Academic Development Centre

At lunchtime today I attended a JISC webinar on the Curriculum Design Programme project ‘Viewpoints’ entitled ”Tools to support effective assessment and feedback: the Viewpoints project”. The webinar was presented by Alan Masson and Catherine O’Donnell from the University of Ulster and had a focus on workshop tools that the Viewpoints project (http://viewpointsproject.blogspot.co.uk/) had developed to support effective assessment. These are my few notes from a very informative session:

The workshop tools were designed around best practice in the areas of :

• Assessment & Feedback – outputs from the REAP Project (http://www.reap.ac.uk/ )
• Information Skills – SCONUL Pillars (http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html )
• Student Interactions – 8 Learning Events Model (see http://www.labset.net/media/prod/8LEM.pdf )

The key elements to the toolset are a learner timeline and a set of principles for each of the above themes. Each of the principles are published on a card with a series of examples on the back. A Staff group attending a workshop are issued with a worksheet, timeline and a set of cards. The first step is for each group to agree their main objective for attending and then map the principles to the learner timeline (e.g. Induction, first few weeks etc). The next step is to turn the cards over and consider the example implementation ideas.

They found that the number of cards was important – too many or too few stifle reflection and debate with the optimum being 9 +/- 2. The principles were action based for consistent meaning with the principle that the cards would promote reflection, discussion, and provide ideas for consideration. Following the workshop participants were provided (via Flickr) with photographs taken during the sessions, along with the typed up / photographed worksheet. Staff feedback seems to have been positive and that the project outputs have been fully institutionally embedded (see http://ee.ulster.ac.uk/assessment_and_feedback/).

Interestingly there was some interactivity introduced into the webinar beyond chat using Collaborate’s inbuilt voting tool to implement a couple of activities based on the principles. This worked quite well.

The project resources including the cards have been made available under Creative Commons via the project wiki: http://wiki.ulster.ac.uk/display/VPR/Home and available in PDF and as Illustrator files. Work is also ongoing at the University of Bolton to develop some widgets for implementing aspects of Viewpoints online (http://coeducate.bolton.ac.uk/2012/03/24/widget-beta-8lem-learning-design/ ). See also http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/29227748/Viewpoints%20project .

In Standards and Openness  I described the role of standards including trials run using OU OpenLearn units and eXe generated resources.  Following this and taking the opportunity of a request from a colleague I explored the availability of OER resources in specific topic areas including the formats that they were provided in and the ability to import and edit.

The first stage was to undertake a key word search of OpenLearn units.  My reasoning for starting with OpenLearn units was partly due to the breadth available but also because of the availability of Common Cartridge packaged resources (ease of importing / editing within a VLE) and metadata including level. This search identified a number of potentially relevant units, supplemented with suggestions made by OER Recommender (The OpenLearn pages use the OER Recommender widget providing automated suggestions to other related resources). 
The second stage was a keyword search of JORUM (specifying open resources) which identified further relevant resources including those in other repositories such as Humbox.  The last stage was to perform a search using Xpert.

These searches identified a wealth of resources, both single item and packaged multiple resources, related to the search topics. Although perhaps not all usable it allowed more focus to be given to addressing gaps and editing and mixing as per the specific context. As part of the exercise the resources were all imported into the institutional VLE.

This exercise identified a number of issues as outlined below:

1. Multiple Formats providing varying ability to edit.  In the case of packaged resources it was not always clear which packaging standard was being used though mostly SCORM and HTML. Formats  included:

• Common Cartridge package. Flexible in terms of editing and mixing within the VLE, though resources not always optimally designed for the navigation tools provided by the VLE. The naming convention of resources could be problematic, e.g. constituent files named with a alphanumeric code which added time in identifying the relevant file for editing.
• SCORM package. Not directly editable but with the advantage of inbuilt navigation between the elements of the resource.
• HTML package.
• URL to web resource. Not possible to edit and the risk of the resource becoming unavailable.
• Documents including MS Word and PDF which may or may not be locked.

2. User generated metadata tags. Flexible but maybe not always consistent.

3. Licence.  Not always declared though commonly Creative Commons.  However there are many types of Creative Commons licences with different levels of restriction which may include “No derivative works”.

4. Quality. Beyond the reputation of the institution and the individual some repositories such as Humbox provide the ability for registered users to add comments and notes to resources.

Summary of Resources Used

• Humbox – Humanities learning resources repository
• JORUM – JISC funded UK Learning & Teaching resources repository
• OER Recommender / Folksemantic - US National Science Foundation funded OER search tool and also provide a recommender widget for embedding in learning resource sites etc.
• OpenLearn – Open Universityopen learning resources
• Xpert – JISC funded Nottingham University tool for searching for open resources in learning and teaching.