Li’s work blog

One of the tasks the JISC Observatory has undertaken is to identify trends of emerging technologies and applications from outside the European and N American educational domains that could conceivably be relevant to the UK higher education system. In order to do so my colleague Phil Barker and I carried out a brief literature scan of the major technology forecasting publications from business and other sectors which are available through open access, e.g. PwC Technology Forecast, Gartner’s Top IT Predictions, etc.

Around thirty publications describing emerging technologies predicted to be important to domains other than education, were suggested by members of JISC’s two Innovation Support Centres: Cetis and UKOLN. These are listed on the delicious website. These were read and the technologies they identify summarised in a Google Doc. These technologies were then grouped into themes for discussion. For each theme we provide a brief introductory definition, a short snapshot of relevant technologies and applications in business and the wider world, and its implications for an organisation’s IT and business strategies. The final report is now available for download.

Overall the themes that were identified as being widely discussed in the technology forecast publications came as no surprise, but there were some interesting trends that were picked up by only one or two of the forecast publications that wered new to us, for example, fabric-based computing (a modular approach to computer hardware, Gartner 2010), that might be worth considering further.

In my presentation at the recent CAL conference on disruptive innovation and Open Education in institutions I looked at the implications of OERs and Open Education initiatives in HE provision by applying Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation framework. Clayton Christensen offers two types of innovations that affect how we improve business and organisations: sustaining and disruptive. According to Christensen, a sustaining innovation is about improving the existing system while a disruptive innovation, on the other hand, creates an entirely new market, typically by lowering price or designing for a different set of consumers or different needs of existing customers. The theory of disruptive innovation helps explain how complicated, expensive products and services are eventually converted into simpler, affordable ones.

HE institutions are currently facing the challenges of funding cuts and rising tuition fees; on the other hand, the rapid development of OERs and Open Education initiatives provides opportunities for institutions to explore new business, financial and revenue models for free or lower cost and flexible HE provision to meet different needs of learners. As with many other technology related initiatives in education, it is clear that most institutional OER programmes focus on sustaining their current business and practice. Inevitably, the existing culture and organisational structure poses huge barriers to innovative models for the use of OERs and provision of Open Education. By contrast, many disruptive innovations around open courses, which offer different models and approaches to make education more accessible and free for all, have grown rapidly outside institutions. Examples of this type of innovation, such as DIY U, P2P U, OER U etc., can be seen as a complement or threat to traditional universities.

Disruptive innovation theories offer possible business solutions and organisational strategies to respond to open educational service provisions, such as by setting up new units with different resources, processes, and priorities to explore new educational approaches and services. Institutions can launch new market disruption to target those who are not being able to go to universities, or either launch up-market sustaining innovations by reducing the cost and providing better learning experiences without extra cost or low end market disruption to target those who look for simple and straight forward courses rather than complicated university degrees. The challenge for institutions is how to implement both sustaining and disruptive innovation in order to improve the existing teaching and learning practice as well as move away from highly formalised, standardised and expensive HE provision towards an individualised, cheaper, flexible and effective education economy.

The slides of this presentation are available at the Slideshare.

Back in 2009, at a CETIS Widgets Working Group meeting in London, a strong desire was expressed by the delegates that we should provide an opportunity for educators and developers to work together to build widgets that really meet the needs of teaching and learning. We finally managed to have our first attempt at this in the 2-day widget bash at Bolton last week. Over 30 people registered for the event and 18 participated in our pre- event survey. The data showed that 11 delegates considered themselves as developers and 7 as educators, providing an excellent environment of pedagogical and technical engagement.

To help prepare this event, my IEC colleagues, Stephen Powell, Dai Griffiths, Mark Johnson and Scott Wilson agreed to record some videos to share their knowledge and understanding on using and building W3C widgets in education. We put these on the CETIS wiki before the event and they were very well received, helping to spread the ideas and different perspectives on W3C widget development across communities. I hope that we will be able to provide ongoing widget-related knowledge and development updates and support through a collection of videos on “talking and building widgets” in the future.

Sheila’s blog and Scott’s blogs have given detailed reports on activities and outcomes of the two days of widgets building. However, not all of the delegates wrote code or built a widget at the event as some spent their time discussing and sharing ideas on the possibilities of using widgets in education. The following are just a few of the observations and reflections on the event and some conversations among the delegates:

• It is still too complicated for non-tech teachers to distinguish between widgets/gadgets and W3C widgets and to understand the relationship between W3C widgets, Wookie, plug ins and VLEs. However, most people felt that an event like this helps to clarify the confusions and the widget demos were especially very useful in allowing others to see how widgets have been built and used in educational context.
• Making widgets is simpler than might be thought but for most teachers it would still be difficult without easy to follow guidance, hands-on practice or support. I made my first widget myself with some support from colleagues in my office: an “Ideas Share” widget based on Scott’s “Share Links” widget. During the event, I also learned how to wrap a BBC online game into a W3C widget. I do think it would be useful if teachers could have clearer guidance for creating educational widgets or if some widget build tools could be built so that teachers can just do some drag and drop, change a few words or click a few buttons to make widgets for their own lessons.
• Developing W3C widgets (apps) stores for education. If we expect more and more teachers to use widget to engage with students within VLEs or in the classroom, we need to make sure that they know where to find an appropriate widget to meet their different needs and purposes, e.g. institutional management, teaching in VLEs or classrooms and learning support. I like the ideas that resources and tools sit outside an institution’s VLE and teachers only need to think about their students and activities, and to pull resources and tools into the VLE to complete their lessons. There is no doubt that having specifically designed educational apps in a “one stop shop” enabling teachers to find and share widgets could help move towards this direction.
• Security issues again were mentioned many times during the widgets and DVLE demo sessions. I had planned to embed the “ideas share” widget into CETIS wiki in order to gather ideas for building widgets before the event but failed because of security risk. It seems that lots of work still needs to be done in this aspect before widgets can be widely adopted in institutions.

As one of the delegates commented: “It (the widget bash) was useful to develop my understanding of what widgets are good for and for the things that are possibly too complicated for the ‘widgetisation’ approach”… We hope that we could bring more educators on board to share ideas and participate in using and developing widgets (or other technologies) for teaching and learning in our future widget events. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.

A two day CETIS event which focuses on developing and using web apps, widgets and gadgets in teaching and learning, will be held at the University of Bolton on 23^rd and 24^th March. The event will provide widget building tutorials from the Apache Wookie (incubating) team, examples of a range widgets and mobile applications developed from the current JISC DVLE programme and the iTech project. We are hoping that this event will provide an opportunity for educator and developers to work together to develop widgets for educational purposes. We have created a Widget Wikipage for the event which you can find two videos that discuss developing and using widgets from educational and technical aspects respectively, and the relevant resources from previous widgets events.

Furthermore, we would like to invite educators and developers to share ideas for developing widgets designed to create a range of flexible teaching and learning opportunities, including organisation and delivery of online teaching and learning activities. If you have an idea, then email me or leave your ideas below and we will circulate them to attendees before the event.

In January 2010, JISC CETIS organised a working meeting to bring together participants across a range of standards organisations and communities to look at the future of interoperability standards in the education sector. This white paper summarises the views expressed by delegates at the meeting and presents relevant background information on present and future models for collaboration between open and informal communities and the formal standardisation system with particular reference to the current issues and barriers in specification and standard development and adoption. The PDF file of the paper is now available here.

I gave a presentation at the Open Ed conference 2010 in Barcelona last week to share some lessons learned from the UKOER projects for sustainable OER releasing and thoughts on developing sustainable OER ecosystems in Higher Education.

The UKOER programme has provided an opportunity for funding bodies, institutions and academics work together to explore cultural, political and financial as well as technical issues related to OER releasing and reusing. In this presentation, I focused on institutional projects funded by the UKOER programme and discussed how different approaches and models have been adopted to address long term sustainability issues regarding OERs releasing and reusing beyond the funding period. Furthermore, I employed an ecological approach to examine the UKOER programme in order to capture the comprehensive views and interactions between stakeholders around OERs and indicate where change should happen in order to develop sustainable OER ecosystems.

The ecological approach provides a useful framework for analysing and examining the development of sustainable OERs in the UK context. It illustrates how government agencies and funding bodies, institutions, subject centres and individuals should engage in the production and reuse of OERs within the particular educational system and articulate the key interactions, dependencies, and influences in OER ecosystems. In this case, the UK government committed to the establishment of a content infrastructure which is professionally developed and organised to support informal and formal education and catalyse innovations in higher education. The UKOER programme used national funding models both as an incentive and as a steering device to encourage institutions, subject centres and individuals to promote openness and culture of sharing in education and explore issues regarding sustainable OERs releasing and reusing. In order to achieve sustainable OER ecosystems, it is clear that higher education institutions will need to explore new business models and improve efficiencies through OERs, e.g. reduction in cost and improvements in quality. Educators and learners will need to participate in communities of practice where OER development and reuse becomes a normal consequence of educational activities. This meso level (national educational system level) OER ecosystem will rely for success on the sustainability of OER projects at the micro level (institutions, subject centres and individuals) and, if successful, will eventually foster the global sustainable OER ecosystem at macro level. The PowerPoint of the presentation is available at slideshare.

My colleague Simon, John and I will run two sessions on Cheaper, flexible, effective institutions at JISC CETIS conference next week. David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, urged that universities need to find cheaper and more flexible ways to teach in “tough times”. The Browne review sets out a great political imperative for institutions to think about new funding streams and innovative approaches to widening participation. There a growing criticism of inefficiencies in Higher Education, including the costs of teaching and of producing learning materials and resources.

So how can we respond to these issues, in the light of political and economic reality, and in terms of the contribution from learning technology? In the first session, we will look at “technology, politics and economics”. Different political and economic assumptions, attitudes or views are likely to give different solutions to our question. In this session, we proposed five models of higher education in order stimulate the debate and discussions.

• State funded - HE could be a service provided free by governments funded from tax revenue to enable all citizens to develop their talents and interests to a higher level, and to benefit the national economy
• Free-market - HE could be a business where HEIs charge full economic fees to students in return for giving them knowledge, skills, professional training and qualifications, networks of contacts, and prestige to use later in working life
• Business-run - Higher-level education and training could be provided by businesses for their employees, as part of a process of managing their talent pool, and as a way to attract and retain the best employees
• Charity funded - HEIs could be charities dedicated to spreading learning and its benefits to as many people as possible, including the poor and disadvantaged across the world, using volunteer staff where possible
• DIY U - HE could be a self-organised system through which individuals decide on their higher learning needs and collaborate with other learners to achieve them using freely available resources where possible.

The participants will be asked to form groups around these positions or suggest other positions for group discussion. We expect that a rich picture for the vision from each position will be presented and some bullet points to cover the practical aspects of learning technology developments that could help to get there, and the role of JISC / CETIS.

In the second session, we will focus on “community and learner support” to explore how technology can help in the processes of learner support at different stages, either directly or through facilitating communities which can support the processes. In each case, who would be the members of the relevant community, and how can technology work for them?

Social software and e-portfolio tools are prime candidates to help with community and learner support, but how can this be done effectively? Can other learning technologies help as well, towards the goal of cheaper and more flexible HE provision that is still effective?

We would like to invite anyone who is interested in the future of Higher Education to share your ideas and thoughts in those sessions. We would like you to think about how cheaper, flexible, effective institutions could function, in terms of technology, politics and economics, and how low-cost, flexible and effective community and support for learners could be provided, how could we practically get there, and how could JISC and CETIS contribute?

Two common approaches have been used by current OER initiatives: the institution-based approach and the community-based approach. The UKOER pilot programme funded three project strands - institutional, subject centre and individuals. These provided opportunities to further explore these approaches separately and to look at how they could benefit from each other in institutional contexts.
At the OER in the Disciplines conference in London last week, I attended a workshop which was to look into the differences between discipline focussed community approaches and institutional approaches and their advantages and disadvantages. The discussion was facilitated by a JISC/HEA funded project – Humbox team and participants were from various OER projects from the OER pilot programme and the UKOER2.
The workshop started with a short presentation from the HumBox, a community-driven repository for the humanities which had been developed using community-focussed approach. They shared key principles to make community building easy around repository design and workflow, such as a profile page for users to introduce themselves and their work and interests, clear guidance on self-reviewing before publishing resources and peer review processes for feedback and tracking the usage; open tagging and category process to make materials easy to find, etc. Then EdShare, a well-used institutional repository from University of Southampton shared their experiences on institutions’ approaches to OERs. The presentations provided a starting point to initiate the discussion on how far institutional and community approaches to OERs differ and how far they may complement each other.
There was general agreement amongst participants that institutional-based approaches tend to provide central management and support mechanisms to deal with copyright, IPR, quality control and technical support which are very useful to help academics new to produce OERs. However, this closed model is likely to be used as a showcase for courses by institutions to attract students rather than allowing academics to share and release their teaching and learning materials freely. On the other hand, community–based approaches are discipline-driven, involving academics from different institutions. This greatly increases the diversity of recourses and opens opportunities for academics to work with others in the same discipline from different institutions. The self publishing mechanism and peer review process encourage academics to share and reuse teaching materials and improve the quality of the resources through peer review and feedback.. It also has been mentioned that sometimes community approaches lack protection for academics on copyright and IPR issues and also lack technical support. It has been suggested that there is a need to look into how community approaches could be integrated into institutional contexts and what mechanisms are needed to bridge the institutional approaches and community approaches to best use the advantages of both approaches.

David Kernohan, Heather Price from JISC and my colleague Sheila MacNeill and I organised a workshop on OERs in HE-trends and scenarios at ALT-C last week. The aim of the workshop was to explore how the rapid development of the Open Educational Resources movement globally can be used as a strategic approach to stimulate innovation in higher education. We developed 4 scenarios in order to stimulate the discussion, namely:
Scenario1: the status quo model in which OERs reach the mainstream; high quality teaching and learning resources are available free of charge, however, the focus is on content rather than changing teaching and learning processes and practice in institutions.
Scenario2: the add-on “credits” model in which institutions are encouraged to explore new ways of assessment and accreditation so that self-learners can gain a university degree through use of OERs.
Scenario 3: the emerging partnership model in which institutions share teaching and learning resources and costs, nationally and internationally, through developing cooperative–university partnerships.
Scenario 4: the radical change model in which a global university appears to serve the different needs of the learners through open access to course materials, learner support and assessment.
More than 20 delegates attended the workshop. Following a brief introduction about the scenarios the audience were invited to discuss issues and concerns surrounding OERs as well as share thoughts and ideas on how those scenarios could be realised. Several themes emerged from the session:
1. Teacher’s roles and perspectives: Although in the presentation, we had a focus on learners (formal and informal) and institutions rather than teachers roles, it was agreed that teachers themselves play a key role in all those scenarios as Open Educational resources. It is important that teachers should not only be involved in content producing and sharing but also engage with open educational resources to transform teaching and learning practice in institutions.
2. National policy on OERs, especially in the school sector: This recognised a need for national policy on developing and using OERs as a whole rather than only within the HE sector. Schools in particular should be encouraged to participate in the OER movement too.
3. Community of practice and network: Some delegates argued that in order to sustain OER practice, it is important that institutions and academics be encouraged to adopt a community of practice approach to create and maintain content and use existing networks to disseminate and share resources.
4. Change mindsets of senior management, academics: It has been found that on the one hand there is resistance to openness and the culture of sharing among some academics and senior management in institutions; while on the other hand, increasingly more institutions and academics are committed to making teaching and learning resources freely available. There is a need to help more academics and senior managers to change their mindsets and bring about an open and shared culture within institutions and among academics.
5. Institutional radical changes: Similar to many other educational initiatives, Open Educational Resources will not be able to bring about radical changes in the education system. However, there is no doubt that OERs will eventually challenge the way of current teaching and learning in Higher Education.
We hope this workshop was just the beginning of such conversations around OERs in the UK HE sector. We would be very happy for anyone interested in looking into the future of OERs in institutions to use those scenarios as a tool to facilitate their discussion in this area and to continue developing those and their own additional scenarios of OER in HE. The presentation of the session is available here on slideshare and we also made a video for the workshop which can be accessed here on YouTube.

JISC CETIS is organising a series of events to look at the future for interoperability standards in the education sector. The first meeting was held in January 2010 and the key topic was the relationship between specifications developed in informal communities, formal standards organisations and industry consortia. There were 17 position papers submitted and around 40 delegates from various international and UK-based organisations and communities attended the meeting.

My colleague and I at CETIS have drawn together the views expressed in the position papers, issues identified during the meeting and reflections on the event from the participants’ blog posts to produce an overview report on the ‘Future of Interoperability Standards in Education’. We hope this report offers some useful insights on current thinking and a basis for further debate around policy and the process of development and implementation of interoperability standards in education.

A second event about the future of interoperability standards in education will be a workshop which focuses on the technical approaches to creating standards. This will be held on the 24^th September in London. More information about the workshop is available here.