Author John Casey,

ALTO UK

Collaborative Approaches to Learning Design for OERs:

Reflections and Outputs from ALTO UK Workshops

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/dhillan/3848315549/

• Learning Design = Instructional Design = Teaching Design

• LD sounds more ‘PC’• Came to be used in the UK and elsewhere after

the IMS LD specification (associated with Learning Objects)

• OERs involve ‘designing learning for strangers’

Terminology

• A lightening conductor for issues related to:– Power– Control – Ownership– Identity– Pedagogy – Tech Infrastructure– Cultures – Policy – Digital Professionalism (aka Digital Literacy)

Unintended Consequences

Image by Christopher Hollishttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Lightning_strike_in_Tampa_Florida_(modified).jpg

• Art courses can be short of traditional text-heavy didactic materials (cf MIT OCW)

• Emphasis is on studio/workshop practice

• Mentoring and apprenticeship and situated learning

• Community of learners / peers

• Importance of the Crit and dialogue

• More about process than content• Pedagogy often deeply contextualized, individual

hard to abstract and share (in the bricks and mortar!)

The Problem for Arts OERs

• Rich media (Images/audio/video) to capture tacit knowledge and practice:– Processes (screen printing, bronze casting, weaving)– Students accounts of learning – supports vicarious

learning – using sketchbooks as prompts/scripts

• Social media (esp. YouTube/Vimeo) as publishing platforms

• Use in-house platform Process.Arts (Drupal) to knit together and act as an ‘open studio’

• ‘Traditional’ Repository Filestore for publishing didactic content

Emerging Solutions

• We now have ‘chunks’ of learning resources as social media and files, great they can stand-alone, but:

• How do we relate these ‘chunks’ to a course?• Should we? (why not? It works elsewhere…)

• We do not have a web system capable of doing this

• Staff do not have the time/skills • Need something simple and sustainable

Emerging Problem 2

Emerging Solutions 2 – Open CourseBooks

• Look elsewhere (frugal innovation, no tech dogma)

• Open Textbooks (Easily understood metaphor)

• OCW MIT simple, consistent, easy navigation

• Represent a course as an Open Textbook using OCW style structure

• Use a Word template to author • Distribute as a PDF (multiplatform) and as Word

(editable)

• Provide a link to a zip file (a la MIT OCW) to download all associated resources

 

Open CourseBooks Examples

 

ALTO UK Examples at: http://alto.arts.ac.uk/930/

This approach is being used elsewhere – e.g. the JISC ORBIT project to Using the latest version of Media Wiki to support joint authoring and outputting in .pdf and .od formats with zip files of resources for offline use – in Africa and the UK.

Open CourseBooks Benefits

 • A good ‘first step’ format to start sharing resources

(especially from deeply contextualised practice)

• Uses easily available info / resources (handbooks minus guff)

• Promotes reflection• Timeline produces a narrative (an initial LD cf the IMS spec.)

• A Shared visualisation tool (for moving to teamwork)

• Starting point for course redesign (Kirklees & Heriot Watt)

• Simple to make – Easy to Use• Adaptable

Next Steps

 • Evaluate• Need a better authoring Tool (than Word)

• Need to author once play on all (desktop, tablet, smartphone)

• HTML5 is ideal for authoring and delivery• HTML5 authoring ‘app’ (supports co-design)

• Customisable templates, easy (drag and drop plus user prompts etc.)

• Attractive outputs, incl. rich media• Prints nice• Downloads for offline viewing and adaptation• Accessible and semantically structured• Excellent for archival and format conversion