OER Virtual Rocky Shore

This has proved difficult to address. Essentially most of the work on the website is readable by text readers if required. The problem relates to figures. Figures on the website are either simple photographs, essentially placed for cosmetic value, or are more complex descriptions of experimental design or graphs of results. the former are largely unnecessary to link with the DDA, the latter are the case where the information is much to complex to be put into words.Unfortunately this makes the resource unsuitable for visually impaired users, however, the simulation component of this work is also not practically modifiable for use in this way.  In terms of complying with the DDA, this has been done as much as possible.

The following pubications have been accepted for this project:Stafford R., Goodenough A.E., Davies M.S. in press. Assessing the effectiveness of a computer simulation for teaching ecological experimental design. Bioscience Education.

Stafford R., Catlin-Groves C.L. in press. Open source e-learning in higher education. Problems, solutions and long-term sustainability of the approach. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Society. London, 28th - 30th June. 

The question is interesting, since it involves the production of OER resources, rather than the release of existing OER resources, as done in this project. In these terms, I have been lucky with my project, since it was developed with the intention of being open source from the start.

Technologically there were two key issues that made this easy for me. Firstly, I am a Mac user, and I’m aware of the compatibility issues between operating systems. This was something I was keen to avoid in any of the resources I developed - hence components were made in Java or as standard HTML. Secondly I have a fundamental dislike of most virtual learning environments. In general I think most virtual learning environments are unnecessary and it is far easier to confidently use the commercial standard packages such as Dreamweaver for producing online resources. This removes any potential conflicts for end users of resources (although some aspects of Dreamweaver don’t appear fully compatible with Microsoft IE, they work fine with Firefox, Safari, Opera etc).

So, from a technological perspective, my advice for producing OER resources would be to use industry standard software rather than university standards when initially designing resources. The issues of security and password protection are not really relevant to OER resources anyway.

In terms of securing institutional release of OER resources, there appears to be two ways forward. Firstly, given most IPR policies, if the work does not involve current teaching resources, then copyright is owned by the individual, and as such poses no problem. Secondly, if the work will involve teaching resources for the institution, then it makes sense to ensure an open policy is in place before the work is initiated (the question states production of resources, obviously many people can’t retrospectively do this in the current project). This was the case with my project – initially it was CETL funded, and part of the funding bid was related to open release of digital resources and uploads to JORUM. 

I’ve just come across ClusterMaps        http://www.clustrmaps.com/           which provides free HTML code for embedding into websites. Basically, it records the number and location of visitors to the site. No idea how well it would work on other resources, but for websites, this could be an ideal way of monitoring use.

Changed as from five minutes ago. Hopefully this will show up soon

I’ve now moved the website to the probably final place at     http://web.mac.com/richardstafford1/vrs      there are a few changes to the previous test site - although it’s worth mentioning that there may still be some mistakes in here, also I’m not sure of some of the image quality when viewed with Internet Explorer (it is all fine with Firefox and Safari - running on a mac with a very large screen…). The main changes are as follows: 1) the index page should contain metadata including ‘bioscioer’ as a key word (only added on the 21st December, so might be worth leaving to after Christmas to check on this). Secondly, some additional digital resources have been added, and I’ve broken down the website into starting places for smaller learning objects (mostly between 3 and 9 hours of teaching/contact time each - although some (especially the statistics resources) may be longer than this - with some additional (non-digital based) material, we run most of the basic stats as a 15 credit module and the intermediate stats as a 15 credit module.  The learning objects page can be found here        http://web.mac.com/richardstafford1/vrs/LearningObjects.html             at the moment, the different objects in the VRS site (numbers 1-6) are not physically split up, but this may be done to upload to Jorum.

I’ve not managed to track down a definitive answer for this yet, but I have found an official position on copyright:University owned copyright relates to:Course materials produced in the course of employment for the purposes of the curriculum of a course run by the University of Gloucestershire and produced, used or disseminated by the University of Gloucestershire. Outcomes from research specifically funded and supported by the University of Gloucestershire. Personal copyright: ’Scholarly work’ produced by staff in furtherance of their professional career; ’scholarly work’ includes items such as books, contributions to books, articles and conference papers, works of an artistic nature, and shall be construed in the light of the common understanding of the phrase in higher education. Material produced by staff for personal use and reference, including as an aid to teaching. Naturally, the VRS resources are a combination of both. However, copyright issues should not prevent release of resources - for example, the creative commons license can have more than one copyright holder:”‘The Licensor’ [one or more legally recognised persons or entities offering the Work under the terms and conditions of this Licence]” 

I’ve recently been comparing the Creative Commons licenses with the GNU license, used for open source software such as Linux, Open Office etc. The issue of liability is not present in the creative commons license - potentially this means that if OER software damaged an end users computer in any way, then the provider of the software could be liable for damage. The GNU license found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html specifically addresses this issue in section 16:

16. Limitation of Liability.

IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.It seems that creative commons licenses are fine for simple webpages, moodle sites etc. But the above issue is certainly worth considering for any executable computer code. The basics of GNU licesnes are the same as that of creative commons - an ability to use, distribute and modify work is implicit.

Firstly, apologies for not keeping the blog up to date. Hopefully this update will explain what is going on with the project. Mainly, things are progressing well with this project. The resources are largely packaged together now - as a single website - and seem to be useable directly from the website, or if downloaded from Jorum (i.e. the technical problems are pretty much solved, at least in the trial run). There are still some bits and pieces to do, such as ensuring all images have descriptive tags etc, but this is all well in hand. While the final site is not yet finished, the full content (subject to checking, and the inclusion of some further resources not associated directly with the virtual rocky shore) is now at this link:??http://web.mac.com/richardstafford1/TEST??I’ll move the site over to the published home page (as described earlier) once it’s been checked through, updated and problems ironed out. Please note, this site may not yet be fully accurate, or display entirely correctly on all browsers or machines (see also the question of liability below - if you don’t trust this site, then please don’t use it). This is solely a test site, but if you do look at it and find any problems, feel free to let me know at rstafford - at - glos.ac.ukI’m still looking into the legal issues about release of OER products. The key concern that has arisen at the present stage is liability. It’s unlikely that a website or even a java executable file can cause major problems, but liability is something that I’ll be considering in terms of the cover given in creative commons licenses - as far as I’m aware the GNU licenses (for open source software) specifically imply no liability on behalf of the supplier of the software (or for anyone involved in storing or distributing the product). I’ll update with what I find regarding creative commons licenses later in the week. 

The website front page for the VRS is now up (although the sever and address may change shortly). It can be seen at:http://web.mac.com/richardstafford1/vrs/More to come shortly…