Tag Archives: oer

New properties for learning resources in schema.org

LRMI, , ,

I am somewhat late in writing this, but back in May some new properties developed by LRMI were added to schema.org that simplify and expand how schema.org can be used to describe learning resources and educational events.

The new properties are:

teaches: The item being described is intended to help a person learn the competency or learning outcome defined by the referenced term.

assesses: The item being described is intended to assess the competency or learning outcome defined by the referenced term.

These are added as properties of CreativeWork and EducationEvent, and can both be used with either a DefinedTerm or text as the value (or URL, which is an allowed value for any schema.org property).

In a related change, the domain of educationalLevel, (“the level in terms of progression through an educational or training context”), which was added last year for EducationalOccupationalCredentials was expanded so that it can also be used with CreativeWork and EducationEvent. It also can have DefinedTerms, text or URL as a value.

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Devolved Management of OER in Irish Higher Education?

Other, , ,

I sometimes get asked for asked for advice by people who are thinking of setting up national infrastructure for OER based on institutional open access research repositories or similar, often with the rationale that doing such would mirror what has worked for open access research papers and cultural heritage. My advice is to think hard about whether it is appropriate to treat OER in the same way as these other types of resource. This week I read a paper, “Towards a Devolved Model of Management of OER? The Case of the Irish Higher Education Sector” by  Angelica Risquez, Claire McAvinia, Yvonne Desmond, Catherine Bruen, Deirdre Ryan, and Ann Coughlan which provides important evidence and analysis on this topic.

Photograph of Mon Repose
M_n Rep_se, Corfu, by Marc Ryckaert via Wikimedia Commons CC:BY

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Planning what I will see at #OER19

ukoer

I’ve been to several of ALTs OER conferences, next week in Galway will be my third year on the trot. Last year’s conference was one of my all time favourites, as I wrote just after it, I found it challenging in making me consider aspects of OER outside of my normal thinking along with some very useful contacts and discussions about what I could contribute.  I am really looking forward to travelling across to Galway for what promises to be more of the same quality in OER19. Here are my plans from the looking through the programme. Think of it as getting my reflections in first.  I don’t know if this is a good idea, I mean I’m bound to offend by omission, apologies for having to miss out so much that’s good.

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Metadata for markdown / MkDocs

K12OCX, OpenTextBooks, , , , , ,

I’ve been experimenting with ways of putting JSON-LD schema.org metadata into HTML created by MkDocs. The result is a python-markdown plugin that will (hopefully) find blocks of YAML in markdown and insert then into the HTML that is generated. You can find the plugin on github, and you can read more about the development of it in some pages generated by MkDocs  (that incidentally use the plugin).

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Quick Notes: Defining Textbook Structure and Elements

OpenTextBooks,

Yesterday I joined an Office Hours session run by the Rebus Community, which was a presentation by  Dave Ernst, (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and  Executive Director of the Open Textbook Network). He spoke about  Defining Textbook Structure and Elements, essentially summarizing a chapter on developing text book structure from guide by the Open Textbook Network for teachers who are creating open textbooks. That resource, and the Rebus community look like they are well worth a look if you are not already familiar with them. Here are my notes mixed with my own reflection & comment.

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#OER18 Open to all

ukoer,

I spent the last couple of days in Bristol, a city I know well: I went to University there (undergrad, PhD and post doc in physics and materials science), my wife’s parents live there. I’ll be honest, meeting my friends from the OER community in a city of which I am very fond was part of what attracted me to this conference. The theme of the conference, “open to all,” with discussions about OER in the context of colonialism, was less attractive to me. Look at the rest of this blog, you’ll see I am much more comfortable talking about technical specifications, APIs and infrastructure to support the creation and dissemination of OER. Continue reading →

PressBooks and ePub as an OER format.

OpenTextBooks, , , ,

PressBooks does a reasonable job of importing ePub, so that ePub can be used as a portable format for open text books. But, of course, there are limits.

I have been really impressed with PressBooks, the extension to WordPress for authoring eBooks. Like WordPress it is available as a hosted service from PressBooks.com and to host yourself from PressBooks.org. I have been using the latter for a few months. It looks like a great way of authoring, hosting, using, and distributing open books. Reports like this from Steel Wagstaff about Publishing Open Textbooks at UW-Madison really show the possibilities for education that open up if you do that. There you can read what work Steel and others have been doing around PressBooks for authoring open textbooks, with interaction (using hypothe.is, and h5p), connections to their VLE (LTI), and responsible learning analytics (xAPI).

PressBooks also supports replication of content from one PressBook install to another, which is great, but what is even greater is support of import from other content creation systems. We’re not wanting monoculture here.

Open text books are, of course, a type of Open Educational Resource, and so when thinking about PressBooks as a platform for open text books you’re also thinking about PressBooks and OER. So what aspects of text-books-as-OER does PressBooks support? What aspects should it support?

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Wikidata driven timeline

Other, , , ,

I have been to a couple of wikidata workshops recently, both involving Ewan McAndrew; between which I read Christine de Pizan‘s Book of the City of Ladies(*). Christine de Pizan is described as one of the first women in Europe to earn her living as a writer, which made me wonder what other female writers were around at that time (e.g. Julian of Norwich and, err…). So, at the second of these workshops, I took advantage of Ewan’s expertise, and the additional bonus of Navino Evans cofounder of Histropedia  also being there, to create a timeline of medieval European female writers.  (By the way, it’s interesting to compare this to Asian female writers–I was interested in Christina de Pizan and wanted to see how she fitted in with others who might have influenced her or attitudes to her, and so didn’t think that Chinese and Japanese writers fitted into the same timeline.)

Histropedia timeline of medieval female authors (click on image to go to interactive version)

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Quick notes: Naomi Korn on copyright and educational resources

ukoer, ,

I gate-crashed a lecture on copyright that Naomi Korn gave at Edinburgh University. I’ve had an interest in copyright for as long as I have been working with open access and open educational resources, about ten years. I think I understand the basic concepts pretty well, but even so Naomi managed to catch a couple of misconceptions I held and also crystallised some ideas with well chosen examples.

hand drawn copyright symbol and word 'copyright' in cursive script.
from naomikorn.com

First, quick intro to Naomi. Naomi is a copyright consultant (but not a lawyer). I first met her through her work for UKOER, which I really liked because she gave us pragmatic advice that helped us release resources openly not just list of all the things we couldn’t do. Through that and other work Naomi & colleagues have created a set of really useful resources on copyright for OER (which are themselves openly licensed).

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Reflections on a little bit of open education (TL;DR: it works).

MACS enhancement, ukoer, , , , , ,

We are setting up a new honours degree programme which will involve use of online resources for work based blended learning. I was asked to demonstrate some the resources and approaches that might be useful. This is one of the quick examples that I was able to knock up(*) and some reflections on how Open Education helped me. By the way, I especially like the last bit about “open educational practice”. So if the rest bores you, just skip to the end. Continue reading →