Blogging for Bioscience

A meeting of all lead centres was held last week in London to share issues and experiences so far.

Here are my thoughts on the day.

All slides/presentations from the meeting available here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer/progmtgoct09.aspx

IPR/Legal session- Jason Miles-Campbell, JISCLegal

Jason led an interesting discussion on the legal minefield of OER production, and touched upon areas including:

The extent to which an institution owns its academics’ work. “Was the work created towards the fulfilment of their contract of employment?” seems to be the pertinent question here, though an institution may have specific points in its contracts over certain details; ownership of materials uploaded to its VLE, for instance.

The balance of branding on OERs. On one hand this movement is seen as a good opportunity to increase an institution’s profile online, and provide a good marketing tool to potential students, and on the other I can see there will be a reluctance to use OER material obviously generated and overtly marked by another institution, so a careful balance must be struck. – I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this.

There’s also the issue that any institution logos that appear on CC-licensed OERs will also fall under the CC licence, which will no doubt infringe policy under a Share-Alike CC licence, if there is potential for derivatives to be made.

Use of third-party IPR works within your own (elements that are not covered under the Creative Commons Licence must be very clearly labelled as such).

The merits of a standard IPR Clearance pro-forma to enable prompt completion. This was deemed unnecessary, though recommendations on specific legalese to include were offered:

“I hereby confirm that the materials specified above were created in the course of my employment at the University of…”

“I hereby agree to the licensing of the materials stated above under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA Licence for England & Wales”

“I have not previously assigned my rights nor granted an exclusive licence which would be incompatible with Creative Commons licensing.”

“I confirm that all inclusions which are or may be subject to third party intellectual property rights have been marked and acknowledged appropriately.”

“I confirm that any personal information relating to a living, identifiable person has been marked as such.”

The grey area of re-drawing copyrighted diagrams was also discussed, the outcome of which was that whilst it is ok to re-present data in a form not previously illustrated, direct copying of an image or diagram is NOT advisable.

[Edit 3-11-09]“As long as you can show you have redrawn something, rather than just copied the original (i.e. ‘copy and paste’ copy), copyright protects your own material as interpretation of the original, as long as you don’t try to palm it off as the original – the changes perceived have to be more than just a few colour alterations and typo corrections, but at the same time can accurately represent the original. Such copyrights you have probably seen already, e.g. ‘K.J. Caley, after C. Taylor’ would be the format.” – Kevin Caley, Project Partner, University of Nottingham.

Proof of rights status of all incoming IPR should be documented and kept. An example was given of a Flickr image previously marked as CC’d subsequently having its licence altered to © All Rights Reserved. It was deemed that whatever licence was applied at the time the image was taken is the valid one (although there may be a burden of proof on this).

A very useful set of comprehensive notes on the session from Sharon Waller of the HEA are available here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer/~/media/JISC/programmes/elearningcapital/Notes%20IPR%20and%20Legal%20Issues201009.ashx

SCORE Support Centre for Open Resources in Education

http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?name=SCORE

Based at the Open University, and only recently formed, SCORE seems to be aiming to position itself as another national support centre for all interested in OERs.

My thoughts from yesterday’s virtual meeting with JISC:

The Creative Commons Licence plug-in for Microsoft Office apps looks useful for those of you converting PowerPoint presentations.

Jackie Milne, Upstream IPR

JISCLegal OER page was mentioned: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Projects/OpenEducationalResources.aspx

Comments/suggestions were asked for from PMs on possible content for forthcoming JISCLegal webcast.

Accessibility Law, Disability Equality Duty (http://www.dotheduty.org/) and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/DisabledPeople/RightsAndObligations/DisabilityRights/DG_4001068) were mentioned.

Issues discussed around the Data Protection Act also, for any projects carrying information on identifiable living individuals.

Orphan Works

All reasonable steps to find and contact owners must have been taken before deciding to use these, and this is still not without risk. All steps must be recorded documented clearly to minimise risk, and infringement and subsequent liability will generally lie with the employer/HEI.

IP Office website has further info on risk management, and the possibilities of making orphan works available under licence: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/c-policy-orphanworks.htm

Sect.30 of the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act was mentioned (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/ukpga_19880048_en_3) , with regard to using orphan works, but found not to be appropriate for OERs, as only partial works may be reproduced for review or criticism.

Liam Earney, JISC Collections

JISC Casper templates: http://jisc-casper.org/

JISC SCA Risk Management publications: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/elearningrepositoriesbpv1.aspx

Naomi Korn, IPR Consultant

CC licence potentially not suitable for software, particularly with regard to release of source code, Open Source licence more appropriate.

Creative Commons add-in mentioned for MSOffice apps.

Office 2003: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=113b53dd-1cc0-4fbe-9e1d-b91d07c76504

Office 2007: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=d1ddbdc8-627f-415a-9b0a-97362bc9b480&displayLang=en

At last, the Consortium Agreements (CA) were shipped and are coming back signed. The requirements to run this project using a CA model led us into significant additional overhead that we have not applied in the past. Even though I worked from template designs there was still enough ‘wiggle-room’ that required the legal experts to refine the issues as each institution seems to have its own received interpretation. I hear that delays due to this are so common that many projects actually sign off the agreement towards the end. My conclusions: A CA model does not necessarily fit and should not be mandatory – however, if it is, then do not start with previous examples and a template to try to save the chain any work - just find a contracts expert and explain what you wish to achieve and the constraints from above, even if it costs.

Last week we had an Elluminate session to look at JorumOpen and metadata issues. After some technical difficulties I managed to join in and discover lots of support for OER in the Jorum Community pages. This looks very useful but the fragmentation problem arises again – there are so many places to hold the OER conversations. Our Centre projects will be testing the processes hopefully in mid October. The Elluminate problem that remains is that it takes so long to pick the bones out of the dialogue when the recording is released. Jump into 1/3 and scan the slides. Blogged notes would be best from each participant.

Finally, the project web pages and blogs are starting to appear. These are internally listed in our sharepoint but once we get a few more I will add these to the project page.

Last week we finally managed to meet up for the first time. Kevin Caley @ Nottingham (of the Biodiversity consortium project)  hosted us. Each project partner gave an outline of the range of materials they were going to release and the work necessary to get them into an OER position. We have a diverse range of materials which should allow us to explore all the different release, delivery and content maintenance issues. We then had a walkthrough the workpackage plan to check our understanding of the requirements was consistent.

The requirement for a JISC style Consortium Agreement as opposed to one of our regular project contracts appears to be causing some additional delays. All parties thought that the sign-off would be a similar process and timescale to our regular contracts via ‘Letters of Agreement’ but this extra overhead has caused more delay than expected (especially holiday time).  Fortunately no partner reported they had been prevented from progressing their work while this is being sorted out.

Within our workpackages I have set aside a little time for the Project Partner to be able to explore the OER concept/community to see where their discipline materials might work most effectively. We need to be able to gather viewpoints from the practitioners point of view as the project progresses so we can tackle issues before the final release and maximise the academic talents in the group . I am sure they will have concerns about the sustainability of OER – it needs effective reward and recognition for the individual and their HEI otherwise their financial audit will see OER production as ‘an opportunity for cost saving’; its an expensive pursuit unless you recover more than you contribute. This will require skilled practitioners to be capable of adopting other resources quickly into their own delivery framework; it appears many e-learning academics find it far easier to produce their own resources consistently than mix and match someone elses as it may take longer to discover, evaluate and select someone elses OER than it would to write your own. Does writing your own win because it develops a new skill every time?

The DJ analogy is that the art of the blend is just as important as the raw material – someone has to bring OER together at the point of delivery and this will probably be yet another burden on the academic talent pool unless it receives a little space to explore the problems. Our first meeting looked at the likely mixing deck for this – JorumOpen and the ReLoad editor, but other solutions may be possible.

The recent start-up meeting gave all the project managers plenty of information to condense but in amongst this was a slight concern about the repository in the middle. JorumOpen is to be the vehicle for OER resources (and our projects are to shake down the problem areas as a sort of technical “crash-dummy”, not a pedagogical one) and we would obviously like to start a core bioscience community through our OER contributions. Jorum have quickly provided an upload service for JorumOpen but without some way of finding what has been uploaded we do not know if we have made the best of it - it’s like throwing it down a well and hearing no splash. Anyway, this has now been resolved – we are to get access to a test service from September. Bioscience is volunteering our project materials as samples (those that are already prepared for OER release)

Other matters from the startup (see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/oer/startupmeeting090609.aspx) I took home were;

1. The overall project goals – “To discover the issues” – needs to have a deliverable to the community, not just a social and technical challenge. I thought JISC left the subject centres with a fair amount of closure work to do as the final products have to be really useful to our community, not theoretically so. The seed has to be able to germinate.
2. The legal issues really need to be documented explicitly. Although many institutions will have no problem releasing small amounts on an semi-formal basis, winding this up to industrial scale would need a clear policy on OER. These projects should start the host institutions really thinking about the process. JISC legal are preparing materials and an OER toolkit may appear.
3. The Open University is making a better job of it than MIT in my opinion, even though MIT started OpenCourseware: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/ . I also hear they have secured considerable further funding since.
4. The gain is not just publicity for the host institution and academic but for the discipline itself. It needs a realistic framework to get contributions re-used and enhanced. However, protecting IPR looks complex. I see we now have a Minister for Higher Education and IP[Rights] so these are being linked at the highest level.
5. CETIS is still the best technical reference site (thanks Phil) and key developers write influential papers and blogs there. It needs to be bridged through to the disciplines collectively and this is where subject centres are essential translators. If we could get our community blogging then we would have better evidence to influence developments.
6. We did not get to hear enough about the other strands – the separate sessions lost an opportunity, although ours did raise some key priorities for our management.
7. Keep an eye on Cloudworks OER ‘clouds’ for discussions and ideas. e.g. http://cloudworks.open.ac.uk/node/1846
8. The Evaluation and Synthesis project will be working with the OER projects to discover more about practices and cultures within subjects, links between open curricula and open content and, finally, collective practices of content creation. I wrote a report about Bioscience habits called ‘Approaches to e-Learning in the Biosciences’ for our centre a few years ago to discover more about this as part of our DeL work. I don’t think my conclusions were too far off, although I have learned far more since.

Final plans and budgets have been returned to the Academy and I think we are now up and running. Looking forward to meeting our project partners towards the end of the month and discussing logistics. I have recieved a better breakdown of the content manifest from most as we will have to assess the volume of material in terms of its individual values as well as the sum of the parts. This is complicated.

Tomorrow I will attend the official start-up meeting for the UK OER projects down in London. I expect this to be very useful to discover more about how the process is going so far, the support available for the pilot projects under the current OER initiative, and some of specifics of the legal constraints that our partners may need to be more mindful of. The reason I say that is that my information returned so far generally condenses to “as far as we know, it’s not really a problem”. Now this might be indeed be the case but one of the aims of the project is to clarify where that approach really ends up under the OER initiative – the open sharing of teaching materials is really the exchange of core business material and must be carefully considered and legally documented. I have not seen any published copyright permission statements (for learning materials) which acknowledge the existence of off-campus repositories explicitly.

My perception (so far) is that, for the academic community in general, OER appears to be seen as an eventual emergent property from various bits of courseware becoming visible. This is missing the point – OER needs to be stimulated by some excellent examples of production with the OER purpose in mind. Admittedly, to get a critical mass of content we have to convert some existing resources to work with and future OER projects will have to set aside resource to enable experienced and novice OER producers to build content and share the materials. However, we have a gap in that the Learning Technologists who work on behalf of content producers and not likely to be in a position to ask their employers to adopt an OER approach to any given project – when time and resources are short. They need some suitable projects to ‘cut their teeth’ on which employ the adoption of OER materials – those who know how to find and deploy re-used content in their projects effectively will promote themselves. We need some OER resource to go to the non-discipline LTs for them to show what they can do with it, probably through a commissioning process for some courseware on a particular topic identified as in high demand in a key discipline. If our tagging strategy was stronger then we could encourage the independents (a.k.a. “Mavericks”) to share non-commissioned experiences effectively.

Meeting will be tracked as #oerstartup so that’s http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23oerstartup for the rest of us.

I picked this Slideshare presentation up from the Open University ‘Open Air’ blog, following an article about the growth of ‘teacherpreneurs’ and the need for technically savvy users to exploit the wealth of resources. At some point I can see this coming together with concept mapping environments (CmapTools or similar) allowing teachers and students to build their own maps using the OER material.

Anyway, this makes the case if anyone asks ‘Why are you spending time making this better for someone else?’

Good Intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials

View more presentations from loumcgill.

This week the OER representatives and project managers met at the Academy to discuss how we can optimise our activities and work together. Each Subject Centre now expands on the detail of our Centre projects to ensure we get best value from our consortia, and manage it effectively. We had very interesting presentations to help us navigate the labarynthine nature of Full Economic Costings and JISC projects, and how to draw up consortium agreements which work for both sides of the relationship without imposing too much of an administrative burden. You can imagine how complex this could get with 12 Subject Centres and probably 10 consortium partners each. This also has to be done while the consortium projects begin to roll – most project partners are approaching the end of the second semester and now is one of the best times to carry out the enhancements for OER release. No-one likes the timing of April to April but as a pilot project we just have to grin and bear it.

I have been trawling the OER universise to discover the current state-of-play and I have to conclude it is very impressive. When the MIT first launched OpenCourseware I was a bit disappointed with some of the materials in that they were not as sophisticated as expected. However, it was the approach itself that made the shift in how collaboration could be of benefit to all, and gave others confidence in adopting the philosophy. The Open University (where I did my first degree) now look particularly impressive as they have also built an environment (called Labspace) where the usage of materials can be linked with others’ activities. I have recently re-joined to explore the environment and would like to hear what my colleagues think.

How educators think about OER is difficult to surface. Academic blogging is painfully slow to take off but we really need this to happen to get a fair measure of the issues. Those who blog are likely to be more technologically literate and therefore receptive. However, those who don’t are likely to have a lifetime of teaching experience untapped. This jiscinvolve.org facility is so easy there really is no technical hurdle to blogging – perhaps it just needs better incentive.

Finally, the Academy’s Gateway project has been establishing a Sharepoint for evaluating an intranet type collaboration system. I am really pleased that all the Centres present at our Academy OER meeting could see the benefits of adopting it for OER teamworking and gave support for its implementation for this pilot. I am sure its benefits will be significant with such a diverse network of partners.

I have set up this separate blog for the OER project work. I want to know how jiscinvolve blogs work compared to my existing elgg blog, and it gives me personal experience in Wordpress.

The Open Educational Resources (OER) subject strand has offered the Centre for Bioscience an opportunity to assemble a ‘Interactive Laboratory and Fieldwork Manual for the Biosciences’. We have identified 10 projects which can be collected for this and each of them have different strengths: The goal of the OER pilot being to identify and resolve many of the barriers leading to the production of OER and “change the culture”. It’s not necessarily a culture problem but we will certainly do our best to leave no stone unturned.

The way I intend to go about this, as project manager, is to take advantage of appropriate IT tools for managing and monitoring the project. I have always wanted to apply the Prince2 methodology (suitably tuned) to a rich and varied project and they don’t come much more varied than this. Within my own institution a similar approach is used to ensure significant projects are aligned with the institutional strategy and it appears to be doing this quite well. I will use the Infonet incarnation for two reasons; 1. It’s JISC and built for this (education environment) purpose so I want to give it a damn good shake and see how it performs; and 2. I want to demonstrate it within a subject centre network and report at the end how it can be used across SC projects. I studied methodologies a long while ago in my MSc.

The components will be managed through a nest of Sharepoints. A top OER Sharepoint to hold common documents and individual (10) sub-sites to manage each individual contribution. It’s fairly transparent with MS-Office so common docs can be exchanged and the advantage is that these can be gathered from a single point but privacy between projects can also be offered.

Finally, I want to apply Infopath to the forms created during the management of the projects. This should allow me to ’slice and dice’ the information in many directions to reveal common issues, risks and solutions for the reporting phase.

So far, all the technology is behaving.