score fellowship final report
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SCORE Fellowship Final Report
Anna Comas-Quinn
Department of Languages
26 April 2012
Community building and user engagement: developing the
potential of LORO
Some background
Project objectives
The report: activities & outputs, findings, dissemination, conclusions
Languages Open Resources Onlinehttp://loro.open.ac.uk
LORO is about: • ...making all teaching materials for all levels
and languages available to all users,• …allowing users to share their own materials
with the OU languages community, • …making all tutorial materials available to the
wider languages community,
• …starting a change in the way we work (OER, access, reflection, transparency, quality).
SCORE Fellowship project objectives
• Continue engaging OU users and raising awareness of the benefits of OERs for teaching and learning;
• Engage active users into further dissemination activities within and beyond the OU;
• Explore links with other languages institutions to promote the use of LORO and widen the community of potential users;
• Explore links with HE providers across Europe to share practice around LORO and OERs for languages;
• Evaluate the effectiveness of LORO and the extent of the culture change in teaching practices amongst OU users.
SCORE Fellowship project objectives
Activities and outputs
• Raising awareness• (DoL, OU, language teachers)
• Research events• Impact of OER (23 March 2011)
• Learning by sharing, Bologna (29-30 March 2012)
Talking OER
From OER to OEP
Make openness and OER part of other activities
DoL Training workspace
Performing Languages www.performinglanguages.eu
Collaborative Writing and Peer Review
Although the primary aim of the learning partnership is not to produce materials but to share experiences and develop common understandings, the resources we produce for our project (such as workshop activities, lesson plans, texts and video recordings) will be made into Open Educational Resources (OER), freely available under a Creative Commons license. (…) In this way, we will ensure that the experiences and ideas from this project can be either replicated by others as such, or adapted to their specific context and needs, thus increasing the impact of the project.
Collaborative Writing and Peer Review Project
• Give and receive feedback• Introduction to peer review• Generate ideas• Keep up to date with technology (e.g. Jing)• Maximise use of existing resources• Create and share resources
adapted from a slide by Caroline Rowan-Olive
Working across languages – adapting resources from different languages
slide by Caroline Rowan-Olive
Reusable Reuse Game, Chris Pegler, National Teaching Fellow, The Open Universityhttp://www.slideshare.net/orioleproject/chris-pegler-reusable-card-game
OER (languages) workshops
Findings
How do we measure impact?
• Metrics (eprints inbuilt + google analytics)
• Surveys (questionnaires + usage polls)
• Data from forums
• Focus groups
• Narrative frames (Barkhuizen, G. and Wette, R. (2008) ‘Narrative frames for investigating the experiences of language teachers’, System, 36, 372–387)
Quantitative data
• 1.5 million page views to date• 20,000 downloads in the last 6 months• over 1100 registered users • over 2500 resources• 900+ visitors a month from around the world
(data from LORO inbuilt stats and Google analytics)
Teachers are using LORO…
• To find resources for their teaching“I often also check what other teachers have done to
teach the same topic or a similar structure”
• To find inspiration and ideas“even if I don’t find anything I can use, it starts the ideas
flowing in my head”
• To standardise their practice and ensure comparability of the student experience
“to make sure the contents covered in my own tutorial are
similar to those used by the rest of the course team and tutors”
Benefits of using LORO
• Increased confidence in one’s own practice“Seeing other work enables you to judge your own, and reassures you that you are doing the right thing”
• Freedom to develop other aspects of one’s teaching practice
“It gives us time and space to create some individual styles”
“I can concentrate on how I will teach culture or how to teach through the asynchronous forum”
Benefits of using LORO• Value of feedback on one’s work
“gives me an opportunity to gain useful feedback on the work I do”
• … but there are constraints“peer comment should be extended, but the restraints of all our workloads make this a problem”
• Increase quality of teaching materials“sharing the resources I have created with colleagues stimulates me to write very good materials, test them and improve them so that they can be used by someone else. LORO really pushes me to produce better materials”
“When something you’ve done is going to be on paper for years and your name will be attached to it, you feel the need to ensure it is perfect. When it’s online, even if it’s open to the rest of the world, it is incredibly temporary, it can be changed all the time. There is no perfect final product. I’ve never been so aware of it before.”
(participant in the Collaborative Writing and Peer Review project)
Dissemination
• LORO newsletter
• Internal (department / faculty / institution)
• Workshops
• Conference presentations
• Publications
• JISC-funded event on Impact
• Bologna OER in languages event
Conclusions
Work with those who want to work with you
©James Roe at http://www.flickr.com/photos/98289645@N00/394540090/
Jakob Nielsen (2006) “Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute”
It takes time, people move at their own pace
Image from Project Gutenberg
Newbiggin Hall Scouts http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fallen_tree_-_geograph.org.uk_-_495932.jpg
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
White, D. Manton, M. JISC-funded OER Impact Study, University of Oxford, 2011
A theoretical framework: activity theory & expansive learning
When whole collective activity systems, such as work processes and organisations, need to redefine themselves, traditional models of learning are not enough. Nobody knows exactly what needs to be learned.
(…) learners are involved in constructing and implementing a radically new, wider and more complex object and concept for their activity.Engeström, Y (1987) Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research.
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