EDULINK - SideCAP Project Presentation to Faculty Deans – 28 April 09 Louise Vakamocea & Alanieta Lesuma-Fatiaki

Overview About the SideCap Project Other institutions Core & Other Activities Way Forward Faculty Involvement Discussion Web links

About the SideCap Project SideCap stands for, Staff Improvement in distance education for Carribean, African and Pacific universities EU funded project – 32 months 5 institutions; OU, UHI, UM, UWI & USP Led by Professor Robin Mason, OU

About the SideCap Project Overall objective Promote multilateral activities amongst European and ACP partners through practical activities, networking and hands on exercises to improve the quality of teaching and support for students. Specific objective Repurpose existing Open Content teaching material and adapt it to local contexts using appropriate technologies

OER – Open Educational Resources Defining OER OER – Open Educational Resources First adopted at UNESCO 20002 Forum of Open Courseware for HE in Developing Countries educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. Learning Content Tools Implementation resources (Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources) Compendium - is the hypermedia knowledge mapping software that allows users to manage, share, analyse and track information and ideas, and the connections between them. It provides tools for annotation, linking and visualisation by supporting the creation of dialogue maps to which the user can link possible answers, arguments and literature in the form of electronic files and hyperlinks. Educators and learners will be able to publish Compendium maps to a Knowledge Map Exchange which is intended to complement the open educational resources. Maps can then be searched, analysed and visualised in new ways to help users spot new connections and find new peers. Cohere – 2nd OpenLearn Knowledge mapping tool following Compendium. Automatically runs in your browser & generates maps layouts. Can also upload compendium maps to Cohere. Optimized for the cross-platform fireforx browser. Recommended for use. Do 3 things; add ideas, connect them & browse & filter your own and other’s knowledge maps. Can be shared as normal web links or as embedded ideas & maps in other websites as interactive elements. MSG is the open source tool developed to provide a combination of instant messaging, geolocational support (who is online and where) and friend-finding via semantic matchmaking (who can help me solve a specific problem right now?). It is an augmentation of existing instant messaging environments as it provides additional information about a user’s availability (eg accessible by mobile phone only and studying a certain unit) and their personal attributes (eg interests, friendship networks, publishing history, annotated photo libraries). FlashMeeting is an application that allows large-scale meetings to happen online via video-conference. In addition to text chat,voting and URL sharing, users can re-use meeting content by editing and annotating it. They can also publish video blogs FlashVlog – is a tool , allowing you to create video blogs online almost instantly. Only need a properly installed Webcam & microphone attached to you computer, as well as Adobe Flash plug in version 8 or above. Learning Clubs – potential for use in our professional development programmes. Gain experience in online instruction & tutoring for our teaching staff

OER Sites

Project Activities 1 - Project website setup & maintenance (UHI) 2 - Preparation of background reports (All) 3 - Kick-off meeting at the OU 4 - Establish ACP Researchers Network 5 - Open Content activity 6 - Open Content in DE workshop in UM 7 – Technology Training 8 – Drafts of Teaching Material 9 – QA Workshop in UWI 10 – Cascading Activity 11 – Final Dissemination Event in USP 12 – Final Evaluation Report 1 – already set up by University of Islands & Highlands (UHI), Scotland using a wiki – wetpaint and a group hub. As we draw closer to the USP hosted event, key people can be added to the group hub for the organisational bit of the event. 2. Already done. Presentations made during the 1st day of Kick-off meeting 3 – done 4 – discussion ongoing. Idea brought to meeting is to open it up to interested individuals in all institutions spreading to other institutions in the ACP region 5 – conducted at OU 6 – to be conducted in UM in December 2008 7 – conducted in UHI, Scotland, May/June 2009 9 – QA workshop in UWI, December 2009 10 – conduct of series of events across the university. Using the documentation & ideas from the project workshops, staff will devise and run activities, both f2f & online in which we will try to impart what we have learned from the project. We will be required to write a report on these cascading activities to be included in the final evaluation report. Money for travel allocated in budget in order for staff from distant locations can participate in the activities. 11 – Final dissemination event in USP – July 2010 (targeting semester break)

Other institutions University of Mauritius (UM) Participants; Prof. Alain Senteni & Mohammad Santally Heavily involved in setting up of technology based applications University of the West Indies (UWI) Participants; Roger Powell & Stewart Marshall Setting up of Open Campus University of Highlands & Islands (UHI) Millenium Institute Co Principal Researcher - Frank Rennie OU Lead Researcher - Prof. Robin Mason UM – reps from the Virtual Centre for Innovative Learning Technologies VCILT UWI – setting up Open Campus. Originally the DEC. to be the 4th campus of UWI. Serves 15 countries. UHI – thriving partnership of 15 colleges & research centres; 13 academic partner collegtes & 2 associated research institutions. Lews Castle College, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis

Core & Other Activities UM – reps from the Virtual Centre for Innovative Learning Technologies VCILT UWI – setting up Open Campus. Originally the DEC. to be the 4th campus of UWI. Serves 15 countries. UHI – thriving partnership of 15 colleges & research centres; 13 academic partner collegtes & 2 associated research institutions. Lews Castle College, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis

Way Forward Complete pilot courses by proposed deadline June 2009 Dissemination of information about project through cascading events Write a chapter towards the book on 'how to repurpose Open Content for distance education in developing countries.' ‘Prototype-run’ at least one from each partner with a few students and peers to evaluate and see responses etc in each partner’s context.

Way Forward UHI – Technology Training (22-26 June 2009) UWI – Quality Assurance (November 2009) USP – Final Dissemination Event (8-12 Feb 2010)

Faculty involvement Cascading events Pilot run of study skills package Identify DFL champions from each faculty to make presentations ACP Researchers Network OER course development @ USP

Discussion

Web links SideCap Project site: http://sidecap.wetpaint.com/?t=anon SideCap Group hub: https://sidecap.grouphub.com/login SideCap Project blog: http://www.sidecap-project.blogspot.com/ OpenLearn site: http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php Cohere: http://cohere.open.ac.uk OU site: http://www.open.ac.uk/ UM: http://www.uom.ac.mu/index.asp UM, VCILT: http://vcampus.uom.ac.mu/vcilt/index.php UWI: http://www.uwi.edu/ UWI, Open Campus: http://www.uwi.edu/vicechancellery/uwioutreach/default.aspx UHI: http://www.uhi.ac.uk/ UHI, Lewis Castle College: http://www.lews.uhi.ac.uk/ OIL site: http://oil.otago.ac.nz/oil/module1.html