Developing digital literacy with discipline-based interactive open educational resources with students as co-producers

Tuesday 9:00-10:30 (1), Blaydon/Gibbs

Type: Lightning talk

Theme: Students as users and co-creators

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/digital-literacies #oer14 #abs56

Authors

Terence McAndrew, Jisc TechDIS, Higher Education Academy

Abstract

The production of ‘e-learning’ is often restricted; licences for many of the popular development tools are expensive and need significant training and technical skills in addition to some experience of pedagogical design. This usually leads to a combination of an academic subject specialist working with a learning technologist to create resources which are presented to a limited number of local students. If the outputs are sufficiently generic they can be shared further across the discipline but the knowledge of this practice is limited; Creative Commons licencing and the use of learning repositories is being adopted inconsistently with concerns over the variable quality of resources (Falconer et. al., 2013). Students are often limited in presentation opportunities to PowerPoint with enhancements due to various constraints.
The Digital Literacy in the Disciplines project has sought to develop digital literacies in staff and students by tasking staff to teach students how to author interactive content for their discipline and share it beyond the institution. Using the free and open source (FOSS) Xerte Online Toolkits (XOT) software, a series of discipline nodes have been established over the four discipline clusters of the HEA. These nodes produce content which is easily licenced and shared while establishing the principles of community production. It is expected that these can be adopted and enhanced by others more easily due to the template authoring features of XOT. The outputs are deliverable on mobile devices using the HTML5 standard.

This talk will report on the progress made by nine projects around the UK (in HE and FE providers) over the 2013-2014 academic year to expand the digital literacies of their students to become more familiar with the practices of OER production. This model may provide new infrastructure to institutions develop OER practice to create more discipline content and raise awareness of the advantages of more open practices.

References

Falconer I., McGill L., Littlejohn A., Boursinou E. (2013). Overview and analysis of practices with open educational resources in adult education in Europe. Publications Office of the European Union (doi:10.2791/34193)/

Funding acknowledgements

HEFCE Digital Literacy

Further details

Keywords: Digital Literacy, OER, Students and producers, Xerte

Website: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/digital-literacies