Author Archives: lornamcampbell

OER and the Vision for Adult Learning

Earlier this year Professor Allison Littlejohn of the Caledonian Academy published the findings of the OER4Adults survey, undertaken by the EU Lifelong Learning OER4Adults Project. The outputs of this survey, which are highly relevant to the aims and objectives of Open Scotland, can be read in full on Allison’s blog here: OER and the Vision for Adult Learning. The following is summarised from Allison’s post.

The outcomes of OER4Adults provided policy makers within the European Commission with evidence on how to incorporate the use of OER into a Vision for Adult and Lifelong Learning to 2030.

oer4adults

The OER4Adults survey identified over 170 OER Initiatives across Europe and other countries (mainly the US). Many of these initiatives – those who provide OER for adult and lifelong learning – are from the higher education, vocational and school sectors. These initiatives assume that the primary users of OER are teachers and registered students, but the might not necessarily think about ‘nonformal’ learners.

Many examples of open learning are within open fora (eg discussion groups around health or hobby areas). These groups are seldom recognised as having an explicit remit for learning. Also they are not associated with the sorts of formal institutions that MOOCs tend to be associated with (eg think about EdX, Coursera, Futurelearn and so on).

The project conducted a SWOT analysis wich identified a number of areas of tension:

    • OER – free vs open resources
    • Learning – conventional pedagogy vs learner controlled learning
    • Motivations for releasing OER – altruism vs marketization
    • Capacity building – community vs openness
    • Numbers of learners – mass participation vs quality
    • Sustainability – add-on vs embedded funding models

Key findings and questions

1. Many examples of open learning are not recognised as learning.

Idea 1: change public perception of what they recognise as learning.

2. To move forward with lifelong learning, we need a fundamental shift in the way society perceives peoples’ roles (eg learners, teachers, others, etc) and organisations’ roles (eg HES, companies, publishers, etc).

Idea 2: change public perception of the roles of learners and teachers – and of organisations more broadly.

3. Within the OER arena, there is little focus on the bigger societal issues. For example the tension between the public and private sectors which have different values and norms. We don’t have a clear idea of the outcome when these values and norms come into conflict.

Idea 3: consider the longterm impact of vested interests of various stakeholders in different sectors.

4. Little is known about what lifelong learners actually do with OER. OER initiatives have little concern about this and don’t view it as significant.

Idea 4: investigate how learners use OER to learn.

5. The focus of attention could shift from open resources (OER) or open courses (MOOC) to the ability of people/learners to learn in open environments.

Idea 5: change the focus of attention from OER or MOOC to learners.

By Professor Allison Littlejohn.

Round Two: New Flavours for #EDCMOOC

We’re very pleased to welcome our second Open Scotland guest blog post by Sian Bayne, Jeremy Knox, Hamish Macleod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair about their highly successful E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC (EDCMOOC), being run by the University of Edinburgh on the Coursera platform.

You never forget your first MOOC, and that’s true for teachers as much as for learners. But what of the second time around – perhaps the novelty wears off and it can just be left to run itself? That’s certainly not been the case for the team for E-learning and Digital Cultures (EDCMOOC); we have been finding ourselves in a new phase of learning about teaching at scale.

EDCMOOC ran as one of the University of Edinburgh MOOCs on the Coursera platform first in January/February 2013 and for the second time in November to early December. It will run at least one more time under the current arrangements in place. The second run has provided an opportunity to experiment with teaching presence, and to further our critical reflections on how MOOCs might inform our research and pedagogy within and about digital environments.

With six new short videos and videoconference via Google hangout every week (as opposed to just twice, as the first time), the teaching commentary on what’s happening within the MOOC has shifted from regular blogging to a televisual mode. This is our first blog post for EDCMOOC2, written at its midpoint when we are starting to build up a picture of some messages from our second run.

The EDCMOOC team made an introductory video commenting on our themes

The EDCMOOC team made an introductory video commenting on our themes

Teaching Presence – how important is it for teachers to be seen?

Teaching presence has always mattered to us in our online MSc in Digital Education programme. There, with course cohorts that never go above 40, we have developed our presence through orchestrating engaging experiences, engaging in online dialogues, and providing feedback that ‘can be digested, worked with, created from’ (Ross, Bayne et al, 2011). While our students can see our photos and avatars, we don’t routinely provide videos of ourselves giving online ‘instruction’. Students on our MSc speak of a connection and closeness from our critical engagements online, both asynchronously and synchronously. They often claim to experience far more interaction with teachers and fellow students than they have in any other educational programme.

edcmoochangout We were therefore somewhat taken aback at the overwhelming reaction to our informal Google Hangout discussions during the first run of EDCMOOC. Again, the ‘connection’ word was used frequently as participants seemed relieved to see their teachers and to be able to make comments at the same time. It was one of the strongest messages that we received, reinforced by an early question in the discussion forum: ‘Where are the professors?’ And so we decided for the second run not only to have a Hangout each week but also to provide videos that introduce ourselves and our themes to help the participants to orientate themselves.

This embodied approach to presence has felt slightly uncomfortable because it has taken us closer to the ‘over-celebratory fetishizing of the teacher associated with some MOOCs’ that we analysed critically before we embarked on our MOOC (Knox, Bayne et al 2012). And yet this form of presence has proved to be one of the most commented-on features of our activities.

While it is reassuring that the need to ‘see’ us suggests that the potential overthrow of the teaching role is greatly exaggerated, we are more interested in establishing good dialogues with our participants and encouraging them to fashion their own ways of engaging with the course material than we are in attaining guru status. Our introductions and hangouts are still not ‘lessons’ as such, but give us an opportunity to provide guidelines to the kinds of connections we are seeking to make between education and digital cultures and, in the hangouts, to focus on the work being produced by MOOC participants. And some of these connections challenge the very notion of ‘the human touch’ that our televisual selves might seem to offer.

So we have included more video in the second instance of EDCMOOC as a way of further exploring the potency of the visible teaching body, but also to question the supposed replication of face-to-face as the privileged pedagogical mode. One of the key ideas that underpins our team approach is the idea that the digital makes education different, and we are interested in questioning the notion that video renders invisible the mediating technologies of the MOOC, and provides straightforward access to the teacher.

Tapping into the potential of the Massive

The other side of this new perspective on presence is the role of the people taking the MOOC. Participants have responded very warmly to being mentioned in hangouts as we comment on their blogs, their forum postings and their digital artefacts. But of course we cannot make this direct contact with each MOOC participant and it would be foolish to try. In a course that works on a large scale, it is perhaps more useful to think of what we can do with thousands of participants, rather than what we can do for or to them. While this has been in our minds from the outset, we’re now beginning to see how that is working. Jeremy has commented elsewhere on the ‘collective energy and intensity of the multitude’ (Knox 2013), inspired by the display of EDCMOOC1 work organised by the participants themselves. We’re seeing a crossover from that energy to the current MOOC, as it starts to take on its own collective identity.

Some of the EDCMOOC1 participants are now very effective Community Teaching Assistants on EDCMOOC2, and many others are also still present and contributing in multitudinous ways. And all are respecting the newer participants’ emerging shared voice that makes this run of EDCMOOC another unique experience. The new voice can be seen partly in response to the hangouts – participants have been gathering photos of themselves as they participate in the hangout, tweeting and commenting in YouTube and Google+. A suggestion for crowdsourcing the captioning of the hangout brought a strong response, and provides opportunities for further development. As one blogger, Heli Nurmi says:

The recording is available but writing a transcript jointly is an interesting experiment. It follows the principles of empowerment, collaborative learning, social networking, peer assistance, media-technology-enhanced learning.
(Nurmi, 2013)

Heli wonders whether it can lead to deep pedagogical debate. We think that it has huge potential to do so, reinforcing Jeremy’s suggestion (Knox 2013) that a focus on assessment of individual pieces of work may go against the ethos of the massiveness of the MOOC. As we observe many connections and creative flows being established in EDCMOOC2, we look forward to the images and other digital artefacts that will be produced between now and the end of the course in December. We do need to begin to think how we should acknowledge the contribution of the multitude to this creation as well as – or perhaps indeed instead of – pinpointing individual star performers.

Our own connections, flows, links and opportunities are expanding exponentially in this process too. It’s good to share our thoughts in our own blog, to aggregate it into EDCMOOC News – and it’s great to be guesting in the Open Scotland blog at the same time. Such opportunities are only possible through digital connections both locally and at scale.

References

Knox, J. (2013). eLearning and Digital Cultures: a multitudinous open online course. eLearn Magazine. Retrieved 20 November 2013: http://elearnmag.acm.org/archive.cfm?aid=2525967

Knox, J., Bayne, S. et al (2012) MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera. Association for Learning Technology Online Newsletter. Retrieved 13 November 2013: http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2012/08/mooc-pedagogy-the-challenges-of-developing-for-coursera/

Nurmi, H. (2013) Pedagogical Principles of MOOCs. Heli Connecting Ideas. Retrieved 20 November 2013: http://helistudies.edublogs.org/2013/11/19/pedagogical-principles-of/

Ross, J., Bayne, S. et al (2011) Manifesto for Teaching Online. University of Edinburgh MSc in E-learning. Retrieved 13 November 2013: http://onlineteachingmanifesto.wordpress.com/

Progress through Openness

theopenagendaMitchell Baker, Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, has released a thoughtful and inspiring statement in support of #TheOpenAgenda called Only Openness Can Power The Next Wave Of Human Progress. Although Baker’s statement focuses specifically on ensuring that the Web remains open in order to foster innovation, many of the points she raises relate to openness more widely and are equally applicable to open education.

Openness is important, not only for the Web and technology but also for the human experience. Openness provides the ability to set the rules for ourselves or experiment and work to create a better experience. Openness is critical for the human experience, critical to problem solving—and if you view the problems facing the globe and the human population today we need the ability to solve problems.

Open vs. closed is a dichotomy in many areas of life; many systems move from open to closed or strike a balance between the two …. In the short-term there is sometimes great value, or perceived value, to centralized services. In the long run, though, as systems become more closed it becomes very hard to change something that no longer works optimally.

Some have adopted a closed mind set …. others have adopted an open philosophy—because it’s in their nature, their leaders’ nature or because it makes economic or business sense. They are shifting because they see the possibilities and are moving into opportunities that are more based on openness.

You can read the a fuller version of Baker’s statement here: Human Progress can Only Come Through Openness.

Open Knowledge Foundation Glasgow Meetup #2

(Cross posted from Open World.)

Last night I went along to the second Open Knowledge Foundation Glasgow meetup. The event took place in the Board Room of the CCA, which was rather more spacious than the Electron Club that kindly accommodated us last time. We all got to sit on chairs rather than perch on tables, which made tweeting much easier! Once again we had a wide range of fascinating lightning talks which generated a great deal of lively discussion. I’ve posted a storify of the event here: open-knowledge-foundation-glasgow-2

Open Scotland – Lorna M Campbell, Cetis

I had the pleasure of opening the meeting with a short talk about the Open Scotland initiative, led by Cetis, SQA, the Jisc RSC Scotland and the ALT Scotland SIG, which aims to raise awareness of open education and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education. The initiative hopes to build on existing open education developments to encourage the sharing of open educational resources and to embed open educational practice across Scottish education. The Open Scotland blog provides a focal point to engage the community in discussion and debate, disseminate news and developments relating to all aspects of openness in education and to further the actions and deliverables discussed at the Open Scotland Summit held in Edinburgh in June.

grainneOpen Badges: What? How? Why? – Grainne Hamilton, Jisc RSC Scotland

Grainne introduced the concept of open badges and outlined the work of the Open Badges in Scottish Education Group. Open badges are data infused images that provide an online representation of skills earned. Badges could provide an important link between informal and formal learning as they enable users to gain recognition for learning that happens anywhere. The Open Badges in Scottish Education Group, which is supported by Jisc RSC Scotland, has set up three sub-groups focusing on Learner Progress, Technology and Design and Staff Development.

graemeWikimedia UK: Scottish Women on Wikimedia – Graeme Arnott

Only 15% of Wikipedia editors are women, so Wikmedia UK is taking positive steps to address the gender imbalance of editors and remove sexism and racism from posts. Graeme spoke about a Wikimedia UK editathon run in conjunction with Glasgow Women’s Library. The event hoped to expose the hidden history of women in Glasgow and provide a way for more women from the Library to engage wth technology.

JenniferThe Digital Commonwealth: digital storytelling and social media archiving – Jennifer Jones

Jennifer introduced the Lottery funded Digital Common Wealth project which aims to support creative community expression in response to the Commonwealth Games. Digital Common Wealth has three strands: Community Media Clusters, Schools Programme and Creative Voices at UWS. Developing digital literacies and creating and sharing data are key principals for Digital Common Wealth. Stories shared by social media are rich source of data and Digital Common Wealth are working with the National Library of Scotland to archive the project’s outputs.

PippaFuture Cities Glasgow – Pippa Gardner

Pippa provided an update on the £24 million Glasgow Future Cities Demonstrator project. Last night the project’s Data Portal had 99 data sets, however this morning they tweeted that they had just added their 100th data set from the Celtic Connections Festival. The project used the Open Data Handbook to prioritise themes, however some of their data sets are more open than others, depending on their original licences. Where possible Glasgow will make data open by default. Engagement hubs and links to digital inclusion initiatives are part of the project’s approach and the team will also be running hackathons in the new year.

DuncanOpen Architecture – Duncan Bain

Duncan highlighted some very interesting approaches to open architecture including Wikihouse, which aims to democratise the process of construction, Terrafab which allows you to download and print 3D models of Norwegian terrain maps, and Terrainator, a similar UK based on OS open data. Duncan’s talk provoked a fascinating debate on lack of openness in architecture education practice, and why architecture has not embraced openness in a similar way that software development has.

bobOpen Street Map – Bob Kerr

Presented an impromptu overview of the very cool work of the Open Street Map initiative and pointed us to the LearnOSM step by step guide. Bob highlighted some amazing examples of open street mapping at work, including the humanitarian effort to map Haiti after the earthquake and Map Kibera, a project that mapped the Kenyan shanty town of Kibera revealing the extent of the community and bringing it to life. Bob’s talk generated a really interesting discussion on the political and social importance of maps. Duncan pointed out that traditionally the people who have the power have the maps, however initiatives like Open Street Map is changing that.

This meeting was organised by Graham Steel, Graeme Arnott and Ewan Klein with a little input from Sheila MacNeil and I. The event was streamed by Jennifer Jones.

OKFN Glasgow and Edinburgh Meetups

OKFNTwo Open Knowledge Foundation Meetups are taking place in Scotland next week. Meet-ups are friendly and informal evenings for people to get together to share and discuss all aspects of openness. The meetings are free and open to all, so come along and join the discussions around open knowledge, open data, open education, open government, open badges, open architecture, open galleries, libraries, archives and museums.

OKFN Glasgow Meetup

On Monday 18th the second Glasgow Meetup with take place at the Club Room of the CCA at 18.00. The first meeting, which attracted over thirty participants, was a huge success and generated a great deal of interesting discussion. The event will feature six lightning talks on a wide range of topics:

* Wikimedia UK: Scottish Women on Wikipedia – Graeme Arnott
* Open Scotland – Lorna M Campbell
* Future Cities Glasgow – Glynn Staples and Pippa Gardner
* Open Architecture – Duncan Bain
* Open Badges: What? Who? Why? – Grainne Hamilton
* The Common-wealth Games, digital storytelling & social media archiving – Jennifer Jones

To attend the Glasgow meetup, please sign up here.

OKFN Edinburgh Meetup

OpenGLAM-logo-720x1024On Thursday the 21st November the eighth Edinburgh Meetup will take place at EDINA at 18.00. This meetup is focusing on OpenGLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and will feature the following lightning talks.

* The SENESCHAL Project – Phil Carlisle
* Why is linking data so hard? – Kate Byrne
* Monuments, Artefacts and Social History – Peter McKeague
* Edinburgh Datashare: A digital repository of research datasets – Robin Rice

To attend the Edinburgh Meetup, please sign up here.

EduWiki Conference Reflections

260px-Wikimedia_UK_logoLast week Cetis’ Brian Kelly attended the 2013 EduWiki Conference in Cardiff, run by Wikimedia UK. There’s a full write up of the conference on Brian’s UK Web Focus blog, and many of the themes raised are of direct relevance to Open Scotland. The event led Brian to reflect on the role of Wikipedia in open education and to conclude

“I’m now convinced of the importance of Wikipedia in open educational practices.”

One of the themes to emerge from the conference was the library sector’s changing attitude towards Wikipedia. This can certainly be seen in parts of the library sector in Scotland, and the National Library of Scotland is to be applauded for appointing a Wikimedian in Residence earlier this year.

I was also particularly interested to hear about efforts in Wales to engage with Wikimedia and to support the uptake of minority languages. This from Brian’s conference report:

Welsh and Other Minority Language Wikipedia Sites

Robin Owain, the Wales Manager for Wikimedia UK gave a talk in Welsh with instant translation for English speakers via headsets. Robin’s talk provided the political and cultural context for the following keynote talk and made the links with Wicipedia, the Welsh language version of Wikipedia. “Wales is a small country. That’s our greatness. “Do the small things” is our motto” explained Robin, who went on to inform the audience that “Wales is the land of open content“. Such approaches to openness and doing small things, but doing them well has led to Wicipedia being the most popular web site in the Welsh language.

Robin Owain’s talk focussed on Wicipedia, which is unsurprising for the Wales Manager for Wikimedia UK. A wider context was provided by Gareth Morlain (@melynmelyn), the Digital Media Specialist for the Welsh Government. In his keynote talk on “Getting More Welsh Content Online” which highlighted how a public pressure resulted in Amazon changing their policy on providing Welsh language access to Kindle ebooks.

I was fascinated to learn about use of minority languages, such as Catalan, Basque, Galician, Welsh, Breton, Irish, Gaelic and Cornish, on the Web. I was particularly interested to note that Catalan appears to be punching above its weight. Since I have professional contacts in Catalonia I sent a tweet to Miquel Duran, a professor at Girona University, about this. It seems that his son is president of @amicalwikimedia which promotes Catalan Wikipedia. This suggests that small-scale advocacy can have a significant effect on the creation of articles on minority language Wikipedia sites. Since we heard how the number of Wicipedia articles need to grow by 400% for Google to take Welsh language seriously as a search language I hope that Robin Owain and others involved in encouraging take-up of Wicipedia are successful in their advocacy work.

It’s very encouraging to see Wikimedia supporting both open practice and minority languages in the UK and I hope we will see similar advocacy work undertaken in Scotland.

POERUP Policy Advice for Universities

poerup_2Policies for OER Uptake (POERUP) is a European Commission funded Life Long Learning Programme project, coordinated by Sero Consulting, which is carrying out research to understand how governments can stimulate the uptake of OER by policy means. The project aims to:

convince decision-makers that in order to be successful with OER, they will have to formulate evidence-based policies based on looking beyond one’s own country, region or continent, beyond the educational sector they look after.

POERUP have already undertaken a survey of open education policy along with developments in education, e-learning, internet and copyright in 26 countries and have produced a series of comprehensive reports which can be viewed on the Country Reports wiki.

The project is also tasked with producing OER policy documents for a number of EU nations including Scotland, and the team are keen to work with those who have been involved in Open Scotland. The project are also drafting three EU-wide policy papers for schools, colleges and universities on
fostering OER uptake, which will act as aides-mémoire for the national policy documents. A draft of the POERUP EU-wide Policies for Universities is available here.

This document provides an invaluable overview of policy developments relative to open education from EU initiatives (e.g. Bologna, Europe 2020, Opening Up Education), OER projects, lobbyist circles (e.g. Opal, UNESCO/COL) and POERUP working meetings. From this evidence base, the following eighteen Policy Proposal Recommendations have been synthesised. In formulating these proposals care has been taken

not to over-focus on OER as an end but more of a means towards educational transformation.

To provide comments or feedback on these recommendations please contact Paul Bacsich of Sero Consulting at paul.bacsich@sero.co.uk.

Recommendations for European Commission and via EU for the Member States

Innovation – new institutions

1. The Commission should set up a competitive innovation fund to develop one new “European” university each year with a commitment to low-cost online education around a core proposition of open content.
Accreditation of institutions – new accrediting bodies and mutual recognition
2. The Commission should foster the development of transnational accrediting agencies and mutual recognition of accreditations across the EU.
3. The Commission should reduce the regulatory barriers against new kinds of HE providers (e.g. for-profit, from outside the country, consortial, etc).

Quality agencies

4. Quality agencies in ENQA49 should:  Develop their understanding of new modes of learning (including online, distance, OER and MOOCs) and how they impact quality assurance and recognition;

  • Engage in debates on copyright;
  • Consider the effects of these new modes on quality assurance and recognition;
  • Ensure that there is no implicit non-evidence-based bias against these new modes when accrediting institutions both public and private including for-profit (if relevant), accrediting programmes (if relevant) and assessing/inspecting institutions/programmes.

Bologna-bis: competence-based not time-based assessment

5. The Commission and related authorities developing the European Higher Education Area50 should reduce the regulatory barriers against new non-study-time-based modes of provision: in particular by developing a successor to Bologna based primarily on competences gained not duration of study.

Assessment and accreditation of modules

6. The Commission should recommend to universities that they should work to improve and proceduralise their activity on APL (Accreditation of Prior Learning) including the ability to accredit knowledge and competences developed through online study and informal learning, including but not restricted to OER and MOOCs, with a focus on admitting students with such accredited studies to the universities’ own further courses of study.
7. The Commission should recommend to the larger member states that they should each set up an Open Accreditor to accredit a range of studies which could lead to an undergraduate degree. In the first instance the Accreditor should focus on qualifications in the ISCED 5B area as this is most correlated with high-level skills for business and industry.

Funding mechanisms for institutions and content

8. The Commission should foster work into standardised syllabi EU-wide for undergraduate degrees in certain professions (e.g. medicine, nursing, mathematics, IS/IT) where this is appropriate for EU-wide action, and in the light of a successful outcome to such initiatives, foster the developments of common bases of OER material to support these standards, including relevant open repositories and (ideally jointly with publishers) open textbooks.
9. The Commission should ensure that any public outputs from its programmes (specifically including Erasmus for All and Framework) are made available as open resources under an appropriate license.
10. The Commission should encourage member states to do likewise for their national research and teaching development programmes, including for the public funding component of university teaching.
11. The Commission should encourage member states to increase their scrutiny of the cost basis for university teaching and consider the benefits of output-based funding for qualifications.

IPR issues

12. The Commission should adopt and recommend a standard Creative Commons license for all openly available educational material it is involved in funding. This should currently be Creative Commons 3.0 in unported or relevant national versions, updated from time to time. The Commission should also recommend this license to all member states.
13. The Commission should study the issues in the modern European HE system round the “non commercial” restriction and make appropriate recommendations for its own programmes and for member states.
14. The Commission should support the development of technological methods to provide more and standardised information on IPR to the users of digital educational content.
15. The Commission should mount a campaign both centrally and via the member states to educate university staff on IPR issues.

Training of academics

16. The Commission should support the development of online initial and continuous professional development programmes for teachers, focussing on online learning with specific coverage of distance learning, OER, MOOCs and other forms of open educational practice, and also IPR issues.
17. The Commission should encourage member states to do this also and should recommend the use of incentive schemes for teachers engaged in online professional development of their pedagogic skills including online learning.

Further research

18. The Commission should fund research into the verifiable benefits of OER, with greater efforts to integrate such analyses with its ongoing research on distance learning, on-campus online learning, and pedagogy; and recommend the same to member states.

Open Badges in Scottish Education Group

We’re pleased to welcome our first Open Scotland guest blog post by Grainne Hamilton of Jisc RSC Scotland and the Open Badges in Scottish Education Group.

Grainne Hamilton,
Jisc RSC Scotland

In Scotland, interest has been growing around the opportunities afforded by the open, standards-based, accreditation framework, Open Badges, to augment traditional accreditation routes. At the Jisc RSC Scotland Open Badges Design Day, held in April 2013, staff from further and higher education institutions worked with the Mozilla Badges and Skills Lead, Doug Belshaw and the CEO of DigitalMe (DML Competition ‘Badges for Lifelong Learning’ winners and Badge the UK leads) Tim Riches, to consider possible badge-based pathways to learning and to explore the Mozilla Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). At this event, there was consensus that it would be useful to bring together interested parties to identify areas where Open Badges could add value to education in Scotland and to engage in joint developments.

Open Badges in
Scottish Education Group

In response to this, the Jisc RSC Scotland has convened the Open Badges in Scottish Education Group (OBSEG) which now includes members from schools, further and higher education institutions, educational agencies including the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and Education Scotland, professional bodies, employer bodies, national and local government, Open Badge projects such as DigitalMe’s Badge the UK and Mozilla. The group performs an overview and mapping function of Open Badge developments in Scottish education, oversees a number of sub-groups developing badge constellations and pathways, and provides a forum for discussion and strategic agreement around Open Badge developments.

I was delighted when active members of the OBSEG, the SQA, issued a press release on the opportunities they are investigating with Open Badges: http://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/67688.html. As far as I’m aware, this commitment from a national awarding and qualifications authority is a world first. The SQA has gained feedback from the wider sector on Scotland’s aspirations in relation to Open Badges via the OBSEG and Jisc is looking forward to continuing to support the Open Badge developments enabled by this commitment and by others, in the Scottish education community.

You can find out more about the OBSEG, the organisations, institutions and bodies represented and the work of the group at: http://bit.ly/obseg

Open Glasgow Data Sets

Open Glasgow, part of the Future City Glasgow project funded by the UK Government’s Technology Strategy Board, has now released 82 84 open data sets covering many aspects of city data. The data sets, which cover a wide range of domains including transportation, environment, health, demographics and education, can be downloaded from a public data platform, http://data.glasgow.gov.uk, where users can search for data sets based on submitting organisation, group, tag, format or license. The individual data sets are available in a wide range of different formats, and while I’d quibble whether pdf data can really be regarded as “open” in any sense of the word, many of the data sets are available in more open formats. The vast majority of the data sets are licensed under the UK Open Government Licence, though some use other licences including the Glasgow Open Government Licence, the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence and Creative Commons licences.

At present there is only one data set relating specifically to the education domain, colleges and universities funded by the Scottish Funding Council, but with the Open Glasgow team encouraging other public, private, academic and voluntary organisations to open and share their data via the platform, I hope that we will see more open data sets relating to Scottish education in the not to distant future.

Glasgow Open Data Platform

Glasgow Open Data Platform

SQA to explore the potential of Mozilla Open Badges

“We believe that the infrastructure promotes and supports greater flexibility for learning and the recognition of achievement.”

– Joe Wilson, SQA

Following two years of discussions, SQA has announced that it will work in partnership with the Mozilla Foundation and the Open Badges in Scottish Education Group (OBSEG) to support the adoption of Open Badges across a range of Scottish education sectors. Rather than being a top down project, SQA’s announcement represents a “commitment to be open about open badges” which will hopefully encourage more traditional parts of the education sector to engage with innovative open approaches to recording achievements and accomplishments.

Press release as follows…

SQA investigates opportunities with Mozilla’s Open Badges

SQA has announced its intention to investigate the opportunities presented by an innovative approach to displaying individuals’ learning accomplishments online.

SQA is working in partnership with Mozilla, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the democratization of the web, to explore the benefits to learners that can be achieved through their Open Badges.

Mozilla’s Open Badges project intends to make it easy to earn, issue and display digital badges that recognise and communicate individuals’ skills and achievements.

The badge project infrastructure allows individuals to display their real-world skills and achievements in online environments – such as social media profiles – in way that may help with future career and education opportunities.

Joe Wilson, Head of New Ventures at SQA, said: “We believe Mozilla’s Open Badges project enables greater flexibility for learners to demonstrate their achievements. Open badges have the potential to allow individuals to display the accomplishments they make along each step of the learner journey, and receive recognition for a single skill or packages of learning that cover a number of skills in relation to a particular task.”

Joe continued: “SQA will work with Mozilla to explore how we can adopt Open Badges. We will encourage our partners to investigate how they could benefit from adopting open badges to support learners across Scotland in addition to the recognition we offer teachers and college lecturers through our CDP courses and training we will explore how we can integrate open badges into our certification processes.”

Erin Knight, Senior Director of Learning and Badges at Mozilla, said: “We are really excited that SQA, as Scotland’s national awarding and accreditation body, is actively exploring how best to implement Open Badges as a means to give learners and institutions the opportunity to demonstrate their skills and accomplishments through digital badges.”

Joe will be speaking at the Mozilla Festival in London on Saturday 26 October about SQA’s work with Mozilla.