Strategien der Digitalisierung an Hochschulen

Netzwerktreffen E-Learning NRW

Veranstalter: 
E-Learning NRW
Ort: 
Learning Lab
Termin: 
26.10.2015 - 14:00 bis 18:00

OER-Strategien für die Hochschule

E-Learning NRW Workshop.

Veranstalter: 
E-Learning NRW
Ort: 
Learning Lab
Termin: 
27.08.2015 - 09:00 bis 16:00

9-10 April: International Seminar in Groningen, the Netherlands

Bild des Benutzers Anna Bukhtoyarova

On April 9-10, 2015 two guest researchers from Learning Lab UDE presented at the international seminar “Intercultural Communications in a Global Age: Political, Media and Cultural Challenges and Tensions” at Hanze University of Applied Sciences (Hanzehogeschool Groningen).

Wenden

Wenden in den Geistes-, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften

Veranstalter: 
Universität zu Köln
Ort: 
Köln
Termin: 
17.04.2015 - 09:00 bis 18.04.2015 - 16:00

Social Network Analysis (SNA) at the Learning Lab

Bild des Benutzers Prof. Dr. Tobias Hölterhof

In October 2014, we hosted a workshop on “Social Network Analysis in Educational Research”, where we engaged into discussions with colleagues from across Europe and provided an overview of what type of SNA research we conduct at the Learning Lab. With this post, we would like to provide a little update about our recent activities in this direction. We still employ SNA to analyze learning processes in formal and informal environments, which offers exciting insights in learning as a relational and structural activity.

ECER 2015

Bild des Benutzers Michael Kerres

ECER 2015, "Education and Transition - Contributions from Educational Research", taking place in Budapest, Hungary, from 8 to 11 September 2015.
http://www.eera-ecer.de/ecer-2015-budapest/

OER15

Veranstalter: 
Association for Learning Technology
Ort: 
Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama Cardiff, Großbritannien (Vereinigtes Königreich)
Termin: 
14.04.2015 - 17:15 bis 15.04.2015 - 17:15

A federate reference structure in an open informational ecosystem

Heinen, Richard (UDE); Kerres, Michael (UDE); Scharnberg, Gianna (UDE), Blees, Ingo (DIPF), Rittberger, Marc (DIPF)

It can be considered as one of the advantages that the production and distribution of learning materials is much easier in the digital world. The OER movement benefits from these possibilities. Whereas, publishing is one thing; the other is to maintain the material, to make it accessible and to implement methods for quality assurance – not only as the responsibility of one publisher but as a task for a whole educational system.

Repositories of OER (ROER) can help to fulfil these tasks, if they follow some given criteria (Atenas & Havemann, 2014).Yet unsolved and underestimated is the question how to enhance transparency between different ROERs (Conole & Alevizou, 2010). Or: ROERs are regarded as appropriate tools to foster (McGreal et. al., 2013) the awareness for OER (UNESCO, 2012). However ,this reflects only the perspective of publishers and not of an (inter)national educational system. If resources are open the different metadata created by authors, editors and users, or even aggregated automatically should be open as well and accessible from different places. Furthermore: collecting descriptions, peer-reviews, ratings and other metadata independent from the resource adds to quality assurance and transparency and to informational autonomy of the user.

So far we have described the main idea of an open ecosystem and the benefit of joining metadata created by different users. As a next step we suggest a federate system of OER reference systems to connect resources and metadata across ROERs.

The paper will describe a federate ecosystem for OER using the example of the German educational system ,where a variety of ROERs (Muuß-Merholz & Schaumburg, 2014) and reference platforms (Kühnlenz et. al., 2012) have been established over the past years. In order to develop this ecosystem not only metadata standards are necessary, but also open APIs to exchange information In conclusion, it is essential that all relevant stakeholders agree on one transparent policy that they develop collaboratively.

References

Atenas, J., & Havemann, L. (2014). Questions of quality in repositories of open educational resources: a literature review. Research in Learning Technology, 22(0).

Conole, G., & Alevizou, P. (2010). A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. A report commissioned by the Higher Education. Milton Keynes, OK: Open University.

Kühnlenz, A., Martini, R., Ophoven, B., Bambey, D., & others. (2012). Der Deutsche Bildungsserver–Internet-Ressourcen für Bildungspraxis, Bildungsverwaltung und Bildungsforschung. Erziehungswissenschaft, 23(44), 23–31.

McGreal, R., Kinuthia, W. & Marshall, S, eds. (2013) Open Educational Resources? Innovation, Research and Practice, UNESCO, Commonwealth of Learning and Athabasca University, Atahbasca.

Muuß-Merholz, J., & Schaumburg, F. (2014). Open Educational Resources (OER) für Schulen in Deutschland 2014: Whitepaper zu Grundlagen, Akteuren und Entwicklungen. Internet & Gesellschaft Collaboratory.

UNESCO (2012): Paris OER Declaration. Retrieved February 10, 2014, from: http://www.unesco.de/oer-faq.html

Open Education Global Conference

Veranstalter: 
Open Education Consortium
Ort: 
Banff, Canada
Termin: 
22.04.2015 - 17:15 bis 24.04.2015 - 17:15

Provisioning strong and weak OER: Requirements of open informational ecosystems

Short description

A federate reference infrastructure in an open informational ecosystem will be presented. Special attention is given to strong and weak OER. (135 char.)

Abstract

It can be considered as one of the main added values of the digital world that the production and distribution of learning materials is much easier. The OER movement benefits from these possibilities. Whereas, publishing OER is one thing; others are to maintain the material, to make it accessible and to establish methods for quality assurance aligned to whole educational systems and its various practices.

Repositories of OER (ROER) can help to fulfil these tasks, if they follow some given criteria (Atenas & Havemann, 2014) and consider the entanglement of heterogeneous practices (Star, Ruhleder 1996). Yet unsolved and underestimated is the question how to enhance transparency between different ROERs (Conole & Alevizou, 2010). Or: ROERs are regarded as appropriate tools to foster (McGreal et. al., 2013) the awareness for OER (UNESCO, 2012). However, this reflects only the perspective of publishers and not of (inter)national educational systems. If resources are open the different metadata created by authors, editors and users, or even aggregated automatically should be open as well and accessible from different places. Furthermore, collecting descriptions, peer-reviews, ratings and other metadata independent from the resource increase the quality assurance, transparency, and informational capacities of the user.

So far an open ecosystem has been characterized (Kerres & Heinen, 2014a) and the benefits of metadata created jointly by different (types of) users have been demonstrated (Heinen, Blees, Kerres, & Rittberger, 2014). In an open ecosystem various stakeholders come together. Content providers offer content on their platforms. Schools, teachers and students are using this content on their LMS or school server. On an intermediate level a reference platform (also called “referatory”) can help teachers and learners to find and choose the material that seems to be appropriate for their tasks. Thereby, references platforms can add substantially to the quality assurance, diversity, and transparency. The information provided here can be gathered in different ways. Editorial staff can select material under different aspects, users can generate metadata by rating, tagging and describing material they find useful, content providers themselves may have access to a reference system and can bring in information about their products. Last but not least information can by collected automatically from the web or from resources already brought in by others. For end users like students and teachers it is easier to access a few (or even one) reference systems to search the material of various content providers.

Of course the described procedure from content platform via reference platform to learning platform can be realized in one closed ecosystem provided by one publisher or company, whereas open informational ecosystems allow for any provider of contents to “plug into” the ecosystem by providing metadata for the reference platform. Building federated or decentralized systems of interconnected services seems to be a difficult task as there are not only questions of exchange formats and APIs to be answered, but also complex practices – often invisible for users and / or authors – need to be aligned to attract different players to take part. Although the intermediation of the reference infrastructures is challenging, it offers a great chance at the same time; each player benefits from each other by enriching the choices of users and the diversity of OERs.

A differentiation in “weak” and “strong” OERs (Kerres & Heinen, 2014b) characterizes further the federated open ecosystem. Two dimensions are worth to be mentioned. The first dimension comprises the fluidity of OER. As Tuomi (2013) has pointed out, there are various understandings of “open” educational resources. Basically they agree that OER are materials that can be used by learners free of (additional) cost. In these cases OER is seen as a fixed entity whereby the actions of teachers are restricted to looking for material that can be used for free and accessed without any barriers. This can be called a “weak” definition of OER which is limited to materials and licenses and focuses on availability and accessibility: OER are considered as fixed materials which are free to use for a learner – but the practice of using and its possible rearrangement of OER for teaching is out of scope.

A “strong” definition has been discussed in respect of sharing OER including the right to edit, remix, and reshare materials with a license “allowing open practices”. David Wiley (2010) has framed the 4Rs (reuse, revise, remix and redistribute) that can be drawn on for a “narrow” definition of OER. Activists of an “OER movement”, like Stephan Downes, stress the point that OER should grant these more extensive rights. In this line of reasoning OER is often seen as an agent for educational visions where teachers actively participate in a mutual exchange of artefacts, ideas, and discourse. But changes in the value creation chain in the production of digital assets for learning have to be kept in mind (Richter & Veith, 2014).

The second dimension comprises the granularity of an educational resource and its relation to educational practices. From a complex level to single objects OER can be distinguished between textbooks, units, materials, and assets. Currently, the discussion about OER is primarily related to the level of learning materials. Teachers produce these materials for homework and exercises in their classes. These materials include assets found in the web or in other sources. The production of “strong” educational resources with a higher granularity (i.e. textbooks) typically relates to a certain curriculum. It brings OER more into educational practices and its affordances for teaching and learning. But so far, only few examples exist, where such materials have been made successfully available under an OER license. A federated open ecosystem should also support the aggregation of OERs of a higher level of granularity from different services. By these strong OER emerge even from end users activities and must be mapped into the ecosystem to be searchable and to include them into a quality assurance process that seems to be needed even for OER (Hug, 2014).

The presentation describes a federated open ecosystem for OER using the German educational system as a use case. While the German federal educational system by its configuration hindered so far the establishment of a centralised OER system it offers the chance to establish a decentralized OER reference infrastructure that entails an open ecosystem and aligns the heterogeneous curricula for “strong” OER. Additionally, a variety of ROERs (Muuß-Merholz & Schaumburg, 2014) and reference platforms (Kühnlenz et. al., 2012) has been established over the past years in Germany (Heinen et al., 2014). The alignment of the presentation addresses policy makers, content publishers as well as educators to discuss and to reflect on the concepts of open informational ecosystem, strong and weak OER and its implications for the production and distribution of OER.

References

Atenas, J., & Havemann, L. (2014). Questions of quality in repositories of open educational resources: a literature review. Research in Learning Technology, 22(0).

Biffi, C. (2002): Evaluation von Bildungssoftware im Spannungsfeld von Objektivität und praktischer Anwendung. Medienpädagogik – Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung.

Conole, G., & Alevizou, P. (2010). A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. A report commissioned by the Higher Education. Milton Keynes, OK: Open University.

Golder, S. A., & Huberman, B. A. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of information science, 32(2), 198-208.

Heinen, R., Blees, I., Kerres, M., Rittberger, M.: Open educational resources and social bookmarking. In: Stracke, C., Ehlers, U., Creelman, A., Shamarina-Heidenreich, T. (Eds.): Changing the trajectory. Berlin : Logos (2014), 33-40.

Hug, T. (2013). Education for all revisited: On concepts of sharing in the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. Seminar.net, 10 (1). Retrieved from: http://www.seminar.net/images/stories/vol10-issue1/Theo_Hug_Education-for-all_Essay.pdf

Kerres, & Heinen, R. (2014a). Open educational resources and informational ecosystems: Edutags as a connector for open learning. MedienPädagogik. Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung, (Themenheft: Educational Media Ecologies (Ed. by Friesen, Norm; Hug, Theor, Meister, Dorothee M.)). Retrieved from: http://www.medienpaed.com/Documents/medienpaed/24/kerres_heinen1410.pdf

24.03.15: Barcamp Science 2.0 “Opening up Science, crossing borders”

Bild des Benutzers Anna Bukhtoyarova

Mikhail Bukhtoyarov and Anna Bukhtoyarova, guest researchers at UDE Learning Lab, presented the Barcamp session "Open Science and Open Education: do they kill universities?" at the Science 2.0 event in Hamburg.

Leibniz Information Centre for Economics in coooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland invited interested researchers and practitioners to exchange knowledge and experiences in the context of Science 2.0 and Open Science.

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