Open Learning Network

Present: Nick, Liam, Kasia, Giota, Anna, Tina, Engin, Patrick, Karen, Sara, Doug

Apologies: Elpida, Andreia, Eileen, Canan, Simon, Michelle, Ann

Announcements

• OER10 conference - arrangements being made.
• Openlearn event, next Tuesday afternoon, Jan 19th,  in the afternoon. Patrick and Karen will be there with OLnet banner on a stand from 2pm. Presentation at 4pm, will be webcast on KMi Stadium - publicly available.
• A series of workshops in IET relating to their programmes of work are underway. Patrick is leading much of that. OLnet work is key. This is looking at OLnet's inward connection to the OU. Karen has the dates of the meetings. OLnet is located in the 'Learning in an Open World' Programme, which is headed by Grainne.
• 27 January - next update teleconference with Hewlett. Karen will circulate the draft report tomorrow (hopefully) for us to comment.
• Wikisym 2010 - co-hosted with Wikimania, in Gdansk Poland, Gdansk, beginning of July. The Open Collaboration Programme Track is coordinated by Giota. Deadline for papers is 7 March - will go in to ACM journal after peer review.
• Sara has been promoted to Support Team Manager. So won't be giving us the same support - she needs to find us a replacement.

Updates

• Nick and Liam have done some bugfixing on the site
• Giota was at the MeCCSA conference last week, will blog about it soon. Had a track on new media, digital literacies, etc. She presented a paper on OLnet. Developing a typology of projects around OER, and the tensions, education vs networks of improvement.
• Anna had paper accepted for a workshop at CSCW 2010, Savannah, Georgia, will be attending it 5-11 February. Paper/workshop on Compendium/Cohere. Collective intelligence in organisations towards a research agenda.
• Tina has been talking to Teresa Connelly about her fellowship application to SCORE. Working with Engin intensively recently.
• Patrick has been working on papers with people like Andy Lane and Eileen Scanlon - expect to see drafts soon. The Hewlett one-year report needs to include a vision for what we will do in the future, as well as looking back at what we have done. Also look at Karen's post after the December meeting - our collective view of risks to the project. Had a FlashMeeting last week on the research strand - partly because of the snow, but the format worked well, so next week's research meeting will be in FlashMeeting format too.
• Sara has been talking to HR. Situation should be clear by the 1 February.
• Fellowships - the open call is out, we will meet and deal with the applications soon.
• Karen has been doing a lot of work on budgets, planning ahead. It's complicated because until we have the end of first year report, we don't know how much the amount in dollars we might get will be worth in pounds until we know the precise date and so know what the exchange rate is. Generally, though, the finances are looking good for supporting the project's activities. Also looking at Meet-o-Matic for simple meeting arrangements, and Toodledo for task management.

End-of-year report

Karen circulated the structure of the end-of-year report by email with the agenda for this meeting. It's only five pages so it will need to be quite summarised. Want to push registrations on OLnet, and have more attractive (controversial?) content on the site. Everyone encouraged to draw all our stuff to the attention of their networks by e.g. Twitter.

OLnet journey: Engin

Tina sent Engin a paper, and he asked if he could come and work at the OU. Arrived in August, and has contributed a lot to OLnet, while doing his PhD.

Engin has a strong link to the Turkish OCW Consortium, through his PhD supervisor in Turkey. The Turkish OCW consortium site is adminstered by Engin using Drupal - as advised by Liam. Consortium now has 57 member universities, and many interesting initiatives.

Drivers for OER in Turkish contexts include the lack of digital resources in Turkish language, young population (25% <15yo), many new universities - from 77 in 2005 to 139 in 2009! Staff:student ratio 1:74 in state universities, 1:49 in private ones. Distance education is underdeveloped.

Engin's research is to inform decision-makers, develop a conceptual OER model.

Using mixed-methods to investigate instructors' attitudes to OER. Starting with literature review, then semi-structured interviews, then expert review, then pilot study at a national conference. Then deep interviews, more expert reviews, second pilot at a conference, then Turkish language expert, then transfer and test to online form - for the first phase of his study: an online survey of Turkish OCW Consortium members.

Results will be published soon. Main barriers were perceived to be intellectual property rights - protecting your own, and clearing them on other's materials. Main incentives were about being informed when changes are made to their materials, but also some concern that course materials that are shared are not altered. Main benefits were around increasing the amount of Turkish resources, and getting benefit from experienced instructors' expertise.

Second phase of study to come.

OLnet Journey, by ekursun on Slideshare

OLnet experience was very positive in being immersed in an academic context, discussing his thesis with OER experts. Specific outputs: OER10 paper wtih Tina and Patrick (accepted), Future e-learning paper with Kasia (submitted), study with Elpida (initiated). Lessons learnt from OpenLearn, workshop submission to OER10, video pilot, presentations to National OCW Conference in Turkey, and elsewhere.

Personally, language development and cultural exchange (Christmas!) were very useful. And the doctoral training workshops and DigiLab, Library resources, and the very wonderful Grant Palmer bus services in Milton Keynes.