Open Educational Resources: the Slick and the Scruffy

My colleague Gabi Witthaus (who works on another Beyond Distance project having to do with Open Educational Resources - OSTRICH) recently showed me a chart she was trying to develop, of various repositories and channels of open educational resources (OER), placing them on a scale showing whether they are focused more on marketing of the institution or focused more on being a source of learning resources.

Who's scruffy-lookin?  (Photo courtesy of ChrisM70 on Flickr)

In the case of iTunes U sites, which I am researching in the SPIDER project, this tension is even more pronounced. There is no doubt that having an iTunes U site is great for marketing an institution. The combination of "Apple gloss" and being listed with the best institutions such as Harvard, Oxbridge, and the Open University makes for a great profile. Some institutions' iTunes U offerings are extremely slick and serve as excellent marketing tools. And yet, iTunes U should benefit the current students as well. Maybe recorded lectures are not favoured by everyone, but many students find them very helpful, and they don't have to be BBC-quality in order to facilitate learning. Other kinds of recordings and publications can be very nicely downloaded and kept organised on the learner's computer or handheld device by iTunes U -- this should be exploited for current students in the institution.


Of course, slick iTunes U offerings can also be very good for learning. Slick is good. If OER is too scruffy it may not be usable. But I would argue that too much "slick consciousness" can hold back the release of OER which may very well serve a variety of learners. The learning purpose should not be lost to the marketing purpose.

Terese Bird
SCORE Fellow, Learning Technologist, and Assistant Keeper of the Media Zoo

Positives and Negatives of iTunes U

In a recent presentation to partners working on another open educational resources (OER) project, TIGER, I presented my first draft of a list of positives and negatives of  iTunes U as a channel of free educational resources.This is a work in progress and I would like your opinion -- please comment.

iTunes U Positives
Excellent profile for institution
Standard formats (mp3, mp4, pdf, epub)
Downloading to Apple mobile devices is excellent
Constant internet unnecessary to use files
Very good search and keyword use
Reaches places YouTube cannot (China, Turkey, others)
Pushes OER agenda and brings university together in discussion
Run by a corporation - sustainable

iTunes U Negatives
Not browser-based
Issues with iTunes on public lab computers
Material not easily accessed on nonApple mobile devices
Not very good for conversation with learners
Run by a corporation - learning second to making money on tunes

What have I missed?

Terese Bird
Learning Technologist and SCORE Fellow
University of Leicester Beyond Distance Research Alliance

Use and Reuse of Open Educational Resources (OER)

In a recent meeting of SCORE fellows at the Open University, discussion arose about exactly what do we mean by reuse of OER. We agreed there are two issues: 1) is the OER being used, and 2) is the OER being adapted and then is the new version being used. Which of these two kinds of use consititutes 'reuse of OER' may be a question of semantics. To my mind, the real question is whether the OER is being used at all, adapted or otherwise.

I am therefore looking forward to a joint LORO-SCORE impact event on 23rd March 2011 at the Open University entitled, 'OER in learning and teaching: Does it make a difference?' I plan to present some of my early findings regarding the use of learning materials distributed via iTunes U. It seems that iTunes U-distributed material is much more likely to be used as-is rather than adapted and repurposed. Some would say this proves that iTunes U-distributed material is therefore not true OER. Personally, I would state that the point is whether the material is used at all, and I am hearing many great stories from users of learning materials from iTunes U.

If you would like to take part in my survery regarding this particular topic as well as gathering data on mobile device use, I would be very grateful indeed: http://tinyurl.com/surveyitunesu

Photo courtesy of Noah Scanlin on Flickr

Having a "Mobile Strategy"

I have been to two conference-type gatherings recently, in which the question arose, "Does your university have a mobile strategy?"

The first was the European Apple Leadership Summit which took place 11 January 2011 and about which I blogged in two parts for the Beyond Distance Research Alliance blog -- part 1 and part 2. In that meeting it was stated that 40% of USA universities have an explicitly-stated mobile strategy. The second time I heard this was when I attended the Open University Winter Mobile Learning Festival, a wonderful showcase of the various ways in which the OU is beginning to address students' growing assumptions that they should be able to access their learning materials on their mobile devices.

Having a mobile strategy is a policy that is, in a way, being forced upon educators. While central service providers of institutions struggle to consider which platforms, if any, to support, especially during a time of economic downturn and possibly less resources with which to launch new systems support of any kind, students are arriving on campus with iPads, iPhones, and Android phones -- and soon Android tablets... not to mention Windows 7 phones which are making a slow start but seem to be a pleasing product.

Does your institution have a mobile strategy? If not, what sort of mobile strategy would you like to see being adopted?

Terese Bird
SPIDER Project, Beyond Distance Research Alliance

A Few Thoughts about E-Books and iTunes U

Late in 2010, several iTunes U universities including Oxford and the Open University began to publish proper e-books on their iTunes U site. Even though pdfs have already been been able to be distributed through iTunes U, a pdf is not quite an e-book, is it? This particular question is for another blog post.

The advantage of e-books on iTunes U is that they can be made to work with the iBooks app, which can render media-rich e-books. Not only can you read the book and have nice colour pictures (unlike with many e-readers), you can have a nice colour movie clip embedded, or sounds, or a chart of data which you can re-sort and re-jig to get exactly the output you need.

iBooks on the iPad - the little photo could have been a little movie. Photo by shiftstigma on Flickr



The difficulty here is that this kind of e-book is not very open. My understanding is that these e-books are multimedia-rich epub documents. You can view an epub on a variety of devices and on any computer operating system, but iBooks are Apple-only. They require the iBooks app. I have used iBooks on my iPad and it's an extremely beautiful thing. I had trouble using iBooks on my iPod Touch. Presumably I can go to the new App Store and try iBooks on a Mac computer; I haven't done this yet. Have you tried this? If so, please leave a comment --- any good? How about iBooks on an iPhone?

Up until now, Apple seems to have made sure that files coming down through iTunes U can be viewed/listened to on Windows computers at no extra cost. iBooks e-books seems to be a diversion from this strategy -- so far. iBooks for Windows -- will it come to pass?

Terese Bird

Learning Technologist, SCORE Fellow, and Assistant Keeper of the Media Zoo







Intercontinental Re-use and Re-purposing of OERs

Last week I had the privilege of attending a seminar at the Open University entitled "Creating OER for use in Business Schools in Africa: what have we learned so far?"  where I learnt about and discussed an ABLE Ghana event involving Five Ghanaian instructors on an OER-focused visit to the Open University. Not having even really heard of open educational resources before, they were tasked with creating two OERs in two weeks: one for them to use in their own teaching, and the second for a colleague to use.

A re-purposed image in Ghana - (Monde Perso, Flickr)

Each instructor spoke enthusiastically about their OERs, all of which were collaborative efforts. They used the Open University OpenLearn site to find suitable OERs to start with, then used LabSpace to put their OERs together, and to make their new resulting OERs available for others. For example, one created an Excel spreadsheet teaching double-entry bookkeeping. Prior to this, he had always taught students to do their bookkeeping manually. It seems to me that in this case, part of that OER's message was its medium.

I had opportunity to ask these instructors what they expected would be the attitude of students to their new OERs. They replied that their students might like the OERs especially because they were based on material originating in the UK, but they did need to repurpose them so that they were in context most helpful for students in Ghana.

Another point raised was that, at best, 50% of theirstudents had previous training in the use of IT, and that the university network was prone to crashes and down time. So I asked, "What percentage of your students have a hand-held device which will play mp3 files?" 80% came the reply. I asked further, "What percentage of your students have a hand-held device which will play video?" 40% was the reply to that question. I suggested that it made sense to look at methods of making sound and video files available to students in such a way that they could be downloaded to devices and taken away from the internet.

And I wondered to myself what these percentages are for students in UK, and how quickly are we in the UK adapting our learning materials so that students can capture and consume them using their own handheld devices. This question has implications for the use of iTunes U-distributed resources.

The seminar was an excellent chance to showcase some examples of OER repurposing, not only from one institution to another but from one continent to another.

Terese Bird

Learning Technologist, Assistant Keeper of the Media Zoo, and SPIDER Principal Investigator

Apps v Free and Open Internet?

Photo courtesy Nick Weinrauch, Flickr

Continuing in a just-now-decided series of looks at "iTunes U in the Blogosphere," I refer now to a blog post from last year by Jim Groom, "5 reasons I don't like iTunesU." It is a good blog post, with many excellent comments posted afterwards.

Reason number one got my attention: "Don't trust anything without a URL." The blogger's point here is that URL-based hyperlinks which take the user to a browser is the one way to have a free and open internet environment. He quotes an article by Matt Gold, saying the "app store mentality is killing the internet."

I argued similarly in my blog post with Beyond Distance "The End of the World Wide Web Surf As We Know It?" where I wrote "app proliferation feels like a step backward into separate platform silos."

But now I am questioning myself. Is the fact that we acquire content by an application other than a browser an indication of less openness, less freedom on the web? If the application itself is free and readily available, perhaps that's enough. It should also be available on every operating system. Some criticise iTunes U solely on the basis that it does not run on Linux, and I will not say that is a trivial point.

But apps are here to stay, because mobile internet is here to stay. For many users, internet just has to be mobile; and in many cases and for many reasons with mobile internet, the app simply works better than the browser. So the goal of educators who believe in open educational resource (OER) sharing is to maintain a free and open internet environment, conducive to sharing of OERs, even if one uses an app.

What do you think? Please leave a comment!

Terese Bird
Learning Technologist and SPIDER Investigator