Open Learning Network

Present: Doug, Engin, Patrick, Liam, Elpida, Michelle, Nick, Karen, Sara, Anna, Andreia, Tina, Andy, Brandon Muramatsu (and Andy Lane part way through)

Apologies: Ann, Kasia, Giota, Simon (late?), Anna, Canan, Eileen

1. Welcome to Brandon Muramatsu
Visiting us from MIT. http://www.mura.org/

2. Team introductions and updates (key points only)

Andreia - pilot online workshop coming up, all team to decide whether to be participant or participant-leader, and contact Andreia. Workshop 7-11 December. Keep track of experiences - useful data. Pursuing links with SCORE. A few bits of H800 will need to be rewritten since it has screenshots of Open Learn. Talked to Liam about forms on the OLnet website. Visit to University of Catalonia.

Engin - news in yesterday: the Turkish government has provided 1m liras for open resources: will be translating courses, probably MIT OCW.

Patrick - went to kickoff meeting for OpenSE (OLnet-related EU-funded project) in Madrid last week with Tina - enabling students of software engineering to work together in an open way on open source projects with open source software. E.g. students sent to existing OSS projects like Google Summer Schools; the students are assessed and given credit for how they actually manage to work in that community. Free Technology Academy - set up with European funding - partner there, doing open sign-up free software engineering courses. Want to give learners activities, learning structure. OU role is capturing this as a case study of a different take on OER. Links to another EU project - OpenED - which includes more provision of OER around research methods.

Elpida - article with Anna on views of participation. Survey on SmartHistory, commonality with Engin's survey of Turkish institutions. Creating a paper for the need for OER development guidelines giving practical ideas about how they can be solved, opening up the conversation for others. Also been looking at iSpot. Also contacted Kurt Squire (MIT Games for Change), link with Civ-related scenarios. Also Elton Barker, a digital classicist. Making OER fun and engaging, bring in Web 2.0, Google Maps etc, and games, and take content from Open Learn, and see what we can do with it.

Brandon - has done an interview with Andreia!

Tina - Madrid trip with Patrick.

Michelle - Working on Cohere plugin. Going for Mozilla Jetpack competition.

Nick - Blogged about CETIS meeting in Birmingham. Seminar tomorrow about tracking OER, led by CETIS. Analytics, site data, surveying. Is invitation-only, principally for people in UKOER programme support team. Done through Elluminate, session recorded so can review afterwards. Nick will go for OLnet, Andy Lane will be there for SCORE.

Karen news items:

Weds 25 November, Open Learning Conference in Nottingham, too late to add - Andy is giving a keynote. 80 from Nottingham, 50 external. We are sending OLnet leaflets to it, will be in the conference pack. And have a table with Openlearn banners, conference pack, etc.

ASCILITE Conference, 6-9 December - Gráinne is going, has a paper accepted joint with Patrick, Elpida etc.

Karen trying to track things like papers, conferences and so on. Spreadsheet started, wants people to look at it, and add to it as a matter of course. Is on file share here

\\appleton\OLnet-team\Papers%20and%20Book%20Chapters

Some discussion about putting it openly on this website, or as a Google doc.

Karen attended workshop about CC licensing. Brief discussion about our licensing (CC:BY). Open Courseware Consortium released a document on fair use guidance for OER - things that go beyond, but it doesn't travel beyond the US. Good document on Commonwealth of Learning website about the NC/Commercial debate.

Last week, split in to two small groups, but actually hardly anyone here, but will do that next week.

Don't forget - we're not having Christmas on 16th December, it's Tuesday 15th December, with the team meeting happening after.

3. Discussion of fellowship scheme

Draft application form and guidance for applicants circulated by Karen. We're planning an open call, with a deadline of 18 January at 1600h GMT. There will be others, which we will announce on the OLnet site (once we've decided when!). Would be good to specify this.

Expert Fellowships are working well, through direct contacts, but we also want to do more of the developmental ones (Fellowships and Interns). Planned to recruit 5 in first year - have Yannis and Engin, want another three through this call. We could recruit more than 3 over the next year.

Need to coordinate with the Teaching Fellows on SCORE - especially for open calls when we might get applicants from English/UK HEIs who might be better directed there. And vice versa. We need to think about co-publicity and co-ordination, and signposting. For SCORE, Martin Bean is going to write to his fellow Vice-Chancellors.

Discussion about criteria - don't want to restrict to non-UK only. Currently draft says 'permanent post', which isn't what we'd want. They do need a context they can go back to and apply the lessons they've learned. That'd be easy to do if they are attached to an institution, but there could be other routes for that to happen.

4. Any other points to record for the telephone meeting with Hewlett at 5pm

The progress report sent to Hewlett is on the file share:

\\appleton\OLnet-team\Progress%20Reporting\Progress%20Reports%20Sent%20to%20Funder\2009-11-18_OLnet_Progress_Report_Nov_09_%20final

We have a late challenge from Hewlett: they want us to discuss how we as a field can connect the research to implementation and policy world.

The implementation link is a fundamental component of what we're trying to do as a project - bringing the research to them, building their capacity to do research.

We do have a mission to provide briefings on that thing, but not to e.g. lobby government. (And indeed we're prevented from lobbying in our Hewlett conditions.)

The research evidence from what we've done has affected policy in places like HEFCE and JISC, and direct Government including the Adult Lifelong Learning paper earlier this year, and the Government's Online Distance Learning Task Force/Open Learning Innovation Fund that Martin Bean (OU boss) is on. And EADTU, ICDE activity too - good route through for this type of activity/output, since that's how you get heard by policymakers.

Key is to be true to ourselves rather than going beyond our remit.

5. Brandon's work - discussion

One big project is a system that makes transcripts automatically from video. So feed in some video, out comes a transcript linked to timecodes. Can search, use as captions, can jump in to segment of video.

Also exploring interfaces for how to interact with web video as you would in other media - e.g. DVD player, VHS tape - making snippets and making analysis around it. Not much commercial activity around that.

Past projects on learning object repositories, learning technology standards, Open CourseWare.

Working with a new university in India, trying to make their processes open from the start. Trying to deploying stuff out to a university that's ready to pick it up today, wants to work with open source, open processes. Indian Institute for Human Settlements

Project around Twitter - replaying history, e.g. Cuban Missile Crisis - people playing the various roles (President, Defense Secretary): tweeting out from the historical record. Works better for short events like that, rather than e.g. Hundred Years' War. Could take another step with a link to open content or wide web content too.

6. AOB

Brandon has also been useful feedback on the OLnet website.