ALTO UK
Collaborative Approaches to Learning
Design for OERs:
Reflections and Outputs from ALTO UK Workshops
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Author John Casey,
Terminology
• Learning Design = Instructional Design =
Teaching Design
• LD sounds more ‘PC’
• Came to be used in the UK and elsewhere after
the IMS LD specification (associated with Learning Objects)
• OERs involve ‘designing learning for strangers’
Unintended Consequences
• A lightening conductor for issues related to:
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Power
Control
Ownership
Identity
Pedagogy
Tech Infrastructure
Cultures
Policy
Digital Professionalism (aka Digital Literacy)
Image by Christopher Hollis
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Lightning_strike_in_Tampa_Florida_(modified).jpg
The Problem for Arts OERs
• Art courses can be short of traditional text-heavy
didactic materials (cf MIT OCW)
• Emphasis is on studio/workshop practice
• Mentoring and apprenticeship and situated learning
• Community of learners / peers
• Importance of the Crit and dialogue
• More about process than content
• Pedagogy often deeply contextualized, individual
hard to abstract and share (in the bricks and mortar!)
Emerging Solutions
• Rich media (Images/audio/video) to capture
tacit knowledge and practice:
– Processes (screen printing, bronze casting,
weaving)
– Students accounts of learning – supports vicarious
learning – using sketchbooks as prompts/scripts
• Social media (esp. YouTube/Vimeo) as
publishing platforms
• Use in-house platform Process.Arts (Drupal) to
knit together and act as an ‘open studio’
• ‘Traditional’ Repository Filestore for publishing
didactic content
Emerging Problem 2
• We now have ‘chunks’ of learning resources as
social media and files, great they can standalone, but:
• How do we relate these ‘chunks’ to a course?
• Should we? (why not? It works elsewhere…)
• We do not have a web system capable of doing
this
• Staff do not have the time/skills
• Need something simple and sustainable
Emerging Solutions 2 – Open CourseBooks
• Look elsewhere (frugal innovation, no tech dogma)
• Open Textbooks (Easily understood metaphor)
• OCW MIT simple, consistent, easy
navigation
• Represent a course as an Open Textbook
using OCW style structure
• Use a Word template to author
• Distribute as a PDF (multiplatform) and as Word
(editable)
• Provide a link to a zip file (a la MIT OCW) to
download all associated resources
Open CourseBooks Examples
ALTO UK Examples at: http://alto.arts.ac.uk/930/
This approach is being used elsewhere – e.g. the JISC ORBIT project to
Using the latest version of Media Wiki to support joint authoring and
outputting in .pdf and .od formats with zip files of resources for offline use –
in Africa and the UK.
Open CourseBooks Benefits
• A good ‘first step’ format to start sharing resources
(especially from deeply contextualised practice)
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Uses easily available info / resources (handbooks minus guff)
Promotes reflection
Timeline produces a narrative (an initial LD cf the IMS spec.)
A Shared visualisation tool (for moving to teamwork)
Starting point for course redesign (Kirklees & Heriot Watt)
Simple to make – Easy to Use
Adaptable
Next Steps
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Evaluate
Need a better authoring Tool (than Word)
Need to author once play on all (desktop, tablet, smartphone)
HTML5 is ideal for authoring and delivery
HTML5 authoring ‘app’ (supports co-design)
Customisable templates, easy (drag and drop plus user prompts etc.)
Attractive outputs, incl. rich media
Prints nice
Downloads for offline viewing and adaptation
Accessible and semantically structured
Excellent for archival and format conversion