29.1 Systems for supportive open teaching  (Page 4/6)

One question for this blog though — and one I have asked before.

Out of 26 guest bloggers — only 5 are women!

Are we really to believe that there are not very many women thinking about open and online education?

Clearly — the values of open education — of open academic discourse — could only benefit from a diverse community of bloggers.

3. ken udas - december 4th, 2008 at 5:21 pm

Hello,

First, I am sorry for not getting back more quickly. The Thanksgiving holiday had me traveling and then there was a stack of work when I returned to the Office. Andy, thank you for the great post. I am wondering if you could talk a bit about what you have learned form your experiences with OpenLearn relative to the co-creation, reuse, and sharing of educational materials.

@Beth, it is not always so easy to line up guests to post. I have tired to ensure that there is a diverse international and disciplinary perspective. Believe it or not, I have tried to be quite mindful about gender also, but I have perhaps not been so successful. That said, I am open to recommendations for guests who will help ensure more diversity in the series.

Cheers

Ken

4. andy lane - december 5th, 2008 at 11:40 am

“I am wondering if you could talk a bit about what you have learned form your experiences with OpenLearn relative to the co-creation, reuse, and sharing of educational materials.”

@Ken, there is a lot to say about this although we will be publishing a 80 page research report very shortly which will also cover much of this.

First, some figures. In 2 years we have had 3 million unique visitors to OpenLearn across both LearningSpace and LabSpace, with over 90% visting the LearningSpace. Generally, we push LearningSpace for learners and LabSpace for educators but some use both to some extent. Among other things a major difference is that you can take away or download (often the same) content from both but you can only upload revisions of our content or your own content to the LabSpace (it is also possible to do in situ editing of content in the LabSpace). There are 8 different formats/ forms of taking content away - printing out (as nice HTML formatted document), RSS, Unit content XML, IMS CP, IMS CC, OUXML, Plan zip and Moodle backup - and currently there are about 10,000 study units printed per week and an equal number of downloads in all the other formats. So the content is mobile but we only have a few anecdotes/ cases of what happens to all of it (there is some direct offline use, direct referrals in from online courses at other HEIs etc). We have also provided some folk with DVDs of all the content to load into their own LMS and where internet access may be msiining or poor - e.g. 15 prisons in England.

Second, it is worth perusing the LabSpace to look at the study units for in some instances there are edited versions of them attached as a string (all these versions are badged as public contributions. About 15% of the 500 odd study units have a version(s). In most cases the changes are minimal and people have just been trying out the technology. Also in the LabSpace are areas we call PlaySpace and Collaborations, the former any registered user can set up a unit and populate it with content and there are over 100 of these, the latter are areas we set up for projects/organisations where we can give some folk additional permissions, There are about 35 of these and some are full of content, one has won an award and two are in fact being used as the means to deliver a regular course at another HEI. In most of these areas the people are using it for professional devleopment, learning how to use the technologies and to experiment. In many ways our technology is more demanding than Connexions as a para-community site but there are more sophisticated features like the free videoconferencing and knowledge mapping which many find attractive.