21.1 Educational development at otago polytechnic  (Page 5/13)

Issues with using Wikieducator:

• Copyright issues - Wikieducator uses a site wide Share Alike copyright restriction without an option to mark a full project or individual resource with the Polytechnic’s preferred CC BY license. This limitation in copyright potentially complicates the Polytechnic’s developments on the platform, but work continues on a good will basis. To manage the risks in this, the Polytechnic’s main page on Wikieducator links to a copy of the Polytech’s IP policy which points out the use of CC BY that applies to all pages that are category tagged Otago Polytechnic . This position has not become a concern to the Wikieducator hosting organisation but clarification on the issue is needed. This issue is argued in detail in the article Open educational resources and practices .

A wikieducator development structure, page templates and staff development

The Polytech’s EDC encourages people who develop educational resources on Wikieducator to use a structure which aims to make resources on the wiki as reusable and open for collaboration as possible. Inspired by Steven Parker and his ideas about activity sheets, as well as David Wiley’s significant 2001 paper The Reusability Paradox , this development structure revolves around the creation of Learning Objective Pages . Learning Objective pages express a set of learning objectives related to a particular skill or knowledge attribute. Two subpages attach to the Learning Objective pages: one being Library of Resources and the other being Learning Activities .

As developers and support librarians encounter information and media relating to the learning objectives in a Learning Objective page, the link for those resources is added to the Library of Resources subpage. As learning activities are devised, they are added to the list on the Learning Activities subpage.

Course Pages are developed separately from the Learning Objective Pages but are what bring a selection of Learning Objective Pages and their Library and Activities subpages together. The Course Pages are free to be contextualised to whatever the expressive needs of the course may be. Because the Learning Objective Pages are simply linked to the Course Page and not subpages, they are effectively independent to the course, and so can be reused in other courses or for other purposes without the need for editing and renaming (for the most part anyway).

For this reason it is important that the Learning Objective pages are worded in such a way so as to be as reusable in as many different contexts as possible, and to leave contextualisation to the Course Page or to the various Activities listed in the subpage to the Learning Objective.

As Learning Objective Pages are picked up by different Courses then its list of Learning Activities will grow to reflect the reuse without affecting the reusability of the Learning Objective itself. A video explaining this structure is available on the Otago Polytechnic Category page on Wikieducator .

In November 2007 Brent Simpson developed the Otago Template Generator , which aims to simplify the process of creating Learning Objective Pages and their Library and Activities subpages. Other work includes hacks for embedding media from popular media sharing services like Youtube and Slideshare, which is another outstanding issue with Wikieducator as we wait for the administrators to consider whether or not to support the functionality of embedded 3rd party media.