Mae'r siŵw yn ei wneud. Sut ydych yn ddweud? Fynaen yn gyfnod â'r GCU.  Mae'r ddweud hynny, a'r dda i'r ddweud hynny. Felly, i'n gallu ddweud hynny'n gwneud yn gweithio'r sefydliadau, mae'r ysgwrdd gyda'r sefydliadau a'r ddweud hynny. o'r angen eu ddweud, felly mae'r cyffinion o'r angen neu'r angen eu ddweud a'r angen neu'r angen ac mae'n dweud hynny, a mae'n unig pan i'w ddweud o'r angen i'w ddweud i fynd i gyd.  Hyfyddi'r sriff o'r cyflwyno gyflei'r llyfr, sydd yn fwy o'r rai gyflym ar ystafell ar gyfer mwy gydweithasedd. Daethwn i ystafell, yr eisiau'r cyfrifredu os oedd yn fwy o'r Lleidau Bryn oherwydd yna. Ych Speakodd Lleidiau Bryn oedd, yn ni'n rwynt o'r yeph yw yw ei fydd, ac maewn hefyd oedd yn nid oedd yn rydyn. a we have some different focus than south of the border in some areas. So these were the aims of the SIG and we are looking at promoting the technology agenda in all sectors of Scottish education. So we are looking at across HME, FE, schools, public sector, etc. all inclusive. Dwi'r cynnwethaeth nhw'n dwi'n gweithio brif iawn yn Llywodraeth Cymru. Rydw i fod yn影iol y ffóorngod rhan oedd fod yn mewn amser ymddangosio cerdd iawn. Mae'r gweithio oedd eu bod hyn yn oed ar gweithio ar gyfnod. Iebeilio gefnog iawn i'r llythiau o gweithio hyn o ffordd o舞-cred etyn. So at the moment, our committee consists of myself, Linda Crenard, and Joe Wilson as co-chairs, and colleagues to Leslie Blochman, who is here. Oh, you're here at Leslie Tamsigas! Jan Lowle here and Mark Hoxie. So this is our current committee. If any of you are interested in getting involved as a committee member, then please do get in touch then Ylvis. Alt are also looking for committee members for the operational committees at the moment, but Martin will tell you more about that shortly. So what we've done so far with Alt Scotland over the last year. Just to let you know, when I have the last kind, that was actually two or three months ago, it might be more now. We had about 1215 subscribers to the mail list, which is great. We've been involved in a number of activities, including writing to the Scottish Education Secretary around the Open Scotland declaration, which we'll hear again more about later from Lorna Campbell. We spoke originally to Mike Russell with now written to Angela Constance, so that communication is ongoing. We are represented now on the Scottish Higher Education Developers Group. Martin is a regular attendant at that group on our behalf. We are part of the consultation group around OEPS project, Open Educational Practices at Scotland, led by Open University in Scotland. We'll hear more about that from Pete Cannell later as well. She'd also mentioned that Jo Wilson was elected as an Alt ambassador this year, which is great. Joins a very elite few. That's quite an honour. Sheila McNeill was also elected as an Alt trustee. So, where our presence is beginning to expand within the Alt community, which is great. Anyway, moving on, we'll get started. This is our morning agenda. I'm going to just pass over to Martin Halxie now just to give us an update on broader Alt activities before we actually launch into the rest of our speakers. Thanks, Linda. So, as Linda mentioned, my name is Martin Halxie. I'm actually one of the few members of staff employed by Alt, but at the same time my background is in learning technology. In fact, this is where I started learning technology in Korea, Glasgow, Caledonia University. So, it's nice to be back here again. I have to thank Linda and our team for hosting Alt Scotland here at GCU Eid. I have a very long job title, a chief innovation community and technology officer, which actually is chief myCT. It's a good summary of what I do for Alt is the ICT. But, Martin, who's the CEO, the CEO of Alt, sends our apologies for not being here today, but we actually have a trustee meeting tomorrow. So, Sheila McNeill, who's in the office over there, we're sitting somewhere. We're going to London to have that meeting with us. There's actually three areas I thought that would be useful just to either update you about or remind you about it. And when I was thinking about these, they actually, I think, overlapped quite a bit and overlapped nicely. So, membership, community and events. So, let's first look at membership. I hope you're all Alt members. If you're not an Alt member, if you can see your institution on the screen, then you're the, well, I would say lucky few, but the growing number of people that can actually join Alt as an associate member for free. So, if your institution is up there, you can join. We have other membership options, so you can join as an ordinary member as well. It's, I think, £54 a year. And if you want to go up another level, we actually have a certified membership of Alt. So it's a pure beast portfolio system where you can actually become a certified member and you're looking for something to do for your CPD. See, Alt's a good thing to do, I would suggest, but I'm obviously biased. Events. Obviously, we have the event here, and I think this event today is actually a great reflection on what Alt does. It's about bringing together the community from across sectors to actually share what we're doing to improve what we're doing. We obviously have our big annual conference in September. It's the 8th to 10th at the University of Manchester. There's early bird registration, and there's quite a big discount if you're actually a member of Alt. So if you're not able to join as an associate, you can actually join as an ordinary member and get big discounts of the conference as well. We appreciate that the conference is quite an expensive thing, and it's for people in other sectors. It's harder to justify the cost, so you can't attend for a day, right? We're also trying to negotiate a deal where we'll get some sponsored places for people from FE, but we haven't finalised that yet, so keep an eye on the news wires about that one. And, like the event today, we'll be streaming a lot of the keynotes and invited speaker sessions, so even if you can't make it down to Manchester, keep an eye out for some of the live sessions. And as an Alt member, you'll be able to interact with some of the participants at the conference as well through the conference platform. So community, this is the bit which is in my job title, so I've got a nice big green black green. If you work for Alt, you have to get used to the colour green. I don't mind, actually. I think community is a very interesting one. I think right now we see a lot of headlines in the papers about education is broken, and I don't really believe those. I think education could be better, and I think the fact that you're here today is evidence of a community wanting to make education better. I think we can use technology to make education better as well. There's obviously other areas that we can do that. Alt is one of the many associations and organisations, I think, helping us to make education better. I think that's quite a powerful idea, and for me the challenge for us within Alt is to actually make that sharing practice, make that education be better easier. Obviously, when you join up as a member of Alt, you have access to the Alt members mailing list, which is a very rich space for not just sharing what you're doing, but asking questions and learning from each other. Something that to bear in mind is Alt is a membership organisation. Linda has already mentioned that the SIG is run by Alt members. In terms of our governance, we have trustees who are members, and also our committees are made up of members. This is my call to you. If you want to have your say in shaping your membership organisation, we've brought some invictities up for various committees. We've got membership and development, member education and cross sector engagement, communication and publication. If you're interested in contributing to our organisation, to the membership, please put in a request to join to one of these committees, and even if you're not sure, just ask more questions about that. We're quite reasonably well represented in Scotland in committees. Kirk Gardner from Glasgow University is on the membership development committee, and Sarah Cymru is just finishing the comms. So you need to fill Sarah's shoes. So please bear that in mind. The last thing, the hashtag. It's quite interesting to see how communities are forming around simple things like hashtags. Twitter, obviously, is a good example of this. This is the hashtag for today, but this is the hashtag that, as a membership organisation, we're trying to promote to everyone to use all year round. So we use this hashtag for the conference, but we actually monitor this hashtag every day practically of the week. I don't get any rest, can you tell? So if you've got anything interesting, blog posts, events, job applications, questions, just that little tag on it, and a little tweet, and we'll help you retweet that, share it to the community, and hopefully we can continue building on making education just a little bit better. So, back to you, Emma. Hello to our first speaker on the agenda, and Natalie Lafferty. Welcome, Natalie. Thank you very much for the invitation to speak today, and I'm going to retweet you a little bit about the work that I've been involved with, which involves students as producers of open learning, and I guess it's to be a bit of a tale of a journey that I've been involved in, probably over about six years now, working with students, and supporting them, and encouraging them in their decided learning resources to support both their own learning and also their peers. I've been based in the medical school at Dundee, I've recently moved to More Central, but I've maintained a day away teaching them, and just to keep my hand in at the cold basis at work, and medicine has quite a strong tradition of working closely with students, and also supporting peer-led approaches to learning, so there's been a well-established peer-tutoring scheme at Dundee for several years already, where I joined the undergraduate at the Medical School, and the Medical School's always been very supportive of supporting students involving these initiatives. And then, as we began to establish a kind of e-learning presence or a technology and innovation learning team, we had students who started to come to us with ideas, the bits of the course which they were maybe struggling to understand, and they thought, we've got an idea, we're taught anatomy in relation to joints, so the elbow, the hip, the knee, but actually it's not really explained in the clinical context, but we've got to develop our own resource. Can you help us? So we basically work with individual students who used to come into the office, and over time a number of learning resources have been developed and they've been integrated subsequently into the teaching and into the curriculum. And then we had a group of students who developed their own website to support peer-learning called DundeePRN, and as part of that they produced weekly podcasts, they started to produce videos, which they posted up to YouTube, and they subsequently wrote a paper about their experience for one of the AGA Germans. And it's very interesting to sort of see their reflections on the process of being involved in developing peer-learning resource, developing videos, podcasts, and all these other sort of e-tee talks because they identified that actually being involved in this process of actually producing ones, they were developing skills and interprofessional learning because they were having to deal with different people to organise a videoing, and to get technicians involved, to get the best from Natalie there at the right time. They were developing communication skills, they were developing teamworking skills, project management skills, things which they wouldn't ordinarily be doing as part of their everyday work in the curriculum. And what we began to see was that a sort of local community of practice began to be involved which involved students, involved some of the academics, some of our clinical teachers and the local NHS trust, and also some of our education lists, and also members of the e-learning team. And this was all coming very good, but there was also a sense that because it was becoming common for students to do things, that staff would then sort of set up projects, recruit an interest, you know, a student that was keen, and then they would go ahead and try and develop something. And then you would then be presented with something which was really a bit of a mess, because one, it would be full of images where you didn't know where they'd come from, who owned the copyright, there was no sense of learning design, they were developing online resources, it just read like a textbook, so actually in terms of supporting learning, they were really kind of way off the mark. And we thought, actually, the students aren't really learning from this experience and what they're developing, we're really happy to take on then so that it's fit for purpose in the curriculum. So we kind of thought, how do we sort of handle this? The other kind of frustration for us was that we just worked with a group of students over several years, and then when they hit the clinical years of the curriculum, they suddenly became very busy because there were clinical attachments and they could be anywhere in Scotland. And the next group of students coming behind them maybe had a very different focus of interest. And so we had these kind of waves of interest. And there was a sense in which we had a group, then there was a bit of a lull, then we had another group of students, and each time we were having to kind of reinvent the wheel, go over first base, and it was like, we're very happy to work with them. There was a sense in which it's got to be a better way than what we're doing. And so we thought, how can we develop a more kind of sustainable approach to actually supporting our students to become co-producers of learning? What is it that we could do? So we began to speak to some of our students. There was an H.E.A. call-out for their students' partners theme two years ago now. And we spoke to some of the students and we decided that we would put in a proposal. So basically look at the potential around developing an approach that could lead to a more sustainable way of developing skills in our students but also longer term, also in staff, that would mean less time for us to kind of have to pick up the pieces. But actually also in a sense equip people as digital teachers but also then be able to mentor new members of staff and also new students as they came through the curriculum. And one of the premises for that kind of idea was this report which is several years old now in 2009 from just that whole notion that actually students should be playing a much more significant role in working with academics and teachers to develop teaching and that we should be working in partnership with them. And so the concept that we came up with was to develop a series of kind of, we call them kind of mini-ooks actually but they're really OERs. And they were sort of focused on a set of skills that we felt were kind of important, kind of rudimentary things that we would expect to students who is developing an online learning resource that we have some understanding about. And the topics that we focused on were copyright. So introducing them into things like creative commons, making sure that they were aware of issues around patient confidentiality. So if they were going to be creating resources where they might interview patients or they were going to photograph patients they were aware of all the consent issues. We were going to look at managing resources so that then when they were producing their final resource they'd be able to make sure that their attribution was there and the appropriate referencing was there. And also introducing them to different curation tools. We looked at presentations and learning design. So the whole concept of multimedia design, cognitive load, usability issues around maybe colour blindness, students with dyslexia. And then we wanted to look at things like developing online activities so whether that was maybe using a blog to create scenarios which then might be followed up by a Twitter chat. We wanted to look at formative assessment because we were already using PYs in the curriculum. So again introducing students to how to write a good MCQ question and how to make sure there was good feedback. And then also just generally about giving feedback to students. So those were our initial six topics. And we essentially worked with the students to co-create these original bits of content. So many a Wednesday afternoon in the office about coffee biscuits. So the students would draft the first version and then get together and review that with her. We'd kind of refine it slightly. And then we would get students to then out the test it. So we just put these kind of resources up on a WordPress blog. And it was very much a kind of step-by-step process. Just, you know, presenting them with some information, some resources, getting them to reflect on that and do a series of activities and walk through it. And we started off with two students. We said that we would then do some beta testing in something called Student Selected Component, which is something that I think peculiar to London where students can select part of their curriculum. And we were offering this SSC as a title of the digital teacher. And we had five students who were scheduled to do that in January in May. And then subsequently we've also had the opportunity to also do some pilot work with some staff. So we've been through this process of trying out the different groups and at each stage we've just been tweaking it slightly as we've gone along. So very much taking a iterative approach. And in terms of when we then first came to use it with a group of students in the natural teaching context, I guess this is an outline of really the kind of approach that we took. We had a four week SSC and the first thing we did was set up a Google community, Google Plus community which was a closed community which involved the three facilitators of the SSC and the students. So it was a place for us to be able to share things. It was a place for them to be able to post questions. But it was also about us trying to introduce different tools that could support their learning but also would be useful for their project. It was also an ability then to introduce things like Google Docs because those some knew about Google Docs and then they didn't. We introduced them to Google Hangouts. Sometimes we met over Google Hangouts and they haven't come across that before. So to them that was a revelation that they could use this when they were working in their groups without having to come into the uni to give it a bad day outside. So that was something new to them. And we initially introduced them to the 12 roles in the teacher and it's quite interesting that students tend to think about the teacher as a lecturer or that someone that stands up or runs a small group session and it hadn't really occurred to them that there are all these different facets to actually being a teacher. So we began to look at these and discuss these. We also explored the students various educational theories and principles. And the kind of key things that are the foundation that you need to be able to develop effective online learning. One of the things that we do is we bring in and kind of hold those books off the bookshelf in the office, get them all to pick one, we say pick a chapter, two weeks' timing out of the presentation invariably they've made the whole book. And it's what's really greatest that actually as they've read it and they've presented it they've thought about all the different projects that they're all doing and related it to each other's projects that they've also related it to the curriculum and identified actually how we could improve our teaching which is quite interesting. And we focused we had face-to-face sessions with the students and then we also had then these kind of mini eukotopics which were online. And in these two SSCs that we've run so far we focused on these mostly topics copyright managing resources and presentations and learning design. Each student has to keep a reflective blog so each day they just say what they'd be doing what they'd be learning what's going to be frustrating them what they'd like to know more about and share those into your class group. They're all commenting on each other's blogs that facilitators will all commenting as well so they're getting that feedback as they're going through the learning process. So here's an example one of the students writing about the papers that we shared around cognitive load theory. So very much reflecting on the things that we're signposting them to but also they're also finding resources and showing them themselves as well. This is the copyright tutorial and again here's some reflections on them working through that. It always kind of evases me that just so few people seem to really understand copyright and creative commons and we found exactly the same when we run this with staff. It's a complete eye-opener but it's great that actually people are then picking up what they need to do in terms of making sure that the resources they use they do have permission or they give them the appropriate attribution etc. Also if they're developing their own resources they also license those under the appropriate CC license which they feel is best for their resource. So after January February went through some more refining and then we ran this and incorporated certain elements of what we've done with the students around copyright and presentation skills into a staff development module which forms part of our post-graduates to keep learning at Dundee and again that worked very well and it's very interesting that around the presentation skills that many staff said actually we should have done this actually when we first came into post as a member of teaching staff because most people just you take power for it you kind of left us to get on with it how do you actually use it nobody really knows and in terms of design we kind of learn for ourselves but always don't do a great job. So we ran the second iteration of the SSC in May had another Google Plus group and I guess our take home messages or the students take home messages have been really interesting from this process in that they've begun to understand that you don't just use technology for technology's sake that sometimes you don't need to use technology they've learnt the importance of education and design whether that's in producing an online resource or whether it's a PowerPoint in a lecture and that multimedia design matters that cognitive load all these things are actually very important and they critique some of the resources that are used in the curriculum and redesign them and that sort of thing as well as part of the project and what we've asked them to do is also now to develop some resources some sort of voice over power for the presentations based on my own work so that we can then share those with teaching staff to help improve teaching staff's presentations. They've learnt about usability testing but actually when you're developing an online learning resource that you need to get some feedback about it as you develop it some of them have been developing websites or apps so again they're developing a little group they're then trying it with their peers to get feedback to make sure that actually the end product is actually useful and it does enhance their peers' learning so again they've been reading around that getting more insights about actually how to improve the learning design what they're developing they've really grasped copyright and created commons and the resources that they're developing and we see a licence and statement on them about how they're sharing them they've also realised how important feedback is and actually not to be afraid to ask for it and I think what's really impressive is that they've listened to the feedback and you see evidence of how they've refined the resources they've developed in response to that feedback both in the classes but also by sharing it with their peers it seems kind of odd that there's some sort of WordPress kind of approach to developing a learning resource and the learning activity has proved really popular because they've kind of... there are a lot of tasks and activities and what they've really enjoyed is actually I see it as an exciting new way of learning which is kind of a well-made fix it seems like not very sophisticated but they've actually liked just following a series of tasks and learning by doing and I think in the past we've just spoken to students about copyright but actually this thing they've also recognised that actually when you're developing teaching that a lot of it there's a lot of work that goes on that's really not seen and I think they appreciate now the efforts that staff make in developing the curriculum in developing teaching that a lot of students don't know what they're doing and what they're doing in developing teaching that a lot is kind of seen behind closed doors and they've also appreciated the time management they've learnt time management skills because they've had to be very self-directed and that's not something that often they have to do because so often how we use technology is that speed-feeding of students another key thing which they've really identified as a take-home message is the whole thing around digital professionalism and certainly in the healthcare professions when you start to talk about using social media it's always quite negative and students just kind of you know put the shutters up I don't want to hear because it's just you know we all don't really trust them and by using things like blogging Google+, they've been using Flickr to sort of share their images some of them have dabbled in Twitter they're beginning to actually see which of these tools can actually support their learning because they will have a use in terms of their professional mind as they move forward and they're beginning to see a distinction between some tools which they may use for their socialise and some which may be more professional and that's quite interesting to see that is actually quite obviously addressing that particular issue something which they've discovered as they've been using the tools and I think one of the most powerful things to come through is that they've really appreciated that actually they can use technology to form a learning elective that can support their learning and that that isn't just restricted to Facebook because typically most of our students use it on Facebook but there are issues with that and it's typically a year group so how do you then pass on the knowledge to the next week behind you is how do you find that thing that was posted 18 months ago about something so they've realised that actually there are far more opportunities to support peer learning and sort of a learning collective notion using a whole range of technologies and in terms of our reflections and what we've learnt I think we've learnt and it seems crazy for me to say so I'm always getting at people who go on that digital leaders but not all of our students are digital mice groups and in the first group and we've probably seen for some of the screenshots embedding a link, they embed the whole thing they've not quite grasped hyperlinking a lot of them, some of them, not a lot of them but one or two lacked confidence in setting up a blog in the second group it was quite different but it's really made us realise that when we start to roll these open courses out to staff we're going to have to do a preliminary session with staff to introduce them how to set a blogger how to use a blogger how to use these various things and how to embed a slideshare presentation in the blog post because people don't have these to cancel we'll need to do that preparation and I think the other thing for us that's been really encouraging is that students who've been involved are all going on now to do additional projects in their fourth year research projects around online learning some of that's around developing resources some bits about identifying needs amongst other students and they see it also as a good thing for their CVs the key for us is that they do learn so many other skills by involving them as co-producers of learning which are essential for employability and I think we have frameworks on employability on digital literacy and sometimes I think yes they've got a place and sometimes I think we get it wrong and actually we should be focusing on our educational approaches and our educational philosophy and how we design learning activities in the right way but actually these students will learn these skills rather than having a kind of tick box approach to come in from the Arctic and I can do that, I can do this it's about actually trying to get students to appreciate what they're learning and seeing the relevance and actually taking forward them and don't just kind of believe it's often when students use maybe social media learning activity they just kind of park it because it's kind of integrated but they don't see the wider relevance of it but if we can create learning activities where they begin to see the benefits and the value of using these things it does help I think to find these other skills I think they've all really learnt skills around inquiry, creativity participation and obviously digital literacy and again it just happens quite naturally and organically by just getting in that space and facilitating their learning and again so much of that it's not been because of us but because actually they've helped each other to learn so we've had a whole raft of other learning resources developed this year I think one of the most exciting things to come out of it is that from the ASSC that one of our students is going to develop a new site called MedShare to support peer learning and I think this was presented to staff yesterday who identified that actually students are understanding now what lifelong learning is rather than just kind of saying that to be lifelong learning is self directed they actually now get it because it's a process of being involved in creating learning and they're linking that in with a peer mentoring scheme and also a student advisory scheme and they're working with the learning team to integrate that into the early years and it's all created by the students so we're kind of developing this kind of ecosystem of working with students and I think what's exciting for me is that actually we've got both second and third year students and the second years are already starting to mentor the first years so that next year we will do more of these ASSCs but also as they develop MedShare we will share these resources there that can actually do these learning activities at any point and the idea is that as they complete them if they do blog about them they can actually go and open a badge to credit the fact that they grasp these principles and the next key step for us is to run this in the open with staff in the next academic session and we will make it more widely open as well and we're hoping that maybe staff and students might work together and that some of the students are really complete at this and some of the staff in that confidence in this area so that's it an example of student engagement are the four creatures of the door so that's what I'm using is there any questions from now to the look of humanists yes John I can ask you, in my experience in some areas I'm wondering that staff can be a bit slow to just play in the operations and hold the reins and be the gatekeeper is that an experience you had at the door? We haven't actually and I think because I think maybe because students tend to come to us first we've then maybe identified a number of teaching staff so when a student develops a resource what we encourage them to do is to link up with teaching staff to peer review what they do because one of the concerns the students have about student development resources is are they accurate so again we're encouraging them to identify and get people to be able to peer review this so that again you've got a statement that says this has been reviewed by Crop 11 or Dr Sonso and actually I think it's maybe slightly different working with doctors who are very very busy with their patients and so actually being able to work with students they actually quite enjoy actually and they also feel that they actually learn a lot from the student in the process but I don't know it might be different maybe in other disciplines where you've got more full time academics who who want to maybe pull the reins a bit more tightly I was interested in what you said about current students who do effective work I tried to get my students to do the same but finding that they don't do much more than that just repeat what I've what the fairly lectures are just summarise what it is that they learned that is not so much of a lecture what did you do that encouraged them or did they just get to share what they learned and it's not important but did you give them any advice or any guidance that you could share that as well to my students? It's an interesting one because our students are always asked to reflect and they have to reflect as part of the course and they hate it and it's very contrived and they write in a way that isn't actually their personal voice and so what we say to them is I want you to do this reflective blog but what I want you to say what have you done today what have you learned today what have you found difficult and I think if you just give them those three things it kind of helps I don't know whether you comment on the student blogs or whether they comment on each others but I think that also helped I think having what was really interesting was that one student was struggling with something and another student went and found something posted a link to that which then helped that student so I think it was also this sense of the students building a relationship that is kind of collective amongst each other that also helped the blogging process in a sense because they were going to see the value in it but then halfway through they all started to say will I carry on with this after the SSC and quite often that doesn't happen but sometimes it does happen and over the years I've seen real extremes, I have one student who wrote 80,000 words over four weeks she just loved writing and it was fascinating it was fascinating and I couldn't eat all of it but it was really genuine kind of reflection and I don't know how we kind of crack it because sometimes it works well but sometimes it doesn't work quite so well Do you assess that blogs? I do, yes well I do the commenting and even if it's reflected by a lot of blog councils they're finding marks but there are no formal criteria for what they should put in a blog and that it should include reflection but I'm just listening to you I wonder if I ever complicated it a bit because I've got to give an example of what it looks like I don't know whether they're actually assessing or whether they've even got to show what their own experience is I think it's just a very simple thought those three points I say and that kind of frames what they do but then once they get into it I finally kind of go beyond that Any questions? Do you assess those three points? We do, their final assessment is based on the final results that they've produced how well have they applied on educational principles what they've developed they have to keep their blogs if they haven't been keeping it to know there's very little reflection in it more evidence that they've actually understood things that will be taken into account The scheme that we have there are issues in medicine that things like that kind of professionalism so because they're expected to keep so many posts while they're doing it so if they're not doing it it will also be affected in the proportion of the grade that they get for that as well as their overall understanding and knowledge and also their kind of approach to the whole module It is a very tricky area It is a very tricky area I've got colleagues who use G-plus and blogs in other SSCs and they're not assessed and I think the reason we've assessed them is because before we used to have students who would sell a proposal project and work with us for four weeks and if students sell proposals they have to keep what's called a learning log which is just typically a word document because they have to do that anyway that's really why we then use the blog but I think that I think it's an interesting area and I do have a concern that we've just changed it but certainly this is the first year we've run it as a formal SSC and I would say the evidence I've seen from these students is that actually their blogging has been very, very rich their reflection is very rich and the fact it's being assessed doesn't seem to have affected that but next year could be a different thing altogether so I think it's a piece of work that needs to be done actually and Jane Mosfer Jane Thank you I'm delighted to welcome Maryam Kelt who heads up our digital development team here at the library at GCU I was going to talk to us about our ocean education resources policy which is hot off the press I'd like to say I'm awful ashamed of my slides after that lovely creative presentation so I apologise for this but I'd quite a lot to say to you about the thrilling world of OER policy creation so this is me and Maryam Kelt this is what I want to tell you all about all the steps frills and spells of getting the policy up and running and approved and now we've got the thing what are we going to do and I should say I also have a humongous job title I am senior library responsible for digital development and information literacy so it's a good thing so basically as I said this is what we're talking about today so I thought what I would do is cut it into steps because it's one of these things like it seemed like a great idea at the time and I was jumping up and he said well how are you going to go about this what are you going to do so here are my steps for what we did and I'll talk you through how we got there with individual steps and you can see it it starts off quite sort of airy-fairy and the joys and then it starts getting into the nitty-gritty and getting very official and all the steps that you have to go through to get the thing finally adopted by a large institution and then see how I just casually drop that one in at the end build into practice I mean no problem, we'll just do that before tea break so here we go, step one also we were betting on the Grand National and I had horses in my mind hurdles and things so you've got horses running about in place so buy on earth what you want to do this in the first place and so here were my sort of reasons for doing I started off I joined a group of librarians who were busy promoting the use of open educational resources for information literacy for that and it came back from the group enthusiasm and it was talking away to everybody oh this is great, we should do this we should all build open educational resources and you know share them out there never do it don't know about that don't know where we stand that was the main thing they liked the theory of open educational resources and they liked the idea of sharing but they didn't know where they stood with regard to copyright and the university management didn't trust them don't you think they really wanted to keep an eye on them so one of the main things same as anything if you're writing, you want your name on it you want to get credit for it and you want to be able to take that forward say you move on to bigger and better things or whatever you want to be able to take that resource with you and use it in your new life somewhere else another thing was people went scary creative comments how do we manage that how do we imply all that so I'm fair enough that's some very reasonable stuff so we wrote library guidance everybody loves library guidance everybody will read that and it'll be great then we'll all work away together firstly put your webpage together not everybody flocks to the library webpage to look at what we have to say and also they still said that's all very well as far as it goes but what about managers where do they stand will they steal our stuff put their names on it no I'm not going to do that we have to actually give people a bit of reassurance so and what I thought eventually once we get all this done sort all the policy get everything done so that's the process of building a new learning object repository which is going to be called HCR at GCU and that will be going live in the autumn so that's going to be summer job once we've knocked out the policy build a repository have these rebirths of optimism that I get over so step 2 who should do all this work now I went to what we have this committee called LTSC which is the learning and teaching subcommittee and I was hoping up and down saying this is great, we need this, we need a policy and I looked hopefully all the managers sitting there and they all looked back and gave me the BDI and went yeah you do this I was still a bit enthusiastic about the whole idea so we decided that we would take what we had build a mat, turn it into a policy get everybody involved and we would build it into the engage strategy which was previous I think it was teaching development strategy so we were going to build it all in together so we were going to be fat and we thought right you work in the library there's no politics in the library you're just kind of sit by well we won't go there but there are no obvious politics evident to everybody else and you've not really got an axe to grind with it you're not going to say oh the health faculty is going to take over the universe or the business school or do it so they thought ok you're not one of the senior managers you're in the library you're fairly neutral, fairly beige you'll be ok so on we went with the new bosses so on any good library before you do anything you have a wee look and see what everybody else has done because you would hate to strain yourself over doing it, building a thing from scratch so I found Leeds University and had some very good clear OER guidance and even better it was created by Cullin's licenster or yeah result, take that use that and then I thought ok we'll adapt that we'll build on it and we'll get you know pick other people's brains it's not enough for me to sit in the library I'm not out there day to day at the chop base dealing with all the issues so I built together a reluctant group not everybody just jumped up and said yeah we fair want to be in this there were the pointy sticks scones and come on I'll give you a scone if you come to my meeting so we got all of these people involved I've got quite a lot of people on the learning technologist side because I thought well they're the people that the lecturers come to to say well I've got this idea and they'll make it happen how can you help me build it where do we put it so they've got dragged in as well because they're like oh why are you awesome this is right you've got to be in it the multimedia content manager is actually part of our marketing and comms department because I thought well you've got all issues of branding and where we once we've got it where do we put it and publicise it and the assistant head information compliance otherwise known as Janice is my link person with the big suits of the university executive we build it, take it to Janice and then she takes it forward to all these exhaustive things so I like the way I've just kind of put these things in to make it sound dead easy so we did it we had our meetings, we built it we took it back, we revised it it went through quite a lot of revisions at this stage and then I was all happy I had it all typed up and off I went back to the LTA C look I've got this we've built it, it's great but in the building and the discussion of it you might find that there are other university policies that need to be or you need to refer to them and link to them so you need to find out what they are and do they exist we had a problem that everybody kept talking about all the IPR policy talks about this and it covers this but it doesn't it doesn't exist people just made it up and I was like oh right I spent six months looking for this and I was trying everybody they all can make him looking for this policy so it was actually a paragraph in the standard employment contract for lecturers that was the IPR policy so we thought ok we do really need to have another couple of policies that you can refer to and they can work as a group so we need IPR which is by the way intellectual property rights are doing the librarian thing there by using initials and not explaining it and a copyright policy so we wrote them as you do just knocked out a couple of policies so in the end what started off was a simple little job to update some guidance termed into policy termed into three whole new policies so off I trotted waving my data step excitedly so they said I right fine so I said go on you guys make it policy make it happen a really must learn to jump sideways keep my mouth shut at eating emails you know so off we went this isn't as easy as you would think I don't know about all of your individual institutions you may have a nice clear procedure where you take your proposed policy and off it goes and then it comes back when we rubber stamp on it no no so here's a wee self portrait this is what I was looking for this time I was not a happy bunny to do yet more emails and find out who did I talk to and I would take it to one of these oh no no no that's not our committee we want to be talking to this other committee so off I went but eventually and it was very lucky because we actually had a copyright and an IPR issue that came up and I got dragged into that because with another thing again I failed to jump sideways and I got stuck with being the copyright adviser not the copyright officer just advice but I got dragged into this so I could say oh one look here let's just discuss this policy because you need one to answer this question so off we went now when we were talking about that we said well you'll be needing to talk to the lawyers because law is involved here you know it was really the IPR one that was more for the work issues with law and talking to lawyers and things like that so I was like here we go but we've got nice lawyers and they speak English and everything it's really good so off we went back it came, few amendments and whatever we built back then another revision you should see my email thing back forward back forward anyway so we did all that then we went and then we, or not we, Janice took it forward with Jan who is the actual member of the executive board they took it away to the executive board and luckily I was just like oh no after all this if it comes back won't revise again I may totally lose my labels and I must say in all the revisions it actually got smaller and clearer so I thought if we revise it any more we're going to be down to one paragraph but you will see if you actually do look at it it's a very short and concise policy now so there we go we actually have it it's properly approved and it's on our website now it's actually called an interim policy but that's not the interim with regard to the concept it's because the other two policies they said oh this will need more work we need to do this and I'm like that's all very well but I need this policy to do my project a bit assertive for this point so they said alright we'll do this one first and then we'll add in the other two and the lawyers wanted it to be one big giant document I'm still not convinced about giant documents I'm one of these librarians like B-Short documents on the web that he actually used not big giant ones that he shoved in the cover he would know but anyway we'll talk about it he can like to bits it so that's why it's interim so so as David said to me now you've got it what you're going to do with it it's not as easy as you would think this is me and Janis riding off into the sunset after we've had it so firstly you get to publish it so manage that one so it's actually up on our university website it's accessible so you can all go in and have a wee look at it and go whoa there's a policy and I've done you a nice short link so you can link in and just go directly to it by the way I've put these on slideshare so I'll tweet a link to slideshare and it'll be lovely and we have actually made it available under creative commons licence so if any of you have an urge an urge to make your own policy you can take hers and adapt it and develop it for your own use and we would love you to do that it's actually on the share alike licence because that's how Leeds originally did there so obviously we have to share a link and do that but that means you can still adapt it and build on it so that's great then we want to add it to the creative commons OER policy registry and share it worldwide because I like if I've done a bit of work I like to run as much benefit as possible out of this bit of work so we want to share it with the world and say when I'll use it build on it slight issue with that because I'm not the luckiest person I'm going to put this on the wiki wiki diet so that actually rebuilding the wiki as we speak so within a couple of weeks we hope it will be up on there so that the world can share it and I want to jump up and down and say look Scotland's a good place we're empty OERs good so let's fly the flag now so I'm kind of preaching to the converted here and telling them there's all these people out there on that building site out there all these colleagues so we have to tell them about we have a staff newsletter radical stuff it took us a long time to get that on but we have that so so I've been banging on about this in our staff newsletter we have a blog so we've been blogging furiously about our blog and putting the links into the policy we have a Twitter feed so we have tweeted the gay abandon and also I have been across we have a blended learning property blog here we all get together and we talk about stuff and small ideas and stuff so I've talked about it and she'll as it was on the Twitter you'll know that you see, you blend, you will all have seen that tweet so I'm hoping she'll talk a bit about that and also we're going to make it part of our advocacy campaign for our new only repository edge here again, you can't really have a big repository full of OERs without the policy to back it all up so it's all linked and you see there is a plan you wouldn't believe it to talk to me but I do have plans then the rest of the world needs to know so we're going to run it out and chat to people at conferences already done a week of that social media so we will tweet, we will blog discussion list we tell you all about it on discussion lists the open Scotland initiative we're going to burn that run about and tell people about it we have also actually this particular aspect of our work going to be in the OEPS project when we do a case study so we're going to be talking about that tomorrow so that will be good, we hope and that's about it I've just sort of said really, we want to build this into everybody's way to practice and just get people on board with the whole idea in a way, though I do the world we're very big on sharing mainly because we've no money we've got an option, we've got to share everything we've got to build on each other's efforts we're all understaffed, you know, the usual stuff everybody's got no money so the best way we can all work is cooperate here help each other out a bit so we want to build that into everybody's practice again we're sort of built into our strategy for learning we also have a new digital strategy which is being developed by a new CIO so we're hoping to put ourselves in there and build into that and one of the services that we offer in the library is the joy of copyright and create commons so we want to build that in sort of city folk you don't need to worry anymore when you're coming and asking about create commons and we tell you all about that look, here's this policy, it backs up all the stuff we're seeing and we're going to help with that so that's me I hope I'm coming in time I hope I'm with each other if you want to find out a wee bit more or talk to me or whatever that's my email and that is where I've put the slides here for the slides but we will tweet that can that be? we'll process and get state-of-the-art speakers don't start me in that you've got to hear some of my life there are many questions for Mayan can I ask you I looked at the leaves of the 24 courses in the early 9 or actually guidance for us in the background what kind of non-confined behaviours policy imagine might happen because I look at the leech ones they're all sort of mum and apple buyers we sort of thought when one of the things that worried us about building the OER repository and the way we've structured it is that it's going to be very much a self-deposit system because we're a very compact and busy team we just don't really have the people or the time to please every single thing that falls in so we want to put a lot of the responsibility on content and the proper use of content on to the deposit of Mayan staff members so with regard to that when you're making things and who you are everybody's sort of talking about oh I got this this lovely image of the internet and I've shoved it into my powerpoint and it'll be grand and then you sort of say oh no you have to check that there's all the usual copyright issues that party issues there's a lot of other things where we're sort of maybe looking at also making a lot of our archives and special collections stuff available via this repository so again you've got issues with what we call often working of it's if it's really old or if they've been left safe letters on published material so I mean there are issues everywhere all holding up but we are very much sort of trying to say to people that it's up to you to check all this so we're wanting to try and make it all clear what the issues can be but yeah principally there are copyrights yeah I would think so yes are you offering any guidance on metadata on the metadata for putting things into the repository we're going to make it free form metadata oh yes we are we had a big conversation because you know library to get started and we start talking about controlled index and languages to sorry what would we use somebody else's and every sort of thought we start getting into this and it's going to be a bit of a struggle just getting people to engage with this whole project and if you start running at them using library and speak like the sort of controlled index and we're just going to go so what we could, we're planning the advocacy is we'll sit down beside folk we'll show them how to do it we'll show them how we would do it and give them some guidelines so we're wanting things to be as simple as possible you will be able to put stuff in with a bare minimum of metadata but we want to explain to them why that's not a good idea and why you want to make things findable because what's the point to share my thing if nobody can find it to share it so to sort of explain how it works and the whole point connected to people so that's, you know, the edge created having another burst of enthusiasm Is that a bit of a guideline to give to your son about keeping it better I've never quite mastered the whole tidy thing this is the most untidy librarian in the world you have to see my desk it's like bombs hit Any questions? There's a lot of questions I haven't seen this far because I think it's great to see an institution actually making the effort to get policies to get the institution in the right way I'd certainly really look forward to see how you get on with your positive trend I think we'll probably learn a lot from your experiences of pushing this policy I'm sure we'll be able to learn a lot about how you get on with the next day I think, when I'm hoping when others will see that we've done it Calais got one We want one We've got one, I know Gaisle got one, but not to college University of the West of Scotland is snacking up my heels they are very well advanced down the road to doing a lot of these things I've got an opposite number there who doesn't work in the library who's doing coming at things a very similar approach so I wouldn't be surprised if they pop up very soon and say, hey, check this out we've got one and if you're EWS, you'd like to comment on that That sounds familiar I feel you're paying The issue is through some of the management side it's a murderation but what we genuinely have is the support that's in the mind but then no clear route through the community structure That was very much the problem we had if I hadn't been really bloody minded about it and needed it for my repository project I think I might have actually chucked it at that point because it did get off and discouraged with you know, your level everywhere you go, every door you knocked at it was very much like you know, and I was actually sitting there in a big sulk I was in a big sulk tantrum until luckily they had this IPR issue which made the whole thing alive issue again and kicked it off the tree so I think it was actually done walk that got us a path through the maze You registered a repository What's that built in? It's actually the edge here people first from Southampton building it from its chorus I should say so we paid them to build it chorus and they were going to host it on a server here and tweaking the bits so I think by next week she said having another burst of optimism we'll have another burst of optimism we'll have a trial one to play with and we've actually got a load of files and data which we're going to import from our whole what was a trade which was if any of you have ever heard of the spoken art project an old steam driven machine and we're going to take a chunk of the files from that clonk it into the new one fiddle about with it and we actually have a pilot group of people lucky jam there that we're going to turn loose on it and we're actually hoping to get some non-techy people as well we're going to get some techy phobes and turn them loose on it and say right go on see how easy it is you can do this so that'll be it and that's a whole other story like they used to say in Jack in the way final question ok thanks Mike we've heard that we've yes project mentioned a few times this morning now so I'm very pleased to welcome Pete Callum who's going to bring us up to date with the project and tell us a little bit more about it ok I'm conscious that there are quite a few people in the room who have been involved with the project in some way or another and others who perhaps don't know much about it at all so I'm going to do a very brief kind of overview about where it comes from but then spend most of the time on just talking a wee bit about some of the things we're doing some of the kind of strands of development and some of the issues that are kind of emerging it's I'm going to do that relatively brief thing because it'll be good to leave time for some questions and one of the things that is really exciting about being involved in is that it's kind of opening up all kinds of possibilities in lots of different directions and I'm going to be quite disciplined to continue to get distracted by going off in all those directions at once which I probably wouldn't ok, so just briefly the opening educational practices in Scotland is a cross-sectoral project it's slightly unusual in the sense that it's led by the OU in Scotland but it's an outcome agreement with the funding council and usually such kind of things in outcome agreements are about the institution doing things within its institutional frame but quite a lot of the objectives we've been set by the funding council are not objectives for the OU but objectives about the whole of the sector instead so that sense is unusual and it's not just something that's it's good to be working in partnership with other people around the sector it's an essential requirement of what we're doing and one of the things which I'll come back to later on is that we've been running from A just over a year now and we've been working in a kind of meaningful way with about 50 different organisations so I'll say perhaps a little bit more about what those organisations are in a minute I mean, we've stuck into a much wider group of people but when I say working with them there's something substantive going on with and it came from something which personally I fell into by kind of accident I think because my role in the opening of this in Scotland was had a very strong focus on what participation in the broadest sense which included work based on learning and the whole range of other things and over a period from about 2007-2008 onwards open education kept on pushing itself into that kind of world in various kinds of ways very pragmatic with partners that I was speaking to about widening participation issues saying was this about this open educational resources stuff that here it's free and what does that mean and is it really free and so on so it might be driven by pragmatic issues but people were often quite excited about the range of options that were available but relatively few cases did anything actually come out of it there I've given a few examples on the slide which we'll see very clearly but amongst a very large number of interactions where nothing happened there was a few where something did and it was quite often people interested in creating some new resources where nothing that fitted the bill actually existed and we worked together with a relatively eclectic range of different organisations to create some new OER and the examples up there are a sample of the kind of things we did so we worked with a range of partners to actually to revertions of existing resources around renewable entrepreneurship and a lot of resources didn't have good case studies that were based in Scotland and we reversioned to do that that's been around for about 18 months slightly previously project over on the left there's Caring Counts which is an interesting resource because again it's a result of successive iterations of reversioning with a range of different partners and we've learnt a great deal from that in terms of how you can use short OER courses to get really wide reach with a wide range of different partners there's something which came from a completely different direction was a commission from the Scottish Government around the new self-directed support welfare reforms and the need for professionals and people who are at the receiving end of that system to actually have some critical insights and practical insights into how it all worked and we produced the OER for that and actually the very first one that we did which was taught us a lot about partnership although it was a slightly different perspective was Gallic in modern Scotland which we brought together a whole range of Gallic experts from other universities from UC Albert various organisations produced things all of those had different elements that actually helped me and I think others of us in the union in Scotland to actually think really hard about what it's like in a partnership in a wider participation context and as a consequence of that we ended up being asked by the Scottish Funding Council to work on this project for three years from this spring last year and the thing that they added is the kind of override it to all of the other kind of detailed objectives that we had to focus on particularly on that so that's a kind of take that we're taking this through and looking at transitions and wider participation so it's kind of open education meets wider participation transitions now one of the things that seems to influence this really strongly from the union project is that we're very conscious from the literature from some of our practice that open education practice was a really key feature of this because one of the things we had found was that if you simply offer people content they generally certainly in the world that we're operating in they generally actually that was very interesting but they ended up not engaging really at all and successful initiatives have been very much around actually thinking really hard about how that content lives in the world that's what it might say and we've taken very seriously a lot of the academic literature about what practice means in terms of learning design but I think we've also had to think quite hard about what that means for the learners as well and one of the things which I think we've worked quite a lot about is the role of the partnership networks and particularly the social models of learning actually help people come together to use resources has been really really important and I think that probably has been a neglected aspect of the use of OER so what we've actually been doing since the project started is to say that we've worked with quite a wide range of different partners they've included universities, colleges organisations that bring those different organisations together we've worked with third sector organisations we've worked with the Scottish Union Learning and the individual trade unions that are affiliated to the SCUC we've worked with some employers so it's really quite a wide range of things and some of the detail that is in on our website the detailed most recent report some of the kinds of things we do I mean a typical kind of engagement with a partner in the project starts off with one or many kind of informal conversations but one of the things we've found really really useful once you get beyond just locating the kind of territory where there is interest and so on so we've developed what we've called a learning design workshop which is focusing on allowing the partner to think through what does using uneducational resources and developing uneducational practice mean in their world and we've developed through several iterations to run I think probably about 17 or 18 really wide range of different partners we've learnt a great deal from that but the feedback we've had from the partners who have engaged in it has been really really good sometimes the result is that people think well this is a really interesting area but it's actually not for us it's not for us at this time in most cases it's actually developed into some other work that's more often than not themselves so the project acts as a catalyst in a small number of cases we've identified areas where in order to develop a significant scale within the arena of the partner organisation actually some additional things are required and sometimes that's about some new content some reversion in the existing content to make it more usable in their world more often than not though it's about really hard about designing practices that would enable already existing OER to be used more effectively and one thing we've been working really hard at in fact over the last 5-6 weeks is, and I'll talk a little bit more about this later on but with a widening participation pattern there's a great deal in the for a long time in the widening participation literature on how people make the transition into further and higher education and the role in organisations of what sometimes is called trusted good people there's people who you go to in order to ask advice about what to do next librarians are really important in that world but actually when you look closely at that there's a whole range of other people who perform that role it depends very much, it's very specific but particularly a lot of the public sector organisations have people who play that role and we've been very thoughtful about if we're putting effort into this that is about increasing the scale of use of other educational resources then where do you focus there and we've felt that simply focusing at individual learning is probably not the most effective way to do it thinking really hard about intermediaries and one group of intermediaries that we've learnt a great deal from is the network of several thousand union learning racks that are located in workplaces all over Scotland whose role is, it's an interesting part of the workshop we're just doing with them and this one is to ask them to think about what their role is and they're all clear they're not teachers sometimes they're really worried if they're involved in a project for education so ask them to be a teacher so we go through an exercise actually just get to the brain store the words they use to describe their work role and it's really interesting really complex motivation people confidence pointed people in the right direction all kinds of issues about that what we find is that quite a large group of people who play a really significant and not particularly well-recognised role have an awareness of open education which is way above I mean there's probably one place to say this but I think if you took a random group of academic staff in a university and a random group of ULRs the ULRs are much more on the ball about open education than the academic staff that's where we are at the moment it's really interesting there's all kinds of underlying issues but nevertheless it's an interesting place to be anyway what we're doing with the project is actually working with them to not to kind of change the role that they do but support them in the role they do by giving them ideas framework, practices and some tools that enable them to do their job in a world where they're trying to use open educational resources at the moment but feel quite frustrated about it we've learned a great deal about why people find repository really difficult to handle and what you might do to make that easier for them and so that's over this month we've been talking to probably between 150 ULRs who are strategically placed to come cascade that to other people and exactly what kind of sport we're going to give them I'll come back to you later on interesting approach there and so we're doing good in these design workshops we're doing workshops for people who are the advocates for other education and we also have a set of workshops available on various aspects of local practice as well which in the final for the duration of the project at least we're able to do free for institutions and groups of stuff so doing the kind of obvious things like speaking to people wherever and whenever we can and we are running twice a year advisory forums which we've had two of now next one's coming up on November 5 I need to say to remember and we're looking to change the format of the back this time aiming to make the maximum participation we're hoping to send out a call fairly soon but we might want to contribute post this as well there's a limit if you have just some presentations it limits the number of voices you can hear we want to kind of widen widen that and on the White Park since the UK is stuck in the middle there it's really attached to the next bullet point we're not about creating new content but in some cases in order to create new practice it's necessary to create new content and Parkinson's is an example of a organisation which works really hard to educate people about the skills you need to support people with Parkinson's disease it's not something that's a mainstream part of most courses for health professionals but then they need it after later on they've got some brilliant hard copy materials and they can't reach the people they need to reach so we're helping them turn it into an OER course it's going to be a badged OER currently it's actually you get because you're currently completing the course and one of the interesting things which we're talking to the SQA about is whether in a situation where people are doing exactly the same assessment in a badged course that would have done in the traditional copy version of it can we get improvements in training a badge for the credit it's actually quite a small amount of credit so maybe as a kind of trial that would be useful to do we are doing quite a lot of work with badges and I'll come back to that in a minute and we're working on developing a hub for educational practices which I'll come back to in a little more detail and one of the things which I felt really interesting in this is we didn't start with a blank sheet of paper we had ideas about where this might be going we listened really hard to much of my community and I don't think we could have predicted exactly where we would have been after a year and there's lots of changes the world is changing as we're intervening in it and there's lots of new things coming out one of the things we've been we need to re-emphasise is that we've been very much engaged in getting out and listening and talking and engaging in practice with people we've got a backlog of things that we need to write up so there's a lot of things which really ought to be on our website now which we're in production but we're not there yet in terms of recordings okay so what's coming out of this it's kind of maybe a trite thing to say that partnership is really important but it is helping us actually to make progress I think what I think we didn't necessarily expect was the really high levels of interest from I mean typing this I don't like what I said outside the education sector but in the sense that you can understand the university colleges and then there's a whole lot of other people interested in what they do what they produce and actually involved in education and training themselves it's actually in that non-institutional domain that we've found the highest levels of interest and we started off with some hypotheses about what learnings design would look like if you started extending that to design for social engagement with OER and I think what we've found is there's still lots of evidence to collect but we've got some really compelling evidence that if you can do that well it actually does two things first of all it means that the individual students who are part of that collective engagement actually get a huge amount out of it and their attainment and their perseverance is actually much higher than otherwise of it but also the impact it has more widely within the sphere of that is also great to with my colleague Roddie McIntyre was actually just down the road to see chambers along with the Glasgow Digital Participation Group because we've been really interested in how much the discussion about urban education resonates in the world of people who are looking at digital participation I mean there's a kind of continuum that's digital participation and digital literacy in urban education in which I think there's huge value in actually making connections because a lot of the people who work with digital participation are really frustrated if all they have to do is very kind of restricted things like digital participation means you can fill in your universal credit you need to fill in that form it's really important that you know how to do it you've got the skills to do it but actually it doesn't make you hard to sing and it doesn't actually give you any place to continue or develop those skills so we're looking at ways in which you can extend that we found one of the key things about working with partners that universities certainly don't have so when you do something that works with a community-based programme it reverberates around their world in a way which the university by doing traditional promotion levels just could not achieve and I've talked about this earlier so I'll work later on now but the other emerging thing is this role of intermediaries and the emerging years of Oial I wanted to say a little bit about this online hub because when we started one of the objectives which we were given by the funding council was that we would produce some kind of online hub fortunately I think they weren't very prescriptive about what that was going to be although I suspect that we had interrogated them that poor they might well have thought that what they wanted was some kind of repository I think and the message we've received I think very clearly from a whole range of different directions is one more repository wouldn't necessarily be in a separate way necessary I think to do but what we've also heard is that if we can make effective use of the repositories that exist then actually if I'm supporting the way that I can use them the way that I can understand them is really important so the hub of development is actually aimed at those intermediaries it's aimed at the gatekeepers in a particular kind of way and just very briefly I'll explain what it's going to look like it should be ready by late summer but there's going to be a pretty generic sort of which is a very good search which finds OER courses doesn't and gives you some information from the meta-bed what kind of courses they are and level and so on and will be that kind of syndicated search will be running across all of the high quality across from you is not just a lovely thing there'll be when developing together will perhaps be a better way of describing it but bringing together resources that mainly have already exist to develop a course for people who want to understand how you're operating this world when holding resources and education and practice and it'll be possible to do that at several different levels both at a very introductory level for people who are feeling new and at a more sophisticated level advertising events and so on will be advising guidance sort of generic sort on how you engage with an educational practice how you can create OER OEP but that will be fairly limited it's not going to be trying to do everything because the key part of it it's got an architecture which involves creating multiple communities that will be a place where people can share practice and learn from each other and and actually develop the information about practice which is context specific so we've got a when we launch we expect to have several of those communities up and running one of them will be the union learning reps that I mentioned earlier on the people we spoke to said so by fantastic, enthusiastic about that in their network somebody might have tried something and loves the answer to a question but actually some of them never meet each other once in the blue moon at best they meet twice a year and they need answers often very quickly so it's across unions it's gotten across workplaces and across sectors but we'll also have one for people involved with careers, we'll have one with some very specific areas of the practitioners of health education people involved in education for co-operatives and there's a strong group around poverty and welfare as well so they're quite different kinds of communities but they've all gotten interesting how you use olden education in their work the other thing that's been coming on rather quickly over the last three or four months is that was part of the project particularly with the carers materials and some of the other OER that were produced there's a whole little infrastructure of the mages developing and the olden university as well has actually been developing a whole range of where is the word there which we're calling for short box branched online access courses in a range of different topics there's currently five specific access courses, another five or six around other topics and we expect there to be another 15 or 20 of those over the next few months I'm a bit impatient with that because anecdotally I think we're getting really large take up of those courses but you have to let people do them before you can actually start seeing how many have so one of our priorities over the next few months is actually really looking at learning analytics on the page and seeing how many people use the page and who they are as well so we have some insights that we need to work on and so in the next few months we're going to work on a kind of one year report both via narrative that gives some sense of direction but we'll have a whole lot of specialized short reports hanging off it which will be of interest to people in different areas we'll be doing a lot more digital participation and digital literacy we'll be launching the hub later in the year we'll be launching a small number of new OERs which will be producing partnership with different partners in Scotland and all that is going to happen in terms of kind of evidence gathering and what we've postponed to near the end of the project is that OER works as a community platform which is open to anybody to use we've focused for the moment on encouraging use because we thought that was the big issue and that as we begin to make some progress we're also beginning to focus on improving the tools that exist on that community platform so that people can re-version material fairly intuitive and straightforward work at the moment the principle is easy the practice isn't light so easy but we're working we have plans to make sure that by two years time that we'll be able to get to that The questions for Pete Pete, you mentioned the hub with various communities and I was just wondering what level of openness those communities will have will content be visible to anyone or will you need to be registered to see it? The plan is to have two different kinds of communities because for some people actually because it involves the kind of sharing the stuff having a safe environment in which to share seems to be quite important what we're encouraging though is that anything that people can post up resources, ideas plans for doing things will be created for condos license so we can lift stuff out of there if they need a private space we can lift it up in a private space put it on to the main site some of the other communities are just from the beginning so it depends and in a sense that's people's choice really so we wanted to allow for both because we know that if you're using essentially using social media and asking people to be really open about you want people to share what doesn't work actually we learn much more from what doesn't work than from just saying look at me I've been so successful with this so it's the hard things we want people to share so for some people that means certainly we are pretty secret but the underlying thing is always that things should then be shared with the others No question, thank you The virtual line access courses that you talked about is part of your web distribution and transition agenda Are they targeted at students who are seeking access to open diversity courses or are they potentially that support any number trying to make that transition to courses that are needed for these institutions For any learning one of the things that I'm really interested in is whether other institutions in Scotland would be want to use those as they are which I think actually because they don't presuppose they're not marketing tools so I think they are usable as they are but I think for the other possibilities since the ROR is perfectly possible and actually desirable that people actually make on their own as well making on their own could be simply just kind of changing some of the headings perhaps putting some more contextual photographs in that understand what particular group they're writing at but that would be a very easy and very cost effective thing to do Is it easy to get access to the students that are doing your project work? No, they're on they're on the opening versus open learning side but we can pull those across to the open learning work site somebody says really like to reversion that course just ask us what we'll put it across to open learning works and then you can do anything like that that's all Thank you Pass 12 We thought it would be good to give people an opportunity to share things that are going on and perhaps share some of the things that you're doing in your own areas but before we do that I know all of these seats can be uncomfortable to sit in you've been sitting for quite a long time now listening to people Do you want to stand up and shake yourself about a little bit? Do you want to do anything else? That's the thing to take the jacket off That's the thing to take the jacket off That's the thing to do We can stop for lunch So we need to have aи So we've heard a�odd myrnau beth this morning about the fact that we also heard a bit about policies around digital education, and just based in what you've heard this morning are maybe something different that hasn't been talked about Is there something that's happening in your own institution or in your own sector that you would like to share with the group at this point? Any interesting developments that you'd like to just draw to our attention? Anything else around open education, for example, with policies or MOOCs or what we're doing about that? For us at GCU, I think we're looking at building on the OER policy that we've just had approved. We're trying to build that into practice and that's a difficult bit for all of us. We're not going down the large scale MOOC route, but we're looking at trying to build in maybe short online taster courses or events or even just resources that may link to some of our new online programmes that are under development. So it's interesting to know what sort of tackle are other people taking and what's happening out there just now. Yes, John? I thought what you were saying, we are continuing MOOCs in Glasgow. I'd like to just introduce yourself. Sorry, I jokingly have a little bit of a call to social studies at the University of London. We're trying to focus on the only PGT courses that we're going to go on in June and September. Hopefully we're in some routes that we're trying to bring people on board and part of them too, rather than here are some essential courses that we're on. Also, we're trying to develop MOOCs that we can actually ground with students that have taught the course of ways to face out and they take part in the MOOC for a minute or three weeks and engage with other people. Part of them take access to the first place and then bring that experience back in for the course of the MOOC courses. So it's difficult because it takes a lot of planning to plan out many, many other heads. We really have to think about where it runs, the students, the material part to take at that point. But that's where we are just now. I think it's a recognition that there are other ways of using the MOOC structure that might be more accessible and more doogled for more institutions. Anything else on that? John, at the instant, you are the manager of Glasgow Tide College, which used to be three colleges. Two things are the opposite extremes of the spectrum. One is that we've created a new version of our BLE, which will be badge-in as a kind of open version of the BLE, both for commercial provision and what works. And it's based on the order yet. But the other end, because we are three colleges in one, we need a learning future repository. So we're trying to build something based on a software called Arfresco, if you know that. But using a flavour or a customisation of the open source version of Arfresco that comes from a German university project called Edge U-Sherry. And that customisation seems to give all the facilities that we want, all the functionality that we want in Arfresco linked to the BLE. And we would use that to build our learning future materials from across three colleges into one place. It's kind of like tidying someone's bedroom. But unfortunately, we don't know how big the bedroom is. It's probably a TARDIS in there. And when we get three sets of learning and teaching materials into one place, we'll come back and tell you. Because we've allowed 14 terabytes in anticipation, but we might fill that out very quickly or not. More to come. I think there's lots of challenges out there. Obviously, we see colleges that come into one to try to get these cultures to start sharing and sync across anything institutionally. And probably a software is a functional need, but it's also to create a culture shell within three institutions, which pretty much. It's either that or replace everybody with a set of robots. I think I'd prefer the second option. Any other updates from anybody? Ronnie Hammond said that we're a programme director for teaching and learning nutrition. We focus on open badges and just to let people know we're currently developing a premium platform that we're actively seeking input to. That will allow the issuing, awarding, managing and display of open badges. That would be interesting. Okay, well I think everyone's ready for some lunch. We'll probably just stand up and move around a bit. So we'll stop there, but please continue the conversations over lunch. And we'll reconvene at quarter past one.