OER Virtual Rocky Shore

Having now found the right interface to upload resources to – I’ve now successfully uploaded both the Virtual Rocky Shore website:http://open.jorum.ac.uk:80/xmlui/handle/123456789/2729And a selection of more discrete learning objects for teaching ecology, evolution, statistics, data presentation, physiology and scientific writing:http://open.jorum.ac.uk:80/xmlui/handle/123456789/2730to the Jorum open site.

I now have institutional authorization for the release of the resources under the Creative Commons license. As such, I have now uploaded the VRS as well as an additional selection learning objects (including other ecological and evolution based simulations) to Jorum open. The many incarnations of Jorum Open have confused me, and I have uploaded to the Beta version, where resources are only available up to a week after uploading – I’m still waiting to see if they appear.Prior to this upload, I’ve made the changes based on the critical friend report. Some of the modifications suggested will be very time consuming (see previous blog entry) and those to the simulation will eventually be implemented, unless others take on this role as encouraged by the use of the GNU license. As such, I’m not in a rush to do this, as I would think a more successful outcome for open educational resources would be for someone else to make these changes – indicating the success of Creative Commons and GNU ‘open’ licensing. Most of the minor changes to the website, however, have been addressed.Finally, the indexing code sent around by Terry, to try to boost the profile of the resources from internet searches, doesn’t yet seem to have had an effect. I modified the index page the day the link was sent around (over a week ago now) and a search for ‘Virtual Rocky Shore’ still brings the actual site up as seventh (although the Centre for Active Learning at the University of Gloucestershire link – which directly links to the resource, and a link to this blog do occur above the actual site).

Below is the report from Dr Roger Santer, University of Limerick. Following the report are some reflections and indications of modification that will be made to the website:The VRS website presents some very sensible guidance on experimental design, analysis and presentation through a series of linked and indexed web pages. It also provides a clever simulation tool, with which students can experiment with the ideas they have learnt before actually conducting a real-world experiment.The resource is written in a very accessible way, using straightforward examples and some nice visual aids. I think that it would be entirely suitable for an undergraduate student undertaking their final year project (or indeed a postgraduate student starting out)… and in fact I just recommended it to my own students for this purpose. I also think that much of the advice could also apply to the preparation of other assignments during undergraduate study.My major comment on the webpage itself would be that the information does take a considerable amount of time to work through. I therefore imagine that the major capacity in which it will be used is as a reference work, and the navigation panel on the left seems very suitable for that purpose.I also noted that, if a student were to follow the course from start to finish, the tomato plant example (which later features heavily) could be skipped over. I wondered if it might be worth making that example ‘mandatory’? Perhaps it’s beyond the scope of the project, but some more detailed coverage of ‘hypotheses’ might perhaps be beneficial before the simulation is introduced.The VRS simulation itself is very clever and worked with no issues on my machine (currently running Windows 7). I do have several comments on how that simulation might be improved in later iterations, however.-      A pamphlet of suggested experiments or research questions (with solutions) would be very handy in getting a student up and running. It’s easy to come up with an experiment to test what happens to biofilm when grazers are excluded (which is sufficient for the purposes of learning experimental design), but I actually found it fairly challenging to come up with more advanced questions. A student with limited time might appreciate some direction in that area.-      Is it worth adding a capacity to vary some range of conditions? Temperatures, or tide heights, for example? In that way a student might be able to undertake a mini-project in the area?-      The introductory material gives a good account of random sampling. It would be great if the VRS biofilm view had a co-ordinate system, or some measurement tools, to enable a student to put these into practice. (I know the view represents a shore of known size, so this is possible; I think it would be nice to have the capacity built in, if possible.)-      The lack of an ‘undo’ can be a bit of a pain!-      It would be nice if the ‘tools’ window scrolled so you could see the more recent activities at any point in time.-      It would be fantastic if the measurements could export easily to excel or a text file, especially since the goal is for a student to run some analysis on these (and the guidance to do that focuses on excel).These comments shouldn’t detract from the simulation as it stands, which is very nice and entirely suited to the task of learning experimental design. I think that with time and development in the areas above, the project may ultimately be capable of much more, which is an exciting prospect!Some more specific (minor) comments below:- In the quiz on biological experiments, I think numbers 1 and 4 require some clarification in order for what’s being done experimentally to be understood.- Random sampling text concentrates on greenhouse example, but you didn’t have to click through that as you progress through pages- High shore – define ‘radula’?- Experiments on virtual rocky shore – ‘your’ vs ‘you’re’- Following page – repetition- Tools – typo on screen shot- Sample and population means – I didn’t understand the statement “For statistics that compare means – if you measure the entire population and compare the population means, there are no more statistics to do”- The ‘advanced’ confidence interval link goes to wikipedia – could an alternative be found? Firstly, we can’t say much about how accurate this will be long-term; and secondly, I spend a lot of time telling students not to trust wikipedia (and i’m sure i’m not alone!).- Graphs of means – didn’t appear correctly on older IE, they do in the current version although labelling is small.- For these and some other graphs, I think it may be worth clearly stating that the data are not real (unless they are). Otherwise I can imagine these making their way into undergraduate literature reviews and so on!- Peer review – I think it’s worth addressing the idea of revisions in manuscript review. Otherwise this pass/fail idea might seem a bit bleak for potential scientists of the future!- The structure of written work… I think it slightly odd (although, regrettably, true) to suggest scientists don’t want to spend too long reading anything! …maybe this could be re-phrased.- Egg timer plots of paper structure: reflex vs innate (I don’t think there’s necessarily a difference…)I will address many of this issues in the coming week, before the resource is uploaded to Jorum. However, the review also raises some interesting points and potential challenges for open educational resources.  Specifically the following points relating to the simulation itself:-      Is it worth adding a capacity to vary some range of conditions? Temperatures, or tide heights, for example? In that way a student might be able to undertake a mini-project in the area?-      The introductory material gives a good account of random sampling. It would be great if the VRS biofilm view had a co-ordinate system, or some measurement tools, to enable a student to put these into practice. (I know the view represents a shore of known size, so this is possible; I think it would be nice to have the capacity built in, if possible.)-      The lack of an ‘undo’ can be a bit of a pain!-      It would be nice if the ‘tools’ window scrolled so you could see the more recent activities at any point in time.-      It would be fantastic if the measurements could export easily to excel or a text file, especially since the goal is for a student to run some analysis on these (and the guidance to do that focuses on excel).All of the above points are valid, however, they do require complex computer programming skills (in actual fact, evidence suggests that temperature does not effect aggregation behaviour – and as such could be simply added to the simulation as a text box or sliding scale that doesn’t alter the snails’ behaviour in any way and result in experiments that do not produce significant differences – as I conducted on real shores for my PhD – this would be an interesting addition, which I may well make over the coming summer). The reminder of points, however, require a relatively high level of Java programing knowledge.  I will consider these points and update them over time, however, these issues also present a unique chance to prove the effectiveness of these resources as OERs. The source code is available in the download bundle,  and the licensing of the simulation under the GNU license means that others, perhaps more skilled in Java programming than I am, can begin to incorporate these ideas in improved version of the VRS. If others take up the challenge of improving these resources, then there is a clear benefit to the educational community as a whole, and for amateur developers to make their resources available under such licenses.

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]“