NB - coloured text are direct quotes from projects and serve as reminders. grey quotes will be used.

 

table of contents includes all heading levels but may be reduced to two main levels - helps me jump to relevant places on the page

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Background Why OER? Digitisation and OER Primary sources and collections Digitisation processes Transforming digital assets into OER Accessibility Licencing Hosting and discoverability Embedding OER and digital collections into learning and teaching New partnerships and approaches What we achieved? Measuring impact Widening access to unique primary sources and collections Changing practices Impact on learners Institutional culture and embedding Wider impact Supporting factors Factor 1. Stimulating and supporting change in practice Through Engagement/awareness raising - examples included By challenging and changing perceptions By changing pedagogic approaches and practice Factor 2. Encouraging and supporting institutional change Through appropriate technical infrastructure for OER release Through changes to institutional processes Through partnership/collaborative approaches Factor 3. Adopting sustainable approaches  By developing sustainable digital assets and OER By supporting new open educational practices By nurturing new and existing partnerships Appendix 1

Synthesis Report - Digitisation and OER

 

Engaging with OER has the potential to change practice. Participants in the project all reported that their professional practice had been changed by working on the project, either in the active implementation of new pedagogical techniques and approaches to content delivery; their understanding of how students can be producers of content and active co-creators of knowledge, or their understanding of how content and language teaching (which is usually taught separately) can be integrated by using original research data in language classes. (OpenLIVES Project, May 2013)

 

Background

In 2011, the Jisc eContent Programme began a new strand of activity, Digitisation for Open Educational Resources,  which followed on from previous activities focused on building digitisation expertise within the UK Higher Education community. The aim of this strand was to digitise, and openly release, archival and special collections of primary sources (and to a lesser degree, secondary sources), create Open Educational Resources (OER) that incorporate the digitised material, and embed such resources within teaching and learning as a way of enhancing the student experience and fostering innovative pedagogies.

 

The ten funded projects in the Digitisation for OER strand were as follows:

• Histology and histopathology: virtual microscopy online - Led by The Open University
• OpenLIVES: Learning Insights from the Voices of Emigrés from Spain Led by University of Southampton 
• Manufacturing pasts: industrial change in 20th Century Britain- led by University of Leicester
• UKVM: United Kingdom Virtual Microscope - Led by The Open University
• CCC-EED: Context, Culture and Creativity: Enriching e-Learning in Dance - Led by University of Surrey
• Observing the 1980s - Led by University of Sussex
• Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection - Led by  University of Sussex
• OBL4HE: Object Based Learning for Higher Education - Led by University College London   
• Architect US: Architecturally Useful Scholarly Resources - Led by Birmingham City University

 

These activities ran alongside two other strands around digitisation:

• Mass Digitisation of collections that meet primarily the needs of Higher Education in the UK
• Clustering Digital Content maximise the use of digital content by bringing together existing online resources for the benefit of, primarily, the Higher Education sector

 

At the same time the JISC eLearning programme was halfway through the JISC/HE Academy UK OER (Open Educational Resources) Programme (UKOER) of activities. The UKOER programme had established a solid support mechanism for the programme when it began in 2009, including advice and support from Jisc CETIS, Jisc Legal,  Web2Rights, Jisc Techdis, the Open University Support Centre for Online Resources in Education (SCORE)  and an Evaluation and Synthesis Team led by Glasgow Caledonian University. Early UKOER projects and the support teams had produced a wider range of supporting materials, particularly guides and toolkits to support those new to OER which were made available through the OER infoKit. These support mechanisms and resources and were also made available to the digitisation projects with a view to sharing new knowledge and understanding around releasing open learning materials.

 

The activities of UKOER and OU SCORE initiatives meant that by 2011 some UK Higher Education institutions were aware of OER but generally this awareness was limited to those institutions that had been directly involved. Most institutions and many individuals that were new to the concept of OER required significant engagement and awareness raising to understand the potential benefits and possible challenges. The time period of the UKOER programme  included many challenges and constraints for the Higher Education sector and many changes. The HEFCE OER Review study carried out a cumulative evaluation and synthesis of the UKOER Programme and SCORE initiative and highlighted some of these wider changes which included technical, legal, economic and cultural aspects^[1]. During 2012 we saw a change in focus from OER to Open Educational Practice (OEP) and also the rise of the MOOC ((Massive Open Online Courses).

 

The open learning landscape has in this period moved definitively beyond content-based resources. Open online courses provide a context in which learning content is relatively less important than the interactions, reactions and emergent properties of the community itself. This has implications for the design, management and sharing of OER, as educational ideas may be deeply embedded in the context in which they emerged, and/or may be widely distributed around different sites with different licenses and means of access. The third phase of the UK OER programme focused on exploring these wider aspects of open learning practice, as did our paper on Open Educational Practices. (HEFCE OER Review Report, May 2013 )

 

Although the Digitisation for OER Programme had a much clearer focus on digitisation of archival and special collections the parallel activities around creating and releasing OER meant that there was a considerable amount of crossover between the outcomes of the two programmes. Indeed two of the projects included team members which had been involved in UKOER, and who brought a fairly sophisticated understanding around models of OER release and around articulating benefits during awareness raising activities. What is unique to the Digitisation for OER Programme was the types of content that were being digitised and released, making previously inaccessible collections available to enhance learning and teaching within the institutions involved and more widely in a range of educational contexts.

 

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Why OER?

 

There is evidence that when digital resources have been used within the curriculum this has brought substantial benefits to the work of students and teachers. One of the key achievements of previous JISC digitisation and content programmes has been to develop a range of learning materials to help contextualise the digitised resources so to better support teaching and learning.  Digital content can be used in a wide range of ways: in preparation for lectures, as supplementary material, as a way to engage students through different media types, for inclusion in VLEs and wikis, as a stimulus for independent research, to provide exposure to primary sources, to enhance the quality of course work, as a way of going “beyond Google” and as a basis for new courses and modules inspired by a digital collection. (JISC eContent Capital Programme: Call for Projects November 2011)

 

The JISC eContent Capital Programme Call distinguished between 'raw' resources (digital objects) and 'cooked' resources (OER) with a view to embedding these within a variety of educational contexts. The Call itself illustrates the high level motivations of Jisc, which could be described as

• the effective integration of primary collections in learning and teaching contexts to address specific pedagogic needs
• to increase the corpus of OER in different subject areas to encourage sharing and re-use of publicly funded resources
• to provide opportunities for innovation and investigation into OER development, release, discoverability and use

Motivations to develop and release OER are often complex ^[2], particularly where multiple partners from different sectors come together with radically different cultural practices and strategic visions. Motivations often reflect the anticipated benefits for different stakeholders. The HEFCE Review report noted 5 broad categories which had emerged from the UKOER Programme, which can also be applied to  the Digitisation for OER projects.

Motivations to use and release Open Educational Resources (OER), and engagement with the broader notion of Open Educational Practice (OEP), reflect strategic priorities and goals of funding bodies, educators, educational institutions and communities, and external sectors concerned with knowledge creation and dissemination. These can be categorised into five broad areas^[3]:

1. Building individuals’ or institutions’ or community’s’ reputation
2. Improving efficiency, cost and quality of production
3. Opening access to knowledge
4. Enhancing pedagogy through the creation and reuse of OER,
5. Building technological momentum

(HEFCE OER Review Report, May 2013 )

 

A key motivation for the Digitisation for OER strand of activities was to increase access to unique primary sources and collections which falls into category iii above - 'Opening access to knowledge'. Number iv in the list, 'Enhancing pedagogy through the creation and use of OER' is also a significant motivator for this programme. Whilst iii and iv are perhaps the most obvious motivations at a programme level, the other motivations did emerge as important for some of the project teams and partners.

 

It is useful to consider the motivations of project teams, and their different partners, as these can impact on development models and approaches adopted, licence and hosting choices and on the kinds of OER released and how they are presented. For example, OER released for a specific student cohort or course may require 'built-in' pedagogic guidance that might make them less usable in a broader context. The projects funded within this strand of activities included a very wide range of partners which undoubtedly added a richness to project experiences and the resulting content, but which added layers of complexity that were sometimes challenging to manage.  Often the lead partner will have been through the process of motivating other partners at the stage of bid preparation, through the articulation of anticipated benefits.

 

One of the most interesting aspects of this programme is that projects had input from academics, learning technologists, librarians, archivists, students and content originators, all bringing a range of different skills, knowledge and understanding and motivations. It is interesting to consider who led the projects and how far this impacted on project team motivations. Of course all teams incorporated the programme's primary intentions.

 

Projects led by academics included CCC:EED, Histology and histopathology, Zandra Rhodes Collection and UKVM. Although often inspired by the actual special collections and content, these projects tended to have very specific pedagogic intentions that were aiming to fulfill a teaching and learning need. Both the UKVM and the Histology and histiopathology projects were responding to the impact of increasing costs of maintaining microscopes and slide collections. Students were often restricted to using small collections held within their own institutions and were having limited experience of microscopy.  The projects aimed to address these issues through the provision of a virtual microscope and an open collection of virtual slides in their respective subject areas. In addition, a move within the biomedical sciences of using virtual microscopes meant that students needed to learn skills in utilising these for their future professional practice. CCC:EED were aiming to enhance student-centred learning, and maximize the use of enriched digital resources and collections in the Dance education sector and the Zandra Rhodes Collection intended to consolidate their existing relationship with the renowned fashion designer to make her processes and products accessible to their students. 

 

Projects led by Librarians/Archivists were Manufacturing Pasts and Observing the 1980s. Both of these projects intended to make existing collections accessible to learning and teaching so Manufacturing Pasts focused on historical sources with a specific focus on Leicester’s industrial past and Observing the 1980s focused on the Mass Observation Collections and the British Library Oral History Collections. Both projects worked closely with academic teams to integrate this digital content into existing courses aiming to enhance learning and teaching and also make these collections more widely available outside the institutions. 

 

Projects led by Learning technologists and/or Educational Developers were Architectus, OBL4HE and OpenLIVES. The projects generally intended to broaden the pedagogic approaches to using digitised collections and technologies. OpenLives, for example had previous experience of using OER and Open Educational Practice to enhance language teaching, the OBL4HE team had a commitment to encouraging the use of Object based Learning across a range of disciplines. The Architectus Project was responding to a need expressed by academic colleagues around the lack of high quality primary sources of drawings and plans for architecture and the built environment.

 

All of these different motivations led to a wide range of content and collections being made available as raw assets and packaged into OER. The different approaches adopted by project teams reflect the motivations, the skillsets and the decisions they made as they progressed through the process. As usual with JISC funded projects, these processes and decisions are as important as the outputs themselves.

 

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Digitisation and OER

Primary sources and collections

 

Since most OER development tends to emerge from module content, this project differed in that the use of archival images (particularly in Ballet and Labanotation) specifically affected the material being developed for classroom use, discussion and eventual OER development. Tasks were designed to have students look at the digitised content both in the packages created and via the DDA website. Not only did this enhance the pedagogical experience, but the students then discover the relevance of their studies to an archived legacy of dance forms and analysis.   CCC:EED

 

 

A  fascinating range of primary sources held in national, private and institutional collections were digitised as part of this strand of activities ranging from slides, fashion garments, historical artifacts, images, interviews and museum specimens. (See appendix 1 for a list of these). Different kinds of sources bring their own digitisation challenges, from technical issues around large raw file sizes for photographs, to the complexity of digitising 3d objects. As with all digitisation projects issues around ownership, permissions and licences can cause problems, particularly where the ultimate intention is to include the raw assets in OER. There are a range of technical choices that need to be made to ensure that the resulting work is accessible, discoverable and usable in a variety of contexts. One of the notable aspects of this programme was the need for projects to consider how to store, manage and make accessible the raw assets and also how to best incorporate these into learning and teaching materials, resulting in projects having to consider very different hosting options. These aspects are discussed in more detail below.

 

Digitisation processes

Previous work of the eContent Programme had led to an increased understanding within the sector around digitisation processes and had built capacity within the UK around management of digital collections. Efforts were made to raise the profile of the value of digital content to educational, public and government sectors to encourage investment in a sustainable national collection. These activities focused on articulating the benefits and impact of digital resources to inspire research and scholarship, bestow economic benefits and connecting people and communities in a 'Digital Britain' ^[4]. The work of the Digitisation for OER strand of activities builds on this, as well as adding to the corpus of the national collection. Projects, therefore, had a wealth of prior experience to draw on around  technical and legal aspects of digitising collections.

 

Digitisisation activities often require collaborative working and a range of skills that may not reside in one place. Different kinds of workflow may be appropriate within each context so some institutions or bodies may adopt centralised approaches whilst others may favour a distributed approach. Even within one project different partners may have very specific practices and procedures affecting workflow and approaches to digitisation. Working with a range of partners can intensify these challenges and there is a clear need for some kind of central management to co-ordinate the separate elements of the workflow and ensure that these come together at the right time.

Another aspect of the staffing of the project related to digitisation and this area required careful planning in terms of work flow. Interestingly, this worked quite differently at the different sites and whilst Reading completed all their digitisation with the same team, UCL had a more diversified approach to achieving the digitisation required. (OBL4HE)

 

Technical aspects around digitisation discussed by projects included the following: (could write this as a series of paragraphs identifying which project experienced these rather than a list but it's stuff we already know and might expect if we have done digitisation before - writing it as a list seems to acknowledge this and stops it being a very large section.) project quotes at end of page to remind me which project experienced this in case we decide to write as paras)

• capacity of in-house services (this might be time capacity rather than simply technical equipment or skills)
• balancing need for high quality images with resulting large raw image sizes impacting on storage
• quicker approaches (for example not relying on experienced services potentially impacted on quality of images) improving how much content can be digitised
• lack of consistency if different approaches are taken (ie. some images produced professionally and others of lower quality)
• not all repositories or services can manage large file sizes (eg Jorum) so this can impact on hosting decisions
• lack of appropriate level of (or outdated) computer equipment impacting on speed of digitisation
• student's lack of equipment or access to technologies limiting capacity to access some resources
• making sure different technical components or workflow activities are properly planned (eg. some scans were too large to apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition) so had to be resized
• time needed to edit original materials to comply with data protection or licening requirements and challenges in managing the resulting different versions of files
• challenges around using institutional systems with sometimes cumbersome processes compared to ease of making materials available on the web
• incorporating metadata and licences into materials for open web compared with adding it within conventional repository systems
• using existing institutional systems can impact on standards used or technical outputs which might not be compatible with other systems (eg SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) format not compatible with Jorum)
• adapting existing systems to meet new requirements (such as adding an option for groups in Humbox to bring all OpenLIVES materials together)
• using familiar formats and sites that people already use can be less challenging and encourage use
• using new formats and different mechanisms can grab stakeholder attention and generate discussion
• making content accessible as html-5 which improved access on mobile devices
• questions about complexity and granularity of materials impacting on future re-versioning
• being prepared to try different software when original choices do not produce the required results or prove too challenging for people to use either in terms of accessibility or the skills required
• general lack of staff skills with existing institutional technologies and/or web-based technologies

 

Transforming digital assets into OER

A range of technologies were utilised across the programme as appropriate for the different collections or sources and these were often combined to provide engaging and effective teaching and learning materials. For example images were combined with videos, hyperlinks and text in the Zandra Rhodes Collection to increase engagement and bring together different aspects of the design process, effectively aiming to bring to life the story. Most projects combined different assets in this way, aiming to reflect the pedagogic requirements of the course or teachers or even by responding to student feedback.

 

The core of the project was determining how we wanted to use the primary sources in teaching and then developing the learning resources to address these needs.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, this was one of our most significant challenges and led to the most discussion and debate at meetings and focus groups. (Manufacturing pasts)

 

Choices around how the primary sources would be integrated into OER raises an interesting tension. Although all projects had a motivation to create OER for re-use in a wide sense, they often developed them with a specific student cohort or course in mind which could actually limit their re-usability in other contexts. However, this kind of approach can really encourage reflection and conversations between people with different roles and strategic motivations, bringing a richness to the process that far outweighs the end products. The UKOER programme synthesis reports highlighted that engaging with OER often led to a radical reconsideration of existing teaching practice^[5], mainly due to those increased conversations within the institution or even with other partner institutions.

 

This has been replicated within the Digitisation for OER programme with several projects highlighting substantial changes in practice and course content. Sometimes these changes in practice stem from engaging with new technologies. The CCC:EED Project, in particular had, in effect, two parallel stories happening at the same time as they encountered radical changes in their curricula through the adoption of new technologies, as well as introducing the rich new content from the digitisation activities. Due to these changes they experienced a significant positive impact on the student learning experience and on staff perceptions around how to use technologies for dance education.

 

Accessibility

For OER to be re-used and/or re-purposed they need to be easily discoverable, technically accessible, pedagogically accessible and carrying appropriate open licences. Not least people need the appropriate digital literacies to be able to access and use or adapt them within their own context.

Technical challenges enabled the Faculty staff to see what type of infrastructural support was necessary to provide strong digital literacy skills, for both students and staff, especially in a creative arts subject. Access to PCs, Macs or computers with the most updated software proved to be a necessity and compatibility between platforms needs to be assessed. For instance, some students were unable to access some videos on the VLE from computers if they did not have a recent version of Explorer which allowed for the most recent version of Flash Player to work. The integration of mobile smartphone technology emerged as something to think about when planning modules; even having students record responses and post them on the VLE would use their already acquired digital skills for the purposes of discussion, particularly appealing to those students who do not feel comfortable speaking up in lectures. Institutional support is crucial for development of digital literacy. This includes a user-friendly VLE, training at all levels of student and staff, and availability of resources. CCC:EED

 

The need for OER to be made available in formats that were accessible and could be used on portable devices (laptops, smartphones, iPads or other tablet devices) was apparent to most projects and they invested time investigating the potential of ebooks/ibooks as well as ensuring that their OER formats were generally accessible to students and other potential users remotely.

 

Accessibility can be enhanced by an understanding of the wider context affecting the way academic staff relate to open educational practice generally. The Manufacturing Pasts project described their materials as learning resources rather than as OER, pointing out that the terminology can be a barrier to access. The two projects based at the Open university (Histology and histiopathology project and the UKVM project) felt that new approaches (particularly the recent interest in Open Courses) might serve to increase accessibility for their OER.

 

the Open University is producing its first set of Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) and one of the first will be ‘Moons: An Introduction’ which will feature a set of virtual microscope slides of moon rocks to allow anyone with internet access to explore samples returned to Earth by the Apollo astronauts. UKVM

 

Assuming that OER are discoverable and accessible in technical and legal terms, there remain tensions around re-use in pedagogical terms, as described above. Where OER have been released for very specific groups or for a particular context they are not always accessible or easily adapted for re-use. Examples of the ways on which this can affect use and re-use include:

• OER to support specific courses which reflect course structures and are difficult to re-use in other contexts
• OER which include references to specific laws or regulations that  are not relevant in other countries
• OER which include specific pedagogic approaches or language that might not be relevant in other context
• OER primarily developed for use within one institution but made open more widely may be less usable in other contexts than anticipated

 

Several projects noted this tension around developing learning materials for specific needs, but also argued that making the raw assets available and discoverable could counterbalance this and make them re-usable in a variety of contexts. In many ways we could argue that this two-pronged approach presents an ideal outcome, and this does reflect what the more experienced UKOER projects did to ensure accessibility and re-usability. Like the UKOER programme the Digitisation for OER projects reported a desire from students for some kind of guidance or context incorporated into the OER and felt that other teachers would prefer to use/re-use the raw assets within their own teaching contexts.

 

Questions remain over the transferability of more processed OERs between institutions or even between teachers. This is owing to factors such as course syllabi and the ways in which university teaching staff work (for example, courses reflect expertise, pedagogical approaches and interests of individual staff and do not follow cross-institutional curricula, as is the case with schools). It is perhaps more likely that OERs are consulted for ideas and adapted as necessary, thereby contributing to a generally positive climate as regards teaching material development.

 

Nevertheless, there is a strong imperative to embed OERs in curricula, however institution-specific they may be, because as our Reading-based research indicated - students are much more likely to use OERs if they form a core part of their learning. (OBL4HE)

 

Transforming the raw digitised primary sources into OER provided an opportunity to provide interactive elements and this was seen as an important way to make the content more engaging for students and other potential users outside the Higher Education sector. Incorporating social features was seen as a particularly useful way to do this, which also has the potential to encourage use of the OER and offer ways to track and evidence use. 

 

This ‘In Time-In Place-In Focus’ feature includes a map with each location marked, allowing users to explore rocks around the UK, a timeline allowing users to explore rocks by their age, and finally a full text based search facility allowing users to find rocks containing specific minerals, or any association mentioned in the accompanying text... The website also includes a set of social features including the ability to post your favourite rock on social networking sites such as facebook or to tweet your favourite rock on twitter. The capability to send key observations via email or to repost them as links is also enabled using a share button that appears on the microscope for each sample. We hope that this will prove to be one of the important features in promoting re-use and re-purposing of our content as OERs. UKVM  

 

Licencing

Legal aspects of open raw assets and OER can be complex and are linked to wider issues of institutional policy, risk management and ownership.  Open licences are critical to the notion of OER as they encourage and enable use, reuse, redistribution and modification with minimal restrictions.  Open licences do not transfer ownership but grant permission for specified uses and sometimes require attribution or other actions. Many of the complications around open licencing relate to issues around people have varying levels of understanding of basic Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), and in particular, Copyright. Within an educational institution the IPR expertise may not include an understanding of this in relation to OER. There is no doubt that widespread use of Creative Commons Licences has made choices easier to some extent although there are a range of open licences that could be applied to OER.

 

The original funding call for Digitisation for OER stipulated that the digitised collections and the OER produced should be licenced under a suitable Creative Commons (CC) or equivalent licence and offered support in the form of the OER IPR Support Project that had been established for the UKOER Programme. This project had developed some excellent guidance and support materials to help projects make appropriately informed licencing choices. Whilst the majority of the projects adopted a CC-BY-NC-SA licence (Creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share alike) a few chose to use the CC-BY-NC licence. The Manufacturing Pasts and Zandra Rhodes projects both chose not to insist on the 'share alike' element as they felt it may restrict re-use, and the OpenLIVES project chose to use the SA element for the OER (but not their original raw assets) in order to encourage others to contribute adapted resources back into the pool.

 

We judged that ‘non-commercial’ would make it easier to obtain permissions for re-use and indeed this proved to be the case.  We also chose not to use the Share-Alike option, as it was felt that many people were not clear exactly what this means, and as a result might not use the resources.  For instance, using the SA option would mean that the resources could not be placed on a password protected virtual learning environment such as Blackboard, as the resources would not be openly and freely available for re-use, only to those with passwords. Manufacturing pasts

 

Many of the legal challenges faced by projects releasing OER relate to the original sources and how easy or not it is to source provenance and obtain permission. Establishing who created a resource (or parts of a resource such as an image) can be challenging and clearing such third party materials for release under an open licence can be difficult.  Where permission is being sought, care should be taken to ensure that the right person is being asked (that they are actually the copyright owner of the third party material in question), and that they are truly consenting to the release of the material under an open licence (for example, merely asking for permission to ‘use’ the resources would not be sufficient). This kind of activity can be one of the most time consuming aspects of release and has led UKOER projects to conclude that it is easier to create new materials from scratch than to try to clear existing content^[6]. This problem also affected some of the Digitisation for OER projects as they were often using collections that had been developed or curated before open licences were widely used. The OpenLIVES project experienced some rather unusual and very sensitive issues around obtaining permissions for oral testimony, that led to unique risk evaluation and risk management approaches for these sources.

 

The most significant challenge which the project faced was the issue of permissions. At the time the original interviews were made, interviewees signed a permissions form which allowed their voice and words to be used for ‘educational purposes,’ but no further permissions were obtained for materials to be put online or made available as open content. It was felt by the project management team that for OpenLIVES to go forward, further permissions would be needed for the testimonies to be made available as open content. However, other team members strongly disagreed with the proposal to ask interviewees to sign a second permissions form, as it was felt that this would be confusing and unhelpful to a group of people who would be in advanced age; come from a cultural background more inclined to openness and less-rule bound, and who had experienced suffering and discrimination under an authoritarian regime (and would see a formal permissions form as a repressive instrument). After a long period of discussion and debate, it was decided that an informal letter would be sent out to interviewees, informing them of our intentions and offering the opportunity for them to decline permission for their testimony to be used in the project. At the same time, the team devised robust plans to contextualise the content to be released within the HumBox repository and ensure that licence information was attached to original resources. OpenLIVES

 

Decisions around risk management affected the Manufacturing Past project who decided to proceed with digitisation before obtaining permissions to keep momentum going. This experienced team (previously involved in the UKOER programme) adopted a 'best efforts' policy to enable use of resources containing 'orphan works', where the original Copyright owner could not be contacted, ensuring that robust procedures are in place to record efforts to locate provenance with a view to removing any items (take-down policy) if questioned. The sophisticated understanding of this team around licencing was also illustrated by their decision to assign a CC 'Zero' licence for the metadata to allow harvesting and re-use, and to incorporate it into the metadata. Open licening of metadata is an important aspect or OER release that has only recently emerged.

 

Challenges around legal aspects often lead to compromises, sometimes over what resources are digitised. Several projects reported selecting materials that were less challenging in order to progress the project. The following approaches were taken by Digitisation for OER projects to address legal and/or licening issues:

• Observing the 1980's used content from people still writing for the Mass Observation Archive as they were easily contactable
• Both Observing the 1980s and Manufacturing Pasts had to track orphan works and adopt a 'best efforts approach'
• Observing the 1980s used letters to writers with clear explanation of what they were asking as some of their writers were not highly digitally literate
• Licencing modern art works proved challenging for the OBL4HE project and led to sections of some collections being avoided for the duration of the project although the conversations were informative for future reference
• Histology and histopathology made it clear to all contributors that they were loaning the microscope slides, that the OU owned the resulting images and these would be made available on a creative commons license.
  

 

Hosting and discoverability

Although deposit in Jorum, the national repository for learning and teaching materials, was mandated by the call a wide range of existing services were also used to host both the 'raw' assets and the 'cooked' OER. Using existing services has several advantages:

• significant impact on long term sustainability as services are likely to be maintained
• appropriate curational and content management skills of existing staff for different kinds of collections
• strong communities of practice already utilising services
• support dissemination of project outcomes and outputs
• likely to be utilising effective seo (search engine optimisation) strategies 

 

The services adopted as hosts by Digitisation for OER projects were wide ranging as appropriate to the content types or subject disciplines covered and and often included services of project partners. Some were institutional systems and services such as repositories, VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) or Content Management Systems. Others were services provided by National bodies, community networks or services on the open web.  Most projects utilised several different hosts which is a proven way to increase accessibility and discoverability, particularly if materials of different levels of granularity are made available through appropriate services. For example, hosting OER in repositories or learning environments and putting raw assets onto social sites such as flickr or youTube.

The website was used to provide context for the learning resources, thereby engaging people who may not be familiar and comfortable with searching academic databases.  The website has a general introduction to the resources, and then a page per theme split into sections: specific topic introduction; learning resources; Explore More (with a link to My Leicestershire History). (Manufacturing pasts)

 

The following list identifies the range of hosts used:

 

this list could be put in appendix if preferred but is of interest I think and not too long - needs double checking and adding to

Services of national and local bodies

• Digital Dance Archives http://www.dance-archives.ac.uk/ (CCC:EED)
• National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD http://www.surrey.ac.uk/library/nrcd/ (CCC:EED)
• Content dm (part of My Leicestershire History site - primary source collection and OER collection) (Manufacturing Pasts)
• British Library Sound Archive http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/bldept/soundarch/index.html  (Observing the 1980s)
• UK Data Archive http://data-archive.ac.uk/ (Observing the 1980s)
• Culture Grid http://www.culturegrid.org.uk/ (Observing the 1980s)
• Mass Observations Archive (Observing the 1980s)
• OCLC Digital Collections Gateway - metadata (Manufacturing Pasts)
• JISC Media Hub - metadata (Manufacturing Pasts) 
• The Wellcome Trust Image library LINK?????? (Histology and histopathology)

Services of community networks

• Humbox http://humbox.ac.uk/ (OpenLIVES, Observing the 1980s)

Web services

• Project website (Zandra Rhodes, Observing the 1980s, Manufacturing Pasts, Architectus)
• Wikipedia articles which reference MP resources (Manufacturing Pasts)
• Youtube (Manufacturing Pasts
• Flickr (Manufacturing Pasts
• vimeo (Zandra Rhodes, Manufacturing Pasts)
• Apple iTunes (UKVM)

 

Institutional services

• OU OpenLearn (Histology and histiopathology and UKVM) Introduction to Histology  Introduction to Microscopy  Introduction to Histopathology
• Institutional VLE (Observing the 1980s, OBL4HE)
• OU OPENScience Laboratory http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/openscience/ (Histology and histopathology)

 

Hosting decisions have a significant impact on discoverability, as does appropriate metadata and effective seo. Making sure that metadata and links are included in a range of online catalogues and other finding services were also techniques used to enhance discoverability.

Our Digital Assets Manager added discoverability code to the online catalogues that is expected to help search engines recognise the images and data as Creative Commons. (OBL4HE)

 

Social networking tools, such as twitter, scoop.it and facebook also provided valuable mechanisms for projects to disseminate resources to targeted groups of interested stakeholders.

 

Embedding OER and digital collections into learning and teaching

A key focus for the Digitisation for OER strand of activities was to attempt to embed their digitised materials into real learning and teaching contexts. As previously discussed when OER are created for specific contexts it can result in less widely appropriate OER. The requirement to embed within learning and teaching did have an impact on the kinds of OER developed and released, and projects benefited from the very clear focus that this provided them. It provided a known audience that could be involved at all stages - from choices around what content to digitise, to the best ways to incorporate this into existing courses, to providing evaluation opportunities throughout the project timescale.

 

This close integration with their target audience resulted in high probabilities of success in developing content that would enhance existing courses, and that would meet existing strategic needs of the educational institutions involved. This did, however also allow for projects to be experimental in their approaches and to engage on conversations around learning design and pedagogic approaches to using primary sources for learning and teaching. Project teams were generally very aware that their specific focus on particular courses could impact on the wider accessibility of content and made efforts to ensure that they would also be relevant to wider contexts, including those outside the higher education sector. One of the key ways to ensure this was through working with a wide range of partners who could bring fresh insights and articulate the needs of wider audiences.

 

New partnerships and approaches

 

Our project greatly benefited from the different skills, perspectives and knowledge that all our partners contributed and which were all essential to achieving our objectives i.e. the subject and teaching expertise of the historians; the collections expertise of the archivist; the technical expertise of the learning technologist and the copyright and resource description and discovery expertise of the library staff. (Manufacturing pasts)

 

Involving partners from a range of sectors brought a richness to project outcomes and encouraged some some excellent collaborative activities. These partners included the agencies and individuals providing the raw formats for digitisation who brought valuable and often unique knowledge about the sources. One example of this is illustrated by the Zandra Rhodes Collection who had access to both the designer herself and her studio's production manager who had worked with her since 1976. This meant that the project had access to personal testimony that significantly enhanced the stories behind the garments and the design materials, bringing them to life for the students. Other partners brought specialised expertise that were essential for effective digitisation and management of the processes. Some partners opened up access to a range of different audiences and provided effective dissemination opportunities through their existing networks.

 

A range of skills were brought together to enable teams to achieve their outcomes and this did bring challenges in anticipating what these were and getting the balance right. Most projects encountered difficulties in managing workflows that relied on different partners delivering their parts of the deliverables to a fixed schedule. The kinds of skills required by projects came from a range of different professional disciplines including research, curriculum design, teaching, archiving, curation, librarianship, learning technology, educational development and include a wide range of digitisation techniques such as photography, transcription, videoing, sound file creation and database management.

At UCL, the project has provoked discussion about the optimum composition of skills required in a project team. In particular, the project showed that it is a tough job to get the perfect balance between those project staff with the requisite technical skill, those who are conversant in the academic subjects and the content of collections, and those who fully understand how to develop high quality learning opportunities through digital resources. It is often possible to get two of the three qualities in one person, but rarely all three and so it is important to have a project team that can cover all quarters. (OBL4HE)

 

One of the most interesting approaches taken by Digitisation for OER projects, which mirrors the UKOER Programme, was the imaginative ways they involved students. Students were offered opportunities to feed into digitisation activities, evaluation activities and also in the creation of OER during learning and teaching activities. For example the Zandra Rhodes Collection project provided opportunities not only for fashion or textile design students, but also for students from other courses such as photography enabling them to gain authentic work related experience. Projects generally valued student involvement and feedback and saw real benefits for them as co-producers of OER. This is discussed further in the next section looking at impact.

 

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What we achieved?

Might be better called What Digitisation for OER achieved but trying to keep it friendly…

 

Sharing research data as open content can be immensely satisfying and give research a new life in different contexts. The researcher who originally collected the OpenLIVES testimonies was moved to tears when she saw her colleague (from a different institution) presenting his students’ reactions to her work, and their own work which builds upon her research. She was moved by the impact her work had had beyond her own students, as well as impressed with the new directions that the students had taken using the testimonies OpenLIVES

 

By nature this section includes more direct project quotes to evidence the impacts and bring their voices in here...

Measuring impact

This strand of activities was not simply about digitising content and the resulting assets or OER, but was also concerned with the processes that support this kind of activity and the challenges that need to be overcome to achieve this effectively.  It has also been about fundamentally changing practices of the various partners to encourage collaborative approaches to digitisation but also around open educational practice, which challenges traditional approaches to learning and teaching. It is difficult to capture these subtle changes that happen over time and which are best supported by longer term studies that include initial base-lining of people's perceptions and practice so that their progression can be measured. However the Digitisation for OER projects have evidenced impact on the institutions involved, and on a wide range of people, including students involved with the projects. They are also measuring use of their materials both through analysing download and viewing data but also through mechanisms built into some content looking to gather feedback on how they are being used and shared.

 

Widening access to unique primary sources and collections

Most projects achieved their original, or slightly revised, objectives and successfully digitised a wide range of primary sources that were made available with open licences to be used globally. This effectively widened access to some very rare and valuable collections that would otherwise have been accessible to only a few people. The processes of digitising these collections and sources have built on the expertise of the various partner institutions and provided some individuals with new skills in digitisation, curation and making digital assets discoverable. For example, the Observing the 1980s project listed a range of new skills that they developed during the process:

blogging, editing audio files, editing and resizing pdfs, using cloud storage and retrieval, creating and editing archive catalogue records, creating records for depositing data in external repositories eg Humbox, and using Moodle to build an OER.  This latter involved learning about E-learning eg structuring teaching materials for an online environment; thinking about issues of accessibility, usability, attention span and search strategies. (Observing the 1980s)

 

Changing practices

In addition to new skills and expertise around digitisation, projects widely reported changes of practice in relation to incorporating these primary sources within learning and teaching and a re-consideration of existing pedagogical approaches.

[The project] has been very important for me professionally because I have learnt many different skills, I have developed new career paths, I feel more confident as a practitioner, I think I can offer better education and better learning and teaching to my students. I feel now that I can make a greater difference in student education.”- Antonio Martinez-Arboleda, LeedsOpenLIVES

 

Projects described these activities as 'bringing a new lease of life' to their teaching and their courses and several noted the value of bringing research and teaching closer together as a result of engaging with primary sources. They offer tangible evidence that using OER has a positive impact on teaching and go some way towards challenging negative assumptions around using content created by others. The OpenLIVES project, in particular offered some powerful stories of changed practice and the potential that OER can bring to the teaching of modern languages.

The re-use of OERs does NOT lead to sameness or lack of originality in teaching. The project has demonstrated how one set of research data can be interpreted in widely different, original and exciting ways by different practitioners working in different settings. This reaffirms the importance of individual teachers in delivering quality in Higher Education teaching and rebuts the notion that using third party materials reduces quality, or results in homogeneity of learning experience. OpenLIVES 

 

For staff, engaging with the OER produced by projects also led to increased engagement with new technologies for teaching and encouraged a culture of experimentation and innovation. The CCC:EED project focused on digital literacies as a way to incorporate both different technological approaches and the new OER and had a significant impact on their existing dance and choreography courses, and on the literacy levels of both staff and students within their partner institutions. Increased skill levels of teaching staff were widely reported by several projects.

CCC:EED has enabled both lecturers and students to see the interrelationship between how digital literacy impacts on both the creative process and learning of theory and the benefits of these connections to new developments in pedagogy, performance and practice. It has also brought up issues of use of appropriate content, authorship, copyright, openness, collaborative working and accessibility. CCC:EED

 

Impact on learners

There is a considerable amount of evidence around the impact of project activities on students, not least the increased access to unique primary sources as digital assets. These new resources enhance the specific courses involved in the projects but also widen access to materials for learners worldwide. The enhancements made to some of the courses opened students to new pedagogic approaches and appeared to have an impact on their levels of understanding, critical engagement and research skills.

Among the achievements students gained in this Choreography module was an awareness of choreographic process and conscious decision-making. This helped to experience choreography as process oriented. The impact this has had has been witnessed in the subsequent choreography modules where intellectual engagement with choreographic process appears richer. Other ways the digital sketchbook process demonstrated impact include: the development of students’ ability to articulate and present process; an opportunity to engage with and operate artistically through a different medium; a way to position oneself in relation to others’ practices; and an increase in confidence and the ability to see the value of approaching their work through new digital mediums. CCC:EED

 

 

Projects investigated a variety of approaches for involving students in the process, often by paying them to contribute towards researching, digitising, cataloguing or locating rights holders, all of which had an impact on their skill levels outwith their subject discipline. Students also fed into project plans and development as potential users, which challenged existing relationships between staff and students and empowered them to contribute ideas and feedback.

 

Students asked us to provide as much context as possible to aid their interpretation i.e. on the provenance of the sources and the sort of historical issues that they raise – in order to assist students in interpreting them for themselves. We addressed this by including a ‘toolkit’ section on the Manufacturing Pasts Website and short, video based introductions to each of the historical themes. (Manufacturing pasts)

 

“I have really enjoyed the OpenLIVES module as it has given us, the students, an opportunity to do our own primary research and genuinely engage with the issues we are studying. Having more academic and creative control over our own education is extremely stimulating and motivating.” (Student OpenLIVES) 

 

One of the most interesting ways of involving students was as co-producers of the OER themselves. Projects reported that this provided motivation and resulted in some very interesting and new resources to share with peers and other learners worldwide. This provided new levels of understanding for students around content to support learning and also significantly enhanced their digital literacies around rights management, metadata, content management and technologies to support open release of content. Several projects felt that these activities supported peer interaction and collaborative working and would ultimately enhance employability.

“It has made me realise how important the materials we use are in terms of motivating our students and also it has allowed me to realise that our students can be good producers of OERs…producers of high quality OERs and partners in research, which is something I had not explored before. The quality of what they produce is really, really good…” – Miguel Arrebola, Portsmouth OpenLIVES

 

 

Institutional culture and embedding

In addition to transforming practice of individuals involved in project teams the Digitisation for OER activities also had lasting impact on the different institutions involved, including partners from outside the higher education sector. Initially, linking project visions and goals to institutionally strategic themes (such as employability or widening participation) was recognised as a useful way to get engagement and buy-in from key staff (academics, senior managers and support teams) as well as tying in project activities with ongoing developments in institutional systems (for example utilising institutional repositories or learning environments to store OER).

 

A significant impact of project activities emerged from the new partnerships within institutions, and the resulting conversations across faculties and departments. This was also echoed for those partnerships across institutional boundaries, as these new collaborations provided strong foundations for future work, as well as robust workflow patterns and management practices that could be taken forward.

Collaboration through the creation of open content is rich and satisfying and can produce excellent work and curriculum innovation. The freedom that open practice offers to researchers and teachers working across different institutions to share ideas, practice and experience in their discipline area has been extremely exciting and motivating for the project team. Colleagues working in different institutions do not often have such opportunities to work closely together, and the competitive nature of Higher Education makes such a situation even more unlikely, but open content is proving to be an effective antidote to traditional closed ways of working. OpenLIVES

 

Wider impact

It is helpful to list some of the impacts for the wider community that may not be immediately obvious across such complex activities with many stands:

• increased access to many rare collections, including some designated by HEFCE as 'strategically important and vulnerable subjects' (modern languages)
• raw assets of relevance to a wide range of related disciplines making research data and collections usable across a wider number of institutions and countries
• expanded understanding of both digitisation and OER across several partners that will impact on future work (this is particularly true for bodies who were familiar with digitisation but not OER and open licencing
• preserving non digital practices - highlighting the value of traditional craft processes and making these more widely appreciated
  

   

• use of assets and OER outside the HE sector - local community groups and schools accessing content
• international interest in the digital collections
• interest from other HE institutions in the UK - all
• improvements in efficiency for several agencies through some of the technical developments (eg. VLE Adlib plug-in from OBL4HE)

 

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Supporting factors

 

Another critical factor for our project has been the willingness of participants to collaborate and share their ideas and work. Without this open attitude, the project would not have achieved so much. For the project team, OpenLIVES has been a “very important and deep experience” (Irina Nelson) which has encouraged all of us to re-evaluate how we work. The enthusiasm for this new, open way of teaching and sharing is undiminished, and we will seek to find ways to spread our experiences and to expand on them in new projects and with new audiences. OpenLIVES

 

In identifying the different motivations, models and approaches taken by projects we have touched upon the kinds of barriers they were attempting to overcome and the critical factors that enable them to do so. Consideration of the enablers that support digitisation of primary sources and ways to incorporate these into OER within real learning and teaching contexts provides some insight into the kinds of factors that may be applied to other educational institutions wanting to engage with either OER or OEP.

 

These are in note form – probably will be added to but could be written as paras if preferred or left as short sharp bullets – like tips

 

Factor 1. Stimulating and supporting change in practice

Because of the emphasis on digital literacy and what methods, computer programmes or delivery would be best suited for the inculcation of such literacy, the project led Faculty to begin to revise module content and assessments to reflect this shift in pedagogical awareness. Therefore, the integration of e-learning and digital literacy skills required a review of the modules we have, how we teach them, how we assess and how we want e-learning to facilitate teaching and learning. As a result, new developments in pedagogy have emerged that will inform the redesign of the entire BA (Hons) Dance and Culture programme. CCC:EED

   

Through Engagement/awareness raising - examples included

• use different new formats to gain people's attention/interest - prezi- MP, CCC,
• gain commitment from outset - not just rely on goodwill - not everyone will buy-in (OBL)
• link project activities with wider agendas - eg use of technology in collections based teaching for HE (OBL)
• one to one interviews with key academic staff (ZR)
• focus groups with other institutions in subject area (ZR)

 

By challenging and changing perceptions

• Staff commitment

• new pedagogic practice (OL,
• new technologies (MP, CCC
• sharing of practices, knowledge and experience with staff (CCC)

 

By changing pedagogic approaches and practice

• student engagement as producers co-creators (OBL, ZR, OL

• student opportunities for authentic work practices (ZR

• digital literacies approach (CCC)

 

Factor 2. Encouraging and supporting institutional change

Through appropriate technical infrastructure for OER release

• ensuring that institutional technologies can integrate open content (either raw assets or OER)
• challenging closed institutional systems
• replacing out of date hardware and software
• ensuring equitable access to appropriate software needed to utilise OER (possibly mobile devices for remote students or student learning in non conventional spaces)
• reconsider existing policies around technologies

Through changes to institutional processes

• changing policy and processes - integrate lessons into strategic planning
• acknowledge that processes move slowly and to different agendas (OBS)
• obtain solid institutional commitment (OBL)
• creation of new posts (OBL - teaching fellow in Object based learning)
• embedding project outputs into institutional infrastructure (OBL) - also impacts on efficiency and into corporate plans

Through partnership/collaborative approaches

• encourage new partnerships that cross traditional boundaries within institutions
• encourage and build new partnerships outside the institutions and across sectors
• balancing skillsets and expertise from a range of partners to ensure digitisation is efficient and effective
• build strong communication mechanisms, particularly to facilitate conversations with remote participants
• understand complexities around creating formal partnership agreements and be prepared to work in less formal ways sometimes to achieve common goals
• identify common goals and visions
• be prepared for challenges with multi-partnership approaches and forge strong management  mechanisms to facilitate conflict resolutions and workflow control

 

Factor 3. Adopting sustainable approaches 

By developing sustainable digital assets and OER

• linking to existing services, activities and other projects - eg UKVM linked to OU OpenScience Laboratory, OpenLearn and other OU projects. (Hist)
• ensuring visibility and discoverability (MP)
• integrating into new institutional software - vle (CCC)
• utilise existing services for hosting (all)
• embedding OER into learning and teaching (all)
• making OER that can be re-used outside the specific context (OBL)
• commercial engagement opportunities, eg slides sets for publishers or other academic institutions, teaching grants and further grant funding (Hist)
• changing institutional policy (OL) changed policy for electronic submission (CCC)

 

By supporting new open educational practices

• offer exemplars to other staff and models for creating OER, integrating research and teaching (OL) exemplars of mobile learning and open learning (MP)
  
• maintain systems and workflows for digitisation  (MP)
• training and support documentation created during projects can be cascaded and ofefred in an ongoing way for staff of different partner institutions (CCC)
  

 

By nurturing new and existing partnerships

• explore opportunities for future collaboration (MP)
• Continue cross-fertilisation of ideas and practice through collaborative partnerships and close working relationships (OBL)
  

 

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Appendix 1

Possibly tables of this and subject areas covered. when complete take form main synthesis  page

Formats/types

• rock specimens on virtual slides (Hist)
• maps (MP)
• building plans (MP)
• company records (MP)
• garment designs and garments (ZR
• interviews (OL, MP, OBS)
• oral history (OL, OBL
• zoological specimens (OBL
• ancient artefacts (OBL
• diaries (OBS
• photographs )OL, ZR, CCC
• images/artwork (OL, ZR, OBL, CCC
• audio files (OL
• text documents (OL
• teachers notes (OL
• student activiites/reports (OL
• videos )OL
• scanned materials (OBL
• ephemera (booklets, pamphlets, newsletters) (OBS)

as well as the experience gained by student interns within a world renowned fashion house; and the project has also been able to film the studio’s creative practices and oral testimony.(Zandra Rhodes Collection)

 

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These quotes relate to the tech aspects mentioned in the list above - retained here in case we want to say which projects experienced these aspcets

 

Since most OER development tends to emerge from module content, this project differed in that the use of archival images (particularly in Ballet and Labanotation) specifically affected the material being developed for classroom use, discussion and eventual OER development. Tasks were designed to have students look at the digitised content both in the packages created and via the DDA website. Not only did this enhance the pedagogical experience, but the students then discover the relevance of their studies to an archived legacy of dance forms and analysis. Additionally, when others use the OER via JORUM, they will learn about the availability of our digitised content, which can then enhance further development of dance OERs, student research projects, and tutor module development.   CCC:EED

 

 

We used a range of platforms and tools to deliver the OERs and the raw object record material. For the OERs, we used eXe for building both the UCL Art Museum and the Grant Museum zoology resources, Exiftool for image metadata, and IrfanView for image watermarking. Prezi was used for the two History of Electricity resource and Microsoft Publisher for the Francis Galton resource. All OERs will be published on JORUM and featured on our departmental websites. For the raw material of our project outputs we used Adlib for object metadata, Adlib OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) module for Culture Grid metadata harvesting. (OBL4HE)

Images of the relevant drawings, watercolours, and finished pieces have been combined within the videos with Zandra Rhodes, and are further illuminated by accompanying text and hyperlinks to relevant sources.  This will be made available on a central OER web page, utilising simple Blogger software, as well as on Vimeo for wider exposure and discovery. (Zandra Rhodes Collection)

Staff pointed out the limitations of viewing garments online and that it is vital to provide multiple image views and for textiles students to be able to home in and see the details of the fabrics.  This validated the project’s existing approach to the photography, with the garments captured from four different views, and the project’s use of ‘Zoomifier’ for the 500 couture pieces on the VADS test site.  The functionality, navigation, and appearance of the VADS site was enhanced further in response to student testing and feedback, for example, the ‘zoom’ feature was moved to make it more prominent and simple radio buttons were added to make the search options clearer. (Zandra Rhodes Collection)

 

At UCL, however, there were two main issues concerning digitisation: 1. the capacity of in-house services to meet the project’s needs and 2. the correlation between creating a lower quality and a higher number of images and vice versa. For example, at UCL we usually use Media Services for digitisation - they produce really high quality photography. However, the Media Services team is stretched quite thin and our department has found that timescales can slip when we work with them on different projects  (OBL4HE)

 

led to compromise - quality vs quantity issue
The sacrifice has been the lack of consistency amongst our object photographs, but this is, perhaps, an acceptable loss when one considers the gains in terms of the project and the learning opportunities it has generated. (OBL4HE)

 

computer equipment with old operating systems hindered the speed of digitisation, particularly as we scanned to a higher bit depth for enhanced quality, and there were concerns about a much reduced total of digital content being delivered.  However, with the purchase of new PCs and a MAC for the NRCD as part of the University Library’s building refurbishment project, and by utilizing a placement student to assist with scanning, the final number of items digitised is over 3,000 so not far short of the original 3,500 target. CCC:EED

Ensuring that all digitisation requirements are established at the beginning.  The Record Office provided some excellent scans which were too big to OCR.  We therefore had to reduce the DPI from 600 to 300 to accommodate the OCR process. (Manufacturing pasts)

It became apparent that many MOP writers had used their names or identified other people in their writings in a way which would compromise the anonymity of their writings.  This meant an additional clean-up process was necessary with someone working through every single page of correspondence to blank out revealing material.  This was additional work not foreseen, but deemed essential in maintaining the integrity of MOP’s position on anonymity.  As a result of this exercise we ended up with various versions of the digitised material: pdfs for widest dissemination, jpegs as back up and the original tiff scans for MOP to hold for any future use.  We would have benefited from a data management plan at this stage to ensure that the data was stored and access managed in a planned way.  (Observing the 1980s)

Because we originally expected to make the materials available via the University Repository where each record would provide relevant metadata we did not embed information at the digitisation stage.  In retrospect it probably would have been useful to do so.  Ultimately, we made our raw data available via web pages, cloud storage, and the Special Collections catalogue which will be fully discoverable later this year, but the issue of the institutional repository highlighted the difficulties of working within institutions where processes move slowly and to different agendas.  (Observing the 1980s)

Alongside the recordings, there were ethnographic notes made by the original researchers, which described the context under which the interview was made; a selection of images and drawings provided by interviewees; transcripts in Spanish or English; synopses in English, and videoed interviews with the original researcher. All of these files were digitised or re-created digitially (i.e. re-typed in MS Word), had license information embedded, and were then published along with the recordings. Synopses or videos which were created for the project were made using templates with embedded Creative Commons licence information. OpenLIVES

 

Materials were published in collections under the name of each interviewee, so that each collection contained where possible: a recording, a transcript, a synopsis, ethnographic notes, images, a video related to the interview. A new feature was installed on the HumBox to allow the creation of groups so that all materials could be published coherently under an ‘OpenLIVES’ group (http://humbox.ac.uk/group/2) banner. Some of the materials were also re-packaged into iTunesU channels at the close of the project: ‘Incredible People, Incredible Stories’ (http://itun.es/i6Jy39M) and Research Skills for Oral History (http://itun.es/i6JQ7vq). OpenLIVES

 

Keep it simple technically i.e. use of PDF, ePub, Powerpoint and making the materials available on popular sites such as YouTube has worked well for us as many people are used to working with these types of materials and sites. (Manufacturing pasts)

Produce some materials and learning resources which are different from the norm.  Using Prezi and maps and ensuring that materials work well on a variety of mobile devices helped us get stakeholders attention, are remembered and generate discussion.  (Manufacturing pasts)

We selected twenty-three Mass Observation correspondents who gave permission for their writings to be digitised and made available online under a BY-NC-SA Creative Commons licence.  This amounted to over 4,000 pages of mostly handwritten text to be digitised.  The digitised files in PDF format were anonymised and licensing information added before being linked to catalogue entries in the University of Sussex Special Collection catalogue and being uploaded to Google Drive and the project website for sharing as well as to Humbox. (Observing the 1980s)

We also selected twenty-six interviews from the British Library Sound Archive, constituting over a hundred hours of audio material.  Some of the interviews had been recorded digitally and stored on mini-disks so required downloading, but the rest were on cassettes and needed to be digitised from scratch.  Extracts from the interviews for use in the teaching module were identified and edited from the larger interviews, while the whole interviews were made available to listen to and download from the British Library Sound Archive website. (Observing the 1980s)

We also identified thirty-eight items of ephemera from the University of Sussex Library official publications collection.  These items were of varying formats from broadsheet newspaper to one third A4 folded leaflet and meant digitising over one thousand pages of different sizes.  These were also downloaded and linked to the University of Sussex Special Collections catalogue as well as being made available via Google Drive and the project website. (Observing the 1980s)

The Open University received a grant for £1m from the Wolfson Trust for the development of an OpenScience Laboratory online. For the future sustainability, development and publicity of this project, it was decided to house the JISC virtual microscope and the histology/histopathology slide collection within the OpenScience laboratory. (Histology and histopathology)

In order to make the content more accessible and to fit with other units in the OpenScience laboratory, it was decided to reprogram the virtual microscope in HTML-5, retaining all of the content. This makes the microscope also accessible on a wider range of devices, including I-pads and tablets. (Histology and histopathology)

The final image set is 200Gigabytes. This increased size has been due to the new software, which allows larger images to be assembled, although the image resolution is slightly lower than originally planned, due to the use of a faster camera.
The Wellcome Trust Image library is the primary repository. Jorum could not handle the file sizes. (Histology and histopathology)

The more complex the program, the less likely is the material to be reversioned as part of the creative commons, since it requires knowledge of the program language and structure used. Individual elements such as videos, images and sound-tracks are more easily re-used by others. (Histology and histopathology)

platform problems with Surrey’s preferred Learning Object Creator (WimbaCreate) which could not produce materials in the way we wished, was time consuming for staff to master, could not be installed on MACS and was configured for sharing in SCORM format which we then discovered JORUM is not.  This created issues uploading to JORUM and we also encountered other small issues with JORUM which each time required a complete re-upload of content. We also experienced some software difficulties; for instance, need to change screen capture software from Jing to Screenr because it allowed easy production of MP4 files.  In addition, Final Pro Cut was recommended for film editing but accessibility and training on it prove to be challenging. We also had the consideration of quantity vs quality for digitisation of archive items.  All of these things impacted on project timescales and are things for others to consider when embarking on an e-learning project.  CCC:EED

 

Technical engagement within the Faculty was quite low at the beginning of the project. Although the University had a VLE, it was only used as a repository for copies of book chapters and articles students needed to access prior to their lectures. Not all lecturers were comfortable with technology and its relevance to dance studies was not clear to the students. It became imperative to begin the e-learning activities by slowly acclimatising both staff and students with technology through individual meetings with staff and our e-learning tutor, or e-learning specific module tutorials for the students. CCC:EED

 

Once the 500 garments had been photographed, the images and metadata were assembled by the VADS team into a searchable and browsable online collection on the VADS test website, ready for user testing and feedback. (Zandra Rhodes Collection)

 

Online users will be able to leaf through the collections in the bibles year-by-year, using ‘Turning the Pages’ software, just as the drawings appear in the original volumes in the studio.  The corresponding sketches for the photographed garments have also been added to the OER videos and VADS database to put them in context with the finished couture piece.  (Zandra Rhodes Collection)

 

The UCA Learning Technologist, Tony Reeves, suggested creating a series of video tutorials to demonstrate the specialist Zandra Rhodes Studio production processes.  Technical instructional videos have already been used to support learning and teaching at UCA, for example, video tutorials have been created by the Fine Art and Textiles courses at Farnham and by UCA’s partner institution, the Royal School of Needlework.  These videos enable students to be able to see the details, pause and rewind, and watch the demonstration as many times as required, and may be particularly useful for students whose first language isn’t English, or for those with certain learning disabilities. (Zandra Rhodes Collection)

 

We used a range of platforms and tools to deliver the OERs and the raw object record material. For the OERs, we used eXe for building both the UCL Art Museum and the Grant Museum zoology resources, Exiftool for image metadata, and IrfanView for image watermarking. Prezi was used for the two History of Electricity resource and Microsoft Publisher for the Francis Galton resource. All OERs will be published on JORUM and featured on our departmental websites. For the raw material of our project outputs we used Adlib for object metadata, Adlib OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) module for Culture Grid metadata harvesting. (OBL4HE)

Images of the relevant drawings, watercolours, and finished pieces have been combined within the videos with Zandra Rhodes, and are further illuminated by accompanying text and hyperlinks to relevant sources.  This will be made available on a central OER web page, utilising simple Blogger software, as well as on Vimeo for wider exposure and discovery. (Zandra Rhodes Collection)

 

Staff pointed out the limitations of viewing garments online and that it is vital to provide multiple image views and for textiles students to be able to home in and see the details of the fabrics.  This validated the project’s existing approach to the photography, with the garments captured from four different views, and the project’s use of ‘Zoomifier’ for the 500 couture pieces on the VADS test site.  The functionality, navigation, and appearance of the VADS site was enhanced further in response to student testing and feedback, for example, the ‘zoom’ feature was moved to make it more prominent and simple radio buttons were added to make the search options clearer. (Zandra Rhodes Collection)

 

Alongside the recordings, there were ethnographic notes made by the original researchers, which described the context under which the interview was made; a selection of images and drawings provided by interviewees; transcripts in Spanish or English; synopses in English, and videoed interviews with the original researcher. All of these files were digitised or re-created digitially (i.e. re-typed in MS Word), had license information embedded, and were then published along with the recordings. Synopses or videos which were created for the project were made using templates with embedded Creative Commons licence information. OpenLIVES

 

Materials were published in collections under the name of each interviewee, so that each collection contained where possible: a recording, a transcript, a synopsis, ethnographic notes, images, a video related to the interview. A new feature was installed on the HumBox to allow the creation of groups so that all materials could be published coherently under an ‘OpenLIVES’ group (http://humbox.ac.uk/group/2) banner. Some of the materials were also re-packaged into iTunesU channels at the close of the project: ‘Incredible People, Incredible Stories’ (http://itun.es/i6Jy39M) and Research Skills for Oral History (http://itun.es/i6JQ7vq). OpenLIVES