CETIS 2006 shared educational content examples

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Day One
On the first day of our two day session we explored, in quite a loose discussion, questions around the types of educational content that were being created and issues raised by sharing it. The starting point for much of this discussion was a group of examples showing how "real life" lectures could be captured and the resulting recording shared. We're all familiar with the practice of putting PowerPoint slides and Word .doc handouts on the web, and it was acknowledged that much of the material put onto VLEs or shared through OpenCourseWare and similar initiatives is of this kind. However relatively easy to go further than this by recording the lecture. We've been doing this in a simple way for some CETIS meetings since last year's conference by making audio recordings of presentations available for download as well as the slides (and more recently we have been exploring ways of combining the two). Examples of audio and video recordings of lectures are available from Berkeley. These (and other) resources can be discovered through Google, perhaps with a custom search engine from Google Coop, or shared through social network sites such as YouTube, SlideShare, http://www.flickr.com Flickr], Del.icio.us and the like.

Some of the aspects discussed were:--

Value issues. It was acknowledged from the start that the value of these resources is often in how they are used: it's not slides and handouts that are important but what teachers and students use them for. Some lecture recordings may only be of value to the students who went (or maybe didn't go) to the original lecture. This has clear implications for sharing and preservation of these resources.

Production quality issues. There was a feeling that even low quality recordings might be more useful than no recording, however it's questionable whether the person being recorded would be happy with sharing something that appeared amateurish. So, there are issues about staff development for producing these recordings, level of commitment to providing equipment and training in how to use it. (Interestingly, it was also mentioned that these recordings provide a feedback mechanism to the person being recorded, hopefully enabling them to reflect on what they do and how they might do it better).

Ownership. It might be that even where the lecturer doesn't make the commitment to being recorded their students do. This may be with or without their knowledge, but let's assume that it is with it. Who owns the recording? Does the student get paid? We came back to this theme on the next day in the context of student created content on wikis and blogs.

Open classrooms and censorship. We were asked to think about what would happen if someone objected to the content of a lecture (perhaps on a controversial subject, or because they felt the lecturer was poor) and used the recording to publicize their objection.

Misappropriation. As a related theme, we talked a little about hostile tagging in social networking sites. No one would want their lecture to appear on YouTube or Del.icio.us as the worst ever. Or conversely, an institution which uses YouTube to distribute prospectus-type material tagged with the University name might not be too happy about students using the same tags for videos of fellow students asleep in classes.

A light touch? There are some real policy and procedure issues here: how do you deal with them while keeping the "social" and "easy" parts of the rationale behind this approach.

Context. For much of this to be discovered it needs to be in a context that Google can search, a context that will also show others what it is useful for ... could the VLE have a role here (if it were opened for public access).

Boundaries. We spoke about opening up access to institutional resources, and also about students using their own online social networking spaces for resource management and learning, but what will either party think about this blurring of the boundary between public and private, work and play?

Issues Raised

 * Staff development: required for content creation, but also role of content creation in staff development (provides feedback loop, supplies motive)
 * Do we need explars of good practice?
 * What do organizations/institutions support?
 * Boundaries of access for content ('shop' your lectuerer Vs incetive for improvement)
 * Student created content: ownership? payment? attitude?
 * Linking together different resource discovery/storage services