Fostering collaboration and enhancement through community-building

Supporting teaching in higher education to improve student learning across the Biosciences

Fostering collaboration and enhancement through

community-building

Chris Taylor and Terry McAndrew

[email protected]

Follow me @chr1staylorhttp://tinyurl.com/bioukoer

UK Centre for Bioscience logo © University of Leeds. All rights reserved.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence except where explicitly exempted.

Subject Centre role

One of the most important and valued aspects of the Subject Centres’ work is to build and establish networks of discipline-specific academics

Outline

Bioscience pilot project background Aims for collaboration Blogs Use of RSS

Yahoo Pipes Feed43

Partner profile pages Skype OeRBITAL

Bioscience OER pilot project

Focus on resources to enhance practical and fieldwork in the Biosciences

To produce and upload to OER repository 200+ resources uploaded

To explore issues around creating and releasing openly-licensed content

Working with ten academic partners in ten institutions spread around the UK Each exploring same set of issues

Aims for collaboration

To build a community of geographically-disparate practitioners around a central theme – OER

To foster communication that would sustain without our direct intervention

To contribute positively through collaboration to the overall project goals

To remove barriers for partners

Blogs

JISCInvolve – Wordpress-based Main Centre

project blog Individual

partner blogs 7/10 blogged

regularly

http://biooer.jiscinvolve.org/

Blogs

Very useful tool for reflection To keep track of

and share issues

encountered All encouraged to

follow and

comment on RSS output...

http://biooer.jiscinvolve.org/

Use of RSS

Very powerful for automation Allowed us to do a lot behind the scenes Very little experience or awareness of

amongst project partners Use in blogs With Yahoo Pipes With Feed43

Partner profile pages

YahooPipes Why?

Wanted straight-forward way to collate project partners’ blog entries and other resource outputs

Visual and fairly user-friendly Versatile

Just scratched the surface Number of ways of exporting results

Can produce size-customisable output window to embed in site/output through web2.0 in addition to standard further RSS feed output

Examples of my YahooPipes: http://tinyurl.com/bioukoerYahooPipes

YahooPipes logo Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

YahooPipes

YahooPipes

YahooPipes

Not without its limitations Restricted by content and quality of RSS

feed input to it Unable to draw out our specific project

partner resources from Jorum due to lack of keywords field in RSS Not practical to repeat keywords in description body

So, more challenging solution required Feed43

Feed43 custom RSS

What? Feed43 is a free third-party custom RSS creator http://feed43.com/ Scrapes contents of URLs offered to it and

produces tailored RSS feed based on defined search parameters

Feed43 logo Copyright © 2006–2009 A.I.Studio. All rights reserved.

Feed43 custom RSS Why?

To resurface links to Jorum records in context within our own site for project partner profile pages

11 pages on our site required project’s OER content Central page and each of 10 project partners

http://tinyurl.com/bioukoer Update pages automatically when new resources

added Sustainable (allowed us to keep track of partners’ uploads ;) )

Emulating repository profile pages To reproduce their Jorum-held resources on

each partner’s page on our own website, along with small biography, reasons for contributing to OER and Comments facility Recognition

To build context around resources provided by each partner

So those who might use the resources could associate them with their creator, and have a space to engage them in a dialogue (though not used)

To allow potential users to relate to creators and their motivations

Feed43 custom RSS

How? Run specific search query in JorumOpen for

individual partners (Surname AND bioukoer) Take resulting URL and input into Feed43 Set parameters on data to collect and output Manipulate using ASP.NET* and display on

website *If easier you can of course feed resulting RSS into

YahooPipes instead

Feed43 custom RSShttp://tinyurl.com/bioukoerFeed43

Feed43 custom RSS

From this:

Feed43 custom RSS

To this:

Risks

Vulnerable to stability of third-party applications Feed43 YahooPipes

Reliant on Jorum not changing their search results URLs

Why? Easy (with minimal training) Instant Versatile

Instant messenger Audio (with multiple participants) Video Screenshare

Supplied partners with headsets and webcams

Exchanged details of Skype IDs Most had not used Skype before, but all

found it useful Able to carry out video interviews, with

VodBurner Partners all now have permanent contact

details in their Skype profiles

10 months after project finished still have contact with partners, and amongst themselves Relationships have sustained

The future for Skype...?

Interviews with project partners

On bioukoer channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/bioukoer

Interviews with project partners

Prof David Male, Open University:

“The main advantage for me, so far, is the contacts that I’ve made. I’ve been in touch with a lot of people via the [Bioscience] OER project… I think it’s a good thing we’ve let this material go out, and hopefully is available and useful for people, but for me it’s the contacts I’ve made and the possibility of taking things forward for new open educational resources.”

OER phase 2: OeRBITAL

Open educational Resources for Biologists Involved in Teaching And Learning Sustaining OER, not creating

Thematic Collections strand To identify existing OER from multiple repositories

and build subject-specific collections Focus on reuse to provide sustainability

OeRBITAL

Building on experience from pilot project Communal MediaWiki as collaborative

development tool Encouragement of discussion areas for

comment Use of further collaborative spaces such as

GoogleDocs…

Supporting teaching in higher education to improve student learning across the Biosciences

Fostering collaboration and enhancement through

community-building

Chris Taylor and Terry McAndrew

[email protected]

Follow me @chr1staylorhttp://tinyurl.com/bioukoer

UK Centre for Bioscience logo © University of Leeds. All rights reserved.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence except where explicitly exempted.