Session Title: Creating OE for Art, Design, Media & Performance Students
Presenters: Alex di Savoia, Lecturer, University College Falmouth
Christine Bunce, Course Leader, University College Falmouth
Time & Date: 10:15 A.M. - 11:00 A.M., Friday, August 14, 2009
Location: Rm. C180
Session Description: In 2010, UCF will be the first specialist Art, Design and Media institution to offer free access to online teaching materials under the Creative Commons Licence. MA Professional Writing will be the first course to provide learning content for the project, currently referred to as openUCF.
The openUCF model will attempt to engage a community of OE students and academics to shape our open content for varied educational objectives. The proposed VLE will be user-centred. It will initially comprise peer reviewed learning materials, collections of searchable educational resources and faculty development, a support services wiki which will be expanded through peer-to-peer development, resource and research wikis; content RSS feeds and social bookmarking applications.
Working in partnership with various UCF academic and non-Academic offices, MA Professional Writing will project manage the proposed openUCF educational platform and community. Inherent within the success of the part-time distance learning course has been the course team?s ability to create an online academic community that is robust, valued by the course?s distance learners, with heavy amounts of use by the majority of the course’s students.
What we propose is to bring our knowledge as a specialist arts, media, design and performance Higher Education Institution (HEI) and our wealth of online retention knowledge and an ability to create innovative online platforms to an OE -based platform to encourage deep independent and group learning within an active, open community. The main challenge the project team face is identifying the right combination of solutions to support the VLE. Another challenge the team faces is adapting its successful methodologies in building and sustaining online learning communities, within a distance learning course context, to an open education context. In essence, we are launching a social learning OE platform (John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0).
Another issue involves encouraging other art, media, design and performance HEIs to engage with openUCF ? using the specialist learning content to be supplied by UCF as well as adding their own art, design, media and performance learning content.
Lastly, an additional aim is to open up higher education to individuals who want to either improve or broaden their employment prospects as well as to employers who wish to upskill their workforce to improve their competitive edge. It is our aim to provide all online learners the flexibility to learn at their own pace in the most convenient of locations; at home or in the office or on the move. Identifying the requirements to support CPD-initiated learning is an important issue.
In summary, openUCF faces a series of challenges which any start-up OE project faces. Achieving the right mix of expertise and experience within a project team, gaining institutional support, selection of the most appropriate technology to provide a pedagogically robust VLE and student support within an OE environment are of critical importance.
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The pedagogy and theories which informed the project process of openSpace (our specialist Art, Design, Media & Performance Open Education Virtual Learning Environment pilot) are in the paper attached to this post. During the course of my presentation, I’ll be discussing the ‘Who’, What’ and ‘Why’ of the demographic populations we think will use openSpace – and then the ‘How’ of how we think they will engage with it. This will specifically address the course units from our MA Professional Writing course – the course which will launch openSpace. I will also cover a bit about the process we used to arrive at our viewpoints.
I’d really like this session to be discussion-led rather than just me talking. So let’s exchange views and don’t hesitate with any questions.
You can preview my presentation here: http://prezi.com/141420/
Online project workspace:
http://learningspace.falmouth.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=739
Full conference paper:
http://learningspace.falmouth.ac.uk/file.php?file=%2F739%2FConferencePapers%2FAlex_di_Savoia_-_OE_conference_paperFINAL.doc
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