practice (42%) as the three main benefits of using OER. Respondents felt that OER would not impact student attendance of lectures (54% disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with 28% neutral), and 48% saw OER as a useful way of improving teaching standards across the University, with a further 55% believing that their students benefit from exposure to the wide range of approaches available through OER. 

Finally, OER was cited as a useful means of developing new courses by 50% of the respondents (with only 8% disagreeing), however the ability to repurpose and personalise the OER content for local use was important to 68% of the respondents.

One thing we did not cover yesterday was the open publishing of academic books although this is a subject we have considered within the team here previously. We have pondered about using Xerte Online Toolkits to produce an interactive companion to published books (where publishers permit) but I have also just come across David Wiley and John Hilton's article on 'Why authors are giving away free books on the internet'.

This makes interesting reading and seems to support this idea as a potentially viable option? We did talk yesterday about the fact that creating and publishing OERs must be an easier way to reach an audience than spending months writing books, however author credibility, authority and validity, for those just starting out in the careers is very important and often comes from the endorsement backed by publishers.

A hybrid approach would support those yet to publish or in the process of building their careers, reputations and authority. Furthermore, this article infers that 'books as OERs' simultaneously

• do not seem to result in any loss of sales
• do offer scope for authors to increase their visibility and reach wider audiences

"a growing number of authors are using free digital distribution of their books in order to increase the visibility of their work" 

If authors create an interactive companion or introduce an interactive element to the book on launch this could also increase the accessibility of the material for many readers. Taking this one step further for the more adventurous, there are now numerous examples of authors willing to engage in conversations with their readers via comments, other asynchronous dialog or one off webinars/elluminate sessions.

Any thoughts?