Literacies for open practice: open up and say OER?

A presentation at Bloomsbury TEL event on Digital Literacy for Teaching and Research, 19 February 2014, at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Literacies for open practice: Open up and say OER? 

Media Cloud forecast: in-video quizzes and more

Recently the Bloomsbury Media Cloud User Group attended a presentation from MediaCore, the company who provide the platform and hosting that powers the service. There are some interesting developments in the pipeline.

In-video quiz prototype

• It is good to see research and thought has gone into this. The goal is that it should be designed and prototyped in accordance with educational theory and research and user community engagement. Reference to literature arguing that in an educational setting, videos shouldn’t just be passively consumed – you want the students actively engaging.
• They have also surveyed academics and technical staff regarding what they would want to do if there was a quizzing functionality. An interesting result was ‘discuss the responses in class’. Also teachers felt they would change the way they create videos if they had the quizzing functionality, so seen as having a strong pedagogical affordance.
• Also reviewed literature on quizzes/MCQs. Creating good ‘distractors’ (plausible wrong answers) and provision of response-contingent feedback (i.e. tells you why you are right or wrong) both seen as key.
• Design is also based on Bloom’s taxonomy with a view to enabling and encouraging teachers to consciously apply Bloom’s taxonomy in design of questions and feedback.
• Questions can be textual or image-based.
• Getting it working smoothly and making it easy to use is the priority. Integration with Moodle gradebook and similar via SCORM or other methods is further down the track, but the group generally felt this functionality will be more valuable for formative/reflective purposes anyway.

Now & next for the platform

• We are now using the new player.
• You can now embed whole collections (not from the Chooser in Moodle though).
• They now have epub support (i.e. you can upload an epub file as the main media item).
• Capture app already existed for iOS devices, and now exists for Android and Windows 8 (PC & tablet).
• Snagit integration allows upload of Snagit screencapture videos directly to MediaCore but there is a bug that is not displaying all the collections (this is currently with TechSmith to resolve).
• Plan for everything to be more responsive to device/screen size so it works and looks better.
• Planned new ‘super embed’ will allow a bunch of functionality from the site (e.g. collections, attached docs, download main media item) to be accessible from the embeds.
• User group members Javiera Atenas, Elizabeth Charles and Leo Havemann supplied recommendations regarding inclusion of licensing options (including the range of Creative Commons licences) and these will be incorporated into  the platform soon.
• Sharing assets across more than one collection is known to be our current major issue.
  
  

  This post was originally written for the Bloomsbury Learning Environment Blog

Birkbeck Special Blend Project Presented at HEA/SEEC Conference 2013

The HEA and SEEC held a combined conference on Flexible Learning at the University of Westminster in July. Along with Liz Drew who was part of the project team with me, I presented an overview of Special Blend, our Changing the Learning Landscape -assisted project which aimed to come up with a Birkbeck-flavoured approach to blended learning. The project morphed into a second phase which involved developing and then delivering a pilot module, Step Up to Postgraduate Study in Arts. The presentation slides are below.

Special Blend: Developing a Model for Technology-Enhanced, Flexible Learning 

Are Repositories Holding Back OER?

Are repositories holding back OER? - Presented at M25 Learning Technology Group, July 2013