Personal Blogs

Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners (e.g. undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, etc.). It is a short, online course aimed at providing these learners with a set of resources for developing ‘digital skills’. It runs for five weeks, with a different subject each week, accounting for about six hours study per week.

• Devise a broad outline of the topics to be covered every week. Don’t deliberate too much on this; it should be a coherent set of topics but you don’t actually have to deliver it.
• Now see how much of your desired content could be accommodated by using OER repositories. Search the following repositories and make a quick evaluation for each week of your course of the type of content that is available. 
  • Solvonauts (this is a search engine that searches across repositories) 
  • Merlot 
  • MIT 
  • OpenStax 
  • Saylor
  • OpenLearn 
• Judge whether the resources are good, medium or bad in terms of suiting your needs.
  

Course topics for a basic digital skills course for learners unfamiliar with using online technologies might include the following topics:

• Week 1 Your digital hardware
• Week 2 Navigating the internet
• Week 3 Online communication skills
• Week 4 Safety and privacy online
• Week 5 Digital transactions

The interface of Solvonauts is very simple but the results display is not user friendly as it doesn’t help the user quickly identify potential resources – everything is all one colour and one size, it is hard to distinguish one result from another!

The Merlot interface for results is reasonably good, with a comprehensive filter system (discipline, material type, audience, mobile platform, other filters which even included reviews, ratings, licence, cost). But I didn’t find anything obviously useful in an initial search.

The MIT interface was reasonably clear, though there were no helpful filters and my search for ‘online communication skills’ produced a course which might yield some suitable material (Communicating with mobile technology). Once investigating further, MIT provide the following information about a course: course home, syllabus, readings, lecture notes, assignments and a ‘download course materials’ section. So it was possible to get a sense of what topics might be covered in the course before attempting to download the package. There is a helpful FAQ screen about how to use the download https://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-technology/.

The OpenSTAX interface includes some filters (publication date, author, type, keyword, subject) but my search for “online communication skills” (it had to be in double quotes to search the phrase rather than the search engine treat it as 3 separate words) didn’t reveal any quickly identifiable potentially useful results.

The Saylor interface didn’t have the search function easily visible on the home page; I had to click through to courses before a search function appeared. I got no results for “online communication skills” and one result for “online communication” (preparing and delivering presentations) which wasn’t close enough to what I was seeking. On the courses page below the search bar, the courses are categorised by subject area, I scrolled down and spotted Learning in a digital age under the “Learning skills” category. The course covers “digital literacies for online learning”, “digital citizenship”, “open education, copyright and open licensing” and “critical media literacies and associated digital skills”. However I could not find a ‘download this course’ function, it would be necessary to view and download individual elements of the course for remixing into a new OER. Interestingly, review comments revealed one user pointing out that the course was too advanced for beginners.

OpenLearn is very familiar(!) to me. It uses a Google custom search and has a filters system within each subject area page (select a topic, types of course, levels, resource length). It has dedicated sections for Skills (at work, for life). I found the following potential OER via the Education subject area:

• Building confidence in using online learning forums
• Digital skills: succeeding in a digital world
• Introduction to cyber security: stay safe online

Via the Skills page I also found Preparing for your digital life in the 21^st century plus several other possibilities.

Although OpenLearn offers a variety of downloadable formats of its courses for studying offline, it is not necessarily easy to edit the downloaded versions, with some formats requiring knowledge of digital editing software to extract the elements desired for a remix. The Word and PDF versions obviously cannot include the video and audio elements of a course, which would have to be downloaded separately and the Moodle quizzes are never included in the downloadable versions. The SCORM downloads are SCORM 1.2 though sometimes don’t work when loaded up to another virtual learning environment depending upon how long ago the SCORM file was generated from the OU structured content (XML) rendering process. The system has been fixed in the past year so the more recently rendered SCORM files have a working manifest telling the VLE how to load and run the SCORM package. OpenLearn’s sister platform OpenLearn Create has the same issue with the download versions.

However, there is a course on OpenLearn Create on the topic of basic digital literacy skills called Everyday computer skills: a beginner’s guide to computers, tablets, mobile phones and accessibility. It was written by the OU in Scotland, partly based on some OpenLearn OER, because they could not find a suitable course in the various OER repositories, which often seem to include much more advanced information for students already familiar with using digital technologies to support their learning (my searches for ‘online communication skills’ mostly revealed courses about computer network technologies).

Although OER is available openly online and is often downloadable, the variety of formats of OER materials and how they were created can make it hard to edit downloaded OER. This is because different systems may not be interoperable, which often means resorting to copy and paste to rebuild an OER rather than having the ability to edit an entire OER easily in your chosen software. This is an ongoing challenge for the OER movement.

Publish a blog post that describes your experience with open education. Is it just with the OU, or have you studied a MOOC, used open resources, or engaged with open access publications?

As explained in my previous blog post about OpenLearn and innovation H817 Week 2 Activity 5 Are OER both open and innovative? I’ve been involved in open education for a long time at the OU in various ways, encompassing different forms of ‘open’. The OU’s mission has always been ‘to be open to people, places, methods and ideas’ and this still holds true in its 52^nd year.

My OU undergraduate degree was open in the sense that there was and is no requirement from the OU for previous school level qualifications (GCSEs or A levels) to study an undergraduate degree at the OU and at the time no limit on the length of time it took to complete the degree (I did 7 modules over 11 years, with breaks when my children were born). From the start, the OU charged fees for its formal learning but has always, as enshrined in its charter, shared some of its content for free with the wider population: via radio and TV broadcasts, free posters associated with those broadcasts and since 2006 free short courses via OpenLearn even before ‘MOOCs’ were a named thing.

OU staff members were encouraged to study with the OU, to help them understand what it meant to be a distance learner. The insights I gained about distance education from my time as an OU undergraduate has helped me numerous times in my various OU roles. Many staff members of all grades have studied with the OU over the years, with some like me starting in secretarial & clerical grades and moving on to academic-related or academic roles as a result.

In 2013 while in IET, I was project manager for the OLDS MOOC (Open Learning Design) before FutureLearn existed. The MOOC was run by IET using an open platform it had developed called Cloudworks plus Google hangouts and Twitter, so was a very different beast from any FutureLearn MOOC. It was open to anyone, though in practice, mostly educators at universities around the world were interested in it.

In 2014 I moved from IET to the home of Open Learn: Open Media and Informal Learning (then called Open Media Unit) to work on the 3 year Open Educational Practices in Scotland project (OEPS) which was co-ordinated by the OU in Scotland. Although my role as Senior Producer (Open Education Project) was to coordinate the online platform development work to support open educational practices, I was also involved in co-authoring badged open courses, guiding third party organisations through the creation of their first elearning courses (Parkinson’s UK, Dyslexia Scotland and Education Scotland being 3 of the organisations OEPS worked with to create open courses, which are still used today), research into OER and what it means to do OEP, writing articles, setting up and helping run the OEPS Twitter account sharing OEPS activities openly and presenting at OER conferences.

In OMIL I went from a Moodle (open source VLE software) novice who had a smattering of experience of working with IT developers when in IET, to a platform manager who confidently writes IT development requirements (acceptance criteria) for the OER platform OpenLearn Create (OLC). Some Moodle code developed for OLC and language pack translations OMIL commissions is shared back with the Moodle community.

I learned so much from OEPS and what it means to be an open education practitioner (I’m still learning). Ultimately OEPS became one impetus for embarking upon the MA ODE: presenting at OE Global in March 2017 in Cape Town finally helped me start to acknowledge that I’m an educator. The other impetus was a resolution I made on a flight back from Cape Town in November 2018 after sadly saying goodbye to my brother who was dying of cancer, he was the only one of my siblings to have a Masters degree (Geology), his long illness and positivity in his final weeks inspired me to go for mine at last.

I often use ORO (OU Open Research Online) to find open versions of OU staff research publications. It isn’t behind a paywall and many of the papers are available as a PDF download.

I’ve been a Flickr user for some time, sometimes sharing photos I’ve taken but more frequently and recently when searching for openly licenced images to use in a series of piano solo videos 'A Little Night Music' playlist I’m compiling for sharing openly on YouTube by Music for All @ SMSG (a local music event organisation team I’ve been involved in for years).

When reusing OER resources found online in this way in a new OER, I’m very conscious of the need for attribution (TASL): title, author, source and licence (something I learned from OEPS). However, I know that this is something many people struggle to practice because they don’t understand how the open licence system works, the TASL information isn’t easy to find or they don’t know they ought to reference what they are reusing.

This is a challenge for open education practitioners: to share such practice in accessible, meaningful ways so more people grasp the principles of open and begin to adopt open education practices appropriate for their context too.