fostering collaboration and enhancement through community-building
DESCRIPTION
Presentation from OER11 (http://www.ucel.ac.uk/oer11/index.html) on our work in the UKOER Bioscience pilot project to foster sense of community and encourage collaboration amongst geographically-disparate project partners. Related abstract here: http://www.ucel.ac.uk/oer11/abstracts/1139.htmlTRANSCRIPT
Supporting teaching in higher education to improve student learning across the Biosciences
Fostering collaboration and enhancement through
community-building
Chris Taylor and Terry McAndrew
Follow me @chr1staylorhttp://tinyurl.com/bioukoer
UK Centre for Bioscience logo © University of Leeds. All rights reserved.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence except where explicitly exempted.
Subject Centre role
One of the most important and valued aspects of the Subject Centres’ work is to build and establish networks of discipline-specific academics
Outline
Bioscience pilot project background Aims for collaboration Blogs Use of RSS
Yahoo Pipes Feed43
Partner profile pages Skype OeRBITAL
Bioscience OER pilot project
Focus on resources to enhance practical and fieldwork in the Biosciences
To produce and upload to OER repository 200+ resources uploaded
To explore issues around creating and releasing openly-licensed content
Working with ten academic partners in ten institutions spread around the UK Each exploring same set of issues
Aims for collaboration
To build a community of geographically-disparate practitioners around a central theme – OER
To foster communication that would sustain without our direct intervention
To contribute positively through collaboration to the overall project goals
To remove barriers for partners
Blogs
JISCInvolve – Wordpress-based Main Centre
project blog Individual
partner blogs 7/10 blogged
regularly
http://biooer.jiscinvolve.org/
Blogs
Very useful tool for reflection To keep track of
and share issues
encountered All encouraged to
follow and
comment on RSS output...
http://biooer.jiscinvolve.org/
Use of RSS
Very powerful for automation Allowed us to do a lot behind the scenes Very little experience or awareness of
amongst project partners Use in blogs With Yahoo Pipes With Feed43
Partner profile pages
YahooPipes Why?
Wanted straight-forward way to collate project partners’ blog entries and other resource outputs
Visual and fairly user-friendly Versatile
Just scratched the surface Number of ways of exporting results
Can produce size-customisable output window to embed in site/output through web2.0 in addition to standard further RSS feed output
Examples of my YahooPipes: http://tinyurl.com/bioukoerYahooPipes
YahooPipes logo Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
YahooPipes
YahooPipes
YahooPipes
Not without its limitations Restricted by content and quality of RSS
feed input to it Unable to draw out our specific project
partner resources from Jorum due to lack of keywords field in RSS Not practical to repeat keywords in description body
So, more challenging solution required Feed43
Feed43 custom RSS
What? Feed43 is a free third-party custom RSS creator http://feed43.com/ Scrapes contents of URLs offered to it and
produces tailored RSS feed based on defined search parameters
Feed43 logo Copyright © 2006–2009 A.I.Studio. All rights reserved.
Feed43 custom RSS Why?
To resurface links to Jorum records in context within our own site for project partner profile pages
11 pages on our site required project’s OER content Central page and each of 10 project partners
http://tinyurl.com/bioukoer Update pages automatically when new resources
added Sustainable (allowed us to keep track of partners’ uploads ;) )
Emulating repository profile pages To reproduce their Jorum-held resources on
each partner’s page on our own website, along with small biography, reasons for contributing to OER and Comments facility Recognition
To build context around resources provided by each partner
So those who might use the resources could associate them with their creator, and have a space to engage them in a dialogue (though not used)
To allow potential users to relate to creators and their motivations
Feed43 custom RSS
How? Run specific search query in JorumOpen for
individual partners (Surname AND bioukoer) Take resulting URL and input into Feed43 Set parameters on data to collect and output Manipulate using ASP.NET* and display on
website *If easier you can of course feed resulting RSS into
YahooPipes instead
Feed43 custom RSShttp://tinyurl.com/bioukoerFeed43
Feed43 custom RSS
From this:
Feed43 custom RSS
To this:
Risks
Vulnerable to stability of third-party applications Feed43 YahooPipes
Reliant on Jorum not changing their search results URLs
Why? Easy (with minimal training) Instant Versatile
Instant messenger Audio (with multiple participants) Video Screenshare
Supplied partners with headsets and webcams
Exchanged details of Skype IDs Most had not used Skype before, but all
found it useful Able to carry out video interviews, with
VodBurner Partners all now have permanent contact
details in their Skype profiles
10 months after project finished still have contact with partners, and amongst themselves Relationships have sustained
The future for Skype...?
Interviews with project partners
On bioukoer channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/bioukoer
Interviews with project partners
Prof David Male, Open University:
“The main advantage for me, so far, is the contacts that I’ve made. I’ve been in touch with a lot of people via the [Bioscience] OER project… I think it’s a good thing we’ve let this material go out, and hopefully is available and useful for people, but for me it’s the contacts I’ve made and the possibility of taking things forward for new open educational resources.”
OER phase 2: OeRBITAL
Open educational Resources for Biologists Involved in Teaching And Learning Sustaining OER, not creating
Thematic Collections strand To identify existing OER from multiple repositories
and build subject-specific collections Focus on reuse to provide sustainability
OeRBITAL
Building on experience from pilot project Communal MediaWiki as collaborative
development tool Encouragement of discussion areas for
comment Use of further collaborative spaces such as
GoogleDocs…
Supporting teaching in higher education to improve student learning across the Biosciences
Fostering collaboration and enhancement through
community-building
Chris Taylor and Terry McAndrew
Follow me @chr1staylorhttp://tinyurl.com/bioukoer
UK Centre for Bioscience logo © University of Leeds. All rights reserved.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence except where explicitly exempted.