It was a genuinely thought provoking event and I was lucky enough to share a table and some enlightened discussion with Fred Mulder, holder of the UNESCO Chair in OER at the Open Universiteit, Stephen Carson, Director of External Affairs for MIT OpenCourseWare, Ignasi Labastida i Juan, Universitat de Barcelona and Creative Commons Spain and Catalonia and Willem van Valkenburg, Delft University of Technology. I confess I was too engrossed in the conversation to take notes on the presentation and discussions, however SURF’s Hester Jelgerhuis, project manager Open Educational Resources SURF and organiser of the event, has blogged a report here: Cambridge 2012 Congres over OEr: diner pensent.

To summarise Hester’s post, Fred Mulder opened the event with a presentation called “Fascinated by digital openness in education”. In addition to outlining his own fascination with all aspects of openness, he characterised Open Education as consisting of three elements; open educational resources, open learning services and open teaching efforts. Fred argued that the EU should concentrate its efforts on mainstreaming open educational resources rather than open education which he suggested was unlikely to be widely adopted by higher education institutions due to its diversity. This perspective caused considerable discussion at our table with several guests suggesting that while open education may not sweep away the institution of higher education that we are familiar with today, open education in all its forms will have an increasingly important role to play in meeting the educational demands of a growing global population. It’s interesting to reflect on this discussion in light of yesterday’s press release by Harvard and MITx announcing the launch of edX “a new nonprofit partnership, to offer free online courses from both universities.”

This theme was picked up by Anka Mulder, president of the OCW Consortium, who presented evidence from Tony Bates and Sir John Daniel suggesting that we need to look for new approaches and methodologies to meet the growing demand for higher education. Anka also noted that innovation in the field of open education tended to come from the US, Australia and the UK and she particularly mentioned the innovative impact of the JISC / HEA Open Educational Resources programmes. By contrast, open education adoption and production is more prevalent in Asia, particularly Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, India and Japan. Anka went on to suggest that EU governments and institutions needed to do much more to influence and embed open education by funding projects and policy developments, adopting legislation to ensure openness by default and including openness as a higher education performance indicator. She also suggested we should all take steps to set up an EU Open Course Ware Consortium.

The final presentation was by JISC’s David Kernohan who presented a brief summary of the aims and impact of three years of OER funding in the UK. David’s presentation was particularly thought provoking and sobering as he reflected on the impact on UK higher education funding cuts on the reality of academic practice. With many of the teachers and academics driving open education in the UK employed on part time and temporary contracts David reflected on whether there was any way to sustain open education adoption and innovation without exploiting the academic staff that make these new and open approaches to education possible.

The diner pensant certainly achieved it’s aim of providing “food for though”. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank SURF for organising this interesting and thought provoking event and for inviting JISC and CETIS to participate.

In the opening keynote Richardus Eko Indrajit, of the ABFI Institute Perbanas, Jakarta, outlined Indonesia’s impressively coordinated top down approach to opening access to education and the adoption of open education practice. One of Indonesia’s more radical policies in this space is the use of google ranking to measure the academic impact of scholarly works and research outputs.

The second keynote of the event by Sir John Daniel, President of the Commonwealth of Learning, also focused on strategic top down initiatives and in particular UNESCOs current Fostering Governmental Support for OER Internationally project. Sir John reported that 17 European nations have already responded to UNESCO’s survey about national policies and intentions regarding OER. Given three years of HEFCE funding for open educational resources, and the undoubted success of the JISC / HEA OER Programmes, it was disappointing to see that the UK did not appear on the list of respondents. This prompted some discussion on the backchannel about who would be the appropriate agency to formally respond to this questionnaire on behalf of the UK. Joe Wilson of SQA suggested that ALT might be an appropriate body to lobby for a response and wasted no time in contacting them directly. I’ll be interested to see it they, or anyone else, manage to provoke a response.

In the interests of practising what we preach, kudos goes to David Kernohan of JISC and Simon Thompson of Leeds Metropolitan University for politely challenging Sir John for not having any license or attribution information on the images he used in his presentation.

One hoary old issue that came up several times was whether there is any real evidence that open educational resources are actually being used, reused and re-shared. Despite some delegates providing pretty compelling evidence that open educational resources are indeed been used, others cited concerns over quality, sustainability and even potential loss of revenue as barriers to the release and adoption of open educational resources. When these objections were raised in the “Embed, don’t Bolt-on: promoting OER use in UK universities” panel on Tuesday afternoon I tweeted, slightly cynically:

@LornaMCampbell Quality, control, walled gardens, potential loss of income. #redherrings? #cam12

It appears that the issue was raised again the following day and was challenged by Patrick McAndrew (@openpad) of the Open University.

@dkernohan: quality, sustainabilty, reuse? Red herrings, says @openpad - challenges for all content not just OER #cam12

One very pertinent comment that was widely re-tweeted was that “many people are doing OER but they don’t call it that”. This prompted some discussion about the benefits of supporting and mainstreaming open practice rather than highlighting open practice as being different and distinct. During a very engaging chat over coffee, Emily Puckett Rodgers of the Open Michigan initiative mentioned that she tends not to use the term “OER” with faculty as this suggests something new and different that they need to engage with, instead she prefers to use the more familiar term “learning materials”. Personally I’m inclined to agree with Emily, like all buzzwords, the term “OER” has accumulated an awful lot of baggage over the years which may be less than helpful going forwards.

Another back channel conversation worth noting was the disappointing failure of the Scottish Government and Funding Council to engage with the open education agenda and open educational resource initiatives at a strategic level. This lack of engagement was highlighted again this week when Martin Hawksey noted that the Scottish Government’s new Professional Standards for Lecturers in Scotland’s Colleges document fails to make any mention of open educational resources or practices.

@mhawksey Shame open education/oer don’t get a mention in new Professional Standards for Lecturers in Scotland’s Colleges #ukoer

While there are certainly a few grass roots open education initiatives across the country, such as Edinburgh University’s eLearning@Ed Conference, Scotland clearly has some way to go when it comes to embedding the concept of openness in education.

From the back channel to the undercurrent….David Kernohan tweeted:

@dkernohan: MOOCs and DIYU - very much an undercurrent of nervousness at #cam12

Sadly I missed the final plenary session where I believe some of these undercurrents started to surface. However Laura Czerniewicz of the University of Cape Town concluded her post-conference blog post Open Education: part of the broader open scholarship terrain.

“I do think that there is beginning to be some fluidity and cross over, (such as the focus on open practices and the interest in the open education landscape at JISC), and this is great. Let’s consciously do more of this.”

An admirable goal for us all to aim for.

And lastly, two final highlights worthy of mention….

Nick Pearce’s Famous Monkeys

@drnickpearce Slides from my talk about developing students and staff as scavengers (hyenas!) http://slidesha.re/HNEiEb #cam12#famousmonkeys

And Guy Barrett and Jenny Gray’s fabulous poster

by Guy Barrett and Jenny Gray

Well, not quite. Phil and I do have one or two thoughts and reflections on the session. There still seems to be growing interest and enthusiasm in the UK ed tech community (if such a thing exists) for both the Learning Registry development in the US and the JLeRN Experiment at Mimas. However in some instances the interest and expectations are a little way head of the actual projects themselves. So it perhaps bears repeating at this stage that the Learning Registry is still very much under development. As a result the technical documentation may be a little raw, and although tools are starting to be developed, it may not be immediately obvious where to find them or figure out how they fit together. Having said that, there is a small but growing pool of keen developers working and experimenting with the Learning Registry so expertise growing.

That cautionary note aside one of the really interesting things about the Learning Registry is that people are already coming up with a wide range of potential use cases. As Sarah’s conference summary shows we had Terry McAndrew of TechDis suggesting that Learning Registry nodes could be used for capturing accessibility data about resources, Scott Wilson of CETIS and the University of Bolton thought the LR would be useful for sharing user ratings between distributed widget stores, a group from the Open University of Catalunya were interested in the possibility of using the LR as a decentralised way of sharing LTI information and Suzanne Hardy of the University of Newcastle was keen to see what might happen if Dynamic Learning Maps data was fed into an LR node.

Paradata is a topic that also appears to get people rather over excitable. Some people, me included, are enthusiastic about the potential ability to capture all kinds of activity data about how teachers and learners use and interact with resources. Others seem inclined to write paradata off as unnecessary coinage. “Why bother to develop yet another metadata standard?” is a question I’ve already heard a couple of times. Bearing this in mind it was very useful to have Learning Registry developer Walt Grata over from the US to remind us that although there is indeed a Learning Registry paradata specification, it is not mandated, and that users can express their data any way they want, as long as it’s a string and as long as it’s JSON.

We’re aware that the JLeRN Experiment were hoping to get a strong steer from the conference session as to where they should go next and I had hoped to round off this post with a few ideas that Phil and I had prioritised out of the many discussed. However Phil and I have completely failed to come to any kind of agreement on this so that will have to be another blog post for another day!

Finally we’d like to thank all those who contributed to a the Learning Registry Session at CETIS12 and in particular our speakers; Stephen Cook, Sarah Currier, Walt Grata, Bharti Gupta, Pat Lockley, Terry McAndrew, Nick Syrotiuk and Scott Wilson. Many thanks also to Dan Rehak for providing his slides and for allowing Phil to impersonate him!

The Learning Registry

The Learning Registry - main web page.

Learning Registry Collaborate Google Group - “If you are interested in integrating, developing applications, working with Paradata… using the Learning Registry to make awesome things happen, then this is the Google Group for you. This list is suited to projects we’re working now, for Plugfest and any collaborative effort involving the Learning Registry.”

Learning Registry General Google Group - for general discussion and announcements.

Learning Registry Developer Google Group - the core technical developers list.

The Learning Registry Technical Guides - page linking to all the technical documentation.

Learning Registry Quick Reference Guide - “The purpose of this document is to provide a brief reference to the principal data structures and services that typical users of the Learning Registry will most frequently interact with.”

Learning Registry in 20 Minutes or Less - “This document will get you rolling with creating, uploading, downloading, and verifying envelopes in and out of Learning Registry server.”

Paradata in 20 MInutes or Less - “The goal of this document is to get you booted up using paradata in 20 minutes or less.”

Learning Registry Technical Specification V.0.5x.x - the top level of the Learning Registry Technical Specification.

Paradata Specification V1.0 - the formal Learning Registry paradata specifiction

Learning Registry Github Code Repository

Learning Registry Browser - demonstration term explorer.

Blog Posts

The Learning Registry: “Social Networking for Metadata” - an introduction to the Learning Registry by ADL Senior Technical Advisor Dan Rehak.

The Learning registry Plugfest: Report and Developments - does what it says on the tin! A report from the June 2011 plugfest by the University of Oxford’s Pat Lockley.

The Learning Registry: Rough Guide for Contributors - by CETIS’ R. John robertson.

Open Educational Resources Timeline - a post by Lou McGill looking at JISC and CETIS involvement in educational resource initiatives over time.

The JLeRN Experiment

JLeRN Experiment - main project blog.

JISC Learning Registry Node Experiment - CETIS blog post introducing JLeRN project.

JLeRN Alpha Node - LR test node running on Ubuntu.

JLeRN Hackday - issues identified at the January 2012 project hackday.

This year I decided I would go to Dev8D, although due to childcare responsibilities I was only able to attend for a single day, rather than the full three days. However I must say that I found it well worth the trip. I was pleasantly surprised to find a friendly and inclusive event with a relatively large number of female delegates. I am no more of a technical developer now than I was two years ago, but at no point did I feel that the event was cliquey or exclusive, despite that fact that UCL Union was packed full of the highest concentration of geeks that I have seen for quite some time.

Mahendra Mahey, who is responsible for running Dev8D and for making it the success it is, commented that he had tried to take possessive steps to encourage more female developers to attend DevCSI events. It appears that Mahendra’s efforts have paid off, as approximately 17% of this year’s delegates were female. This may not seem like a particularly impressive percentage but when one considers that this is actually higher than the annual percentage of female Computer Science graduates then I think that is quite an achievement!

It was also noticeable that many of the Dev8D participants appeared to have a real interest in educational technology issues. JISC’s Andy McGregor commented that educational technology developers were much better represented than in previous years. Certainly JISC’s Amber Thomas and I gathered lots of valuable comments and feedback during our very informal Digital Infrastructure Directions for Educational Content blether round table. Hopefully this bodes well for the forthcoming DevEd event that JISC, CETIS and DevCSI are running on the 29th / 30th May in Birmingham. Watch this space for more news!

All in all I thought Dev8D was an interesting and enjoyable event with plenty of opportunities, even for a day delegate, to have lots of thought provoking conversations and discussions. I think I’ll be going again next year

On Wednesday 15th there will be an opportunity to tell JISC what you think the key opportunities and challenges are in supporting the creation, sharing and management of learning materials. Lorna Campbell (JISC CETIS) and Amber Thomas (JISC Programme Manager) will be circulating on the day to gather views from delegates.

We want to know from you:

• What are the most common requests you get from the people you develop for and support?
• What are their greatest needs?
• What software and formats would you relegate to Room 101?
• What would be the killer app for learning content?

Stop us for a chat anytime throughout the day, or pop along to see us at the Digital Infrastructure Directions for Educational Content drop-in from 2-4 on Wednesday 15th February and help to shape JISC’s priorities for the future.

Alternatively if you are so brimful of thoughts and ideas you can post them in the comments below or blog them with the tag #deved.

Look forward to seeing you in at Dev8D!

One of the aims of the day was to attempt to scope some usecases for the JLeRN Experiment, while the technical developers were discussing the implementation of the node and exploring potential development projects. We didn’t exactly come up with usecases per se, but we did discuss a wide range of issues. JLeRN are limited in what they can do by the relatively short timescale of the project, so the list below represents issues we would like to see addressed in the longer term.

Accessibility

The Learning Registry (LR) could provide a valuable opportunity to gather accessibility stories. For example it could enable a partially-sighted user to find resources that had been used by other partially-sighted users. But accessibility information is complex, how could it be captured and fed into the LR? Is this really a user profiling issue? If so, what are the implications for data privacy? If you are recording usage data you need to notify users what you are doing.

Capturing, Inputting and Accessing Paradata

We need to consider how systems generate paradata, how that information can be captured and fed back to the LR. The Dynamic Learning Maps curricular mapping system generates huge amounts of data from each course; this could be a valuable source of paradata. Course blogs can also generate more subjective paradata.

A desktop widget or browser plugin with a simple interface, that captures information about users, resources, content, context of use, etc would be very useful. Users need simplified services to get data in and out of the LR.

Once systems can input paradata, what will they get back from the LR? We need to produce concrete usecases that demonstrate what users can do with the paradata they generate and input. And we need to start defining the structure of the paradata for various usecases.

There are good reasons why the concept of “actor” has been kept simple in the LR spec but we may need to have a closer look at the relationship between actors and paradata.

De-duplication is going to become a serious issue and it’s unclear how this will be addressed. Data will need to be normalised. Will the Learning Registry team in the US deal with the big global problems of de-duplication and identifiers? This would leave developers to deal with smaller issues. If the de-duplication issue was sorted it would be easy to write server side javascripts.

Setting Up and Running a Node

It’s difficult for developers to find the information they need in order to set up a node as it tends to be buried in the LR mailing lists. The relevant information isn’t easily accessible at present. The “20 minute” guides are simple to read but complex to implement. It’s also difficult to find the tools that already exist. Developers and users need simple tools and services and simplified APIs for brokerage services.

Is it likely that HE users will want to build their own nodes? What is the business model for running a node? Running a node is a cost. Institutions are unlikely to be able to capitalise on running a node, however they could capitalise by building services on top of the node. Nodes run as services are likely to be a more attractive option.

Suggestions for JISC

It would be very useful if JISC funded a series of simple tools to get data into and out of JLeRN. Something similar to the SWORD demonstrators would be helpful.

Fund a tool aimed at learning technologists and launch it at ALT-C for delegates to take back to their institutions and use.

A simple “accessibility like” button would be a good idea. This could possibly be a challenge for the forthcoming DevEd event.

Nodes essentially have to be sustainable services but the current funding model doesn’t allow for that. Funding tends to focus on innovation rather than sustainable services. Six months is not really long enough for JLeRN to show what can really be done. Three years would be better.

With thanks to…

Sarah Currier (MIMAS), Suzanne Hardy (University of Newcastle), Terry McAndrew (University of Leeds), Julian Tenney (University of Nottingham), Scott Wilson (University of Bolton).

John joined the CETIS team at the University of Strathclyde in 2006 to take up the post of Repositories Research Team project officer. Coming from Strathclyde’s Centre for Digital Library Research, John made an invaluable contribution to RRT. In addition to participating in the Repositories and Preservation Programme synthesis, John was also the lead author, along with his UKOLN colleagues Julie Allinson and Mahendra Mahey, of the influential report An Ecological Approach To Repository And Service Interactions.

After the JISC Repositories Programmes ended, John took on the role of Technical Support Officer for the new JISC / HEA Open Educational Resources Programme in 2009 and it’s here that he really made his mark. John went on to support all three OER programmes and has personally interviewed every single project, (apart from one or two that disappeared into the ether), recorded their technical choices in the CETIS PROD database, and synthesised the outputs in an important series of blog posts. He also participated in the regular online Second Tuesday seminar series, attended all the programme meetings, contributed to scoping the technical requirements of the programmes and assisted in marking the numerous proposals received.

John has been tireless in promoting and disseminating the OER programmes and projects through a wide range of channels including JISC events, international conferences, academic papers, social media channels and of course his own blog, which quickly became required reading for anyone with an interest in open educational resources. In fact as Rowin’s recent post reviewing CETIS Year in Blogging showed, it was one of John’s OER posts that attracted more readers than any other.

Over and above his “official” role, John has been an enthusiastic and approachable member of the JISC community who was always available to answer questions or queries from projects and programme managers alike or to drop everything and dash off to a meeting at the other end of the country or even the other side of the Atlantic.

In addition to supporting the OER Programmes John has also maintained a watching brief on the Learning Registry project in the US. John has been instrumental in communicating the potential impact of this initiative and disseminating regular updates to JISC and the wider community.

Above and beyond all that, John has been a respected and popular member of both CETIS and CAPLE, where has has also made a significant contribution to the academic life of the department. Equally importantly, he also proved to be a gracious and enthusiastic host at our irregular office soirees!

I know we’ll all miss John enormously but we wish him all the very best for the future and will look froward to following his adventures via twitter. Whoever happens to be successful in recruiting John will be very, very lucky indeed. I am quite sure we haven’t seen the last of @Kavubob!

Having said that, and this is important, I have no plans to go to Learning Without Frontiers, so if I can’t even be bothered to attend, do I really have any right to criticise the conference? Am I actually part of the problem? I’m sure LWF12 will be an excellent event but attending in person has never been an option as I have childcare commitments on Wednesdays and Thursdays that make it almost impossible for me to travel those days. Of course travel restrictions are a factor for all working parents and event organisers are much more aware of the importance of disseminating their events to those who are unable to attend in person. So I’ll be following the #lwf12 tag with interest and will hopefully catch a few of the keynotes and presentations on the live stream, I just wish that the profile of the speakers on the “stellar programme” was a little more balanced. It would be nice to know we all have a place in The Future Of Learning. </rant>

JLeRN / UK Contributors Learning Registry Hackday

The aim of this proof of concept project is to explore the practicalities of configuring and running a Learning Registry node and to explore the practicalities of getting data in and out of the network. The team are actively seeking any technical developers who would like to experiment with the node and, in order to facilitate this collaboration, CETIS and JLeRN are hosting a technical development day in Manchester on the 23rd of January. This event is aimed at developers contributing (or intending to contribute) data to the Learning Registry or hoping to build services based on the data it provides access to.

If you are interested in attending this event, you can register here. If you’re hoping to come along please also add a note to this Google Doc about what you’re doing, or hoping to do, and any of the issues you’ve encountered so far. If you can’t come along but are interested, please comment / leave a note as well.

JLeRN Blog

The JLeRN Experiment team have a blog (jlernexperiment.wordpress.com) up and running which they will use to disseminate regular progress reports, or as Sarah explained:

“to share all of our adventures, mis-steps, solutions, and creative ideas while working on the Learning Registry. It’s open notebook science in action!”

And the team have already been as good as their word. Nick has written a post on the Node of Mimas, a test node he installed on “a spare machine (he) had lying around” along with samples of the JSON documents the node outputs to illustrate what Learning Registry data looks like. And Bharti has posted a note on Some more exploring… which mentions the challenges of establishing a test node on a Windows Server 2008 machine and issues with getting Nginx setup correctly.

In parallel with the JLeRN experiment, CETIS will also continue to maintain a watching brief on the Learning Registry initiative in the US and will post updates of relevant developments on the CETIS blogs, so watch this space!