Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The primary intention was to facilitate the staff development of key personnel who
were then charged with cascading the techniques and the pedagogy to colleagues
at their own institution. There was therefore a double necessity, not simply to train
the staff member in the relevant educational technology (and the pedagogical back-
ground to this) but to equip that person to be able to pass this training on to their
peers when they returned to their normal duties. In addition, networked activities
punctuated the project and were designed to explore the experience between and
within partner institutions. A secondary aim was to develop a fuller understanding
of the issues involved in adapting open content to local contexts, through practical
tasks, evaluation exercises, and comparative analysis. A third aim was to develop
flexible course materials that are to some extent customised and contextually rele-
vant for these very different distributed university systems. An appreciation of the
importance of contextualising and re-purposing of the resources is regarded as being
of equal importance to the acquisition of the technical skills related to the educa-
tional technology applications. In order to be consistent with the “open access/open
source” ethos, existing (free) training resources were used wherever possible (e.g.
see Stannard, 2008).
The Conceptual Framework
The theoretical framework for the design of these courses using OER is to provide
easy access to the course content (overview, teaching materials, digitised articles,
relevant web sites, etc.) and to provide specific guidelines on the flexibility of
delivery options for each course.
For instance (Fig. 13.2) the OER can be packaged together and contextualised
by the tutor(s) to provide a common resource pool of learning materials. These
would be freely available on the web and could either be embedded within the
OER Template
OER
OER
OER
OER
OER
OER
Learning Resources
Tutorials
Peer-to-peer
Assessment
Certification
email
Dboard
TMA
Award
Fig. 13.2 The conceptual
framework for networked
OER use in course design
LMS
skype
Exam
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