This will be targeted at FE and HE educators and cover both practical and pedagogic issues. It will be designed to be a practical guide rather than a study. The focus will be on the acquisition, import and repurposing of content for use physically with a VLE, rather than the incorporation of effective linking to external resources in novel contexts.
In this context “repurposing” does not mean merely identifying resources and pointing at them from within VLEs, or even taking complete resources and incorporating them physically within a VLE. Adoption of wider resources (and particularly their reuse and repurposing) by FE and HE teaching staff means enabling them to access such resources in a sufficiently disaggregated way for them to build such resources into their own course content in such a way as to make effective pedagogic use of them. The SoURCE Evaluation Report confirms this view[1]
Such reuse of disaggregated content, physically within a VLE, means that issues of ownership, copyright and IPR must also be addressed. The project work with other X4L projects that are focusing more closely on this area and draw on existing sources of guidance to facilitate training and dissemination to staff.
Equally important in this context are issues of the quality assurance of the newly created material, which incorporates the repurposed content, and making the “new” material more widely available for repurposing itself. This is an area the project will focus closely on in terms of both educational quality (a particularly important issue for FE/HE “cross-over” courses) and issues of usability and accessibility. The project will work closely with other involved in issues of Accessibility, and in particular with the Royal National College for the Blind and TechDIS.
It is vital that the pedagogic implications of repurposing are evaluated and understood. The project will use formal instruments to evaluate not just the outcomes, but also more importantly the process of the use of repurposed content in terms of both staff and students.
In particular, an emphasis will be placed on promoting and evaluating “active learning paradigms”. Because the project will be carrying out the work using at least two very different VLE systems, a range of issues relating to the “inherent pedagogies” of content and learner centred VLEs can also be explored.
Work will focus on FE courses and HE/FE “cross-over” courses (the new Foundation Degrees). Particular emphasis will be placed on the promotion (and evaluation) of pedagogic awareness and cultural change in FE teaching staff in the contexts of the repurposing of content and course design for delivery using VLEs. This is an area, which was identified as crucial by the JISC MLESG SURF Pilot[2]:
Also:
As a result of this work contributions will be made available to Strand B projects.
A consequence of the proposed work would be further conformance developments on the COSE VLE. Following discussions between Staffordshire University and Cambridge Software Publishing (publishers of COSE), it has been agreed to investigate the change of the supply of the COSE system to an Open Source Initiative model. As a step towards this, the COSE 2 system has been freely available in binary since March 2002. This will continue, and the IMS Content Packaging and Enterprise conformant version, 2.1, will be available shortly. Versions of COSE benefiting from the project’s work will be similarly made freely available.
SURF’s intention is to work with the outputs of Strand B, and other
tools providers as needed to use packaging tools to capture, describe
and package content (initially to IMS CP specification, and later
incorporating SCORM and possibly Simple Sequencing and Learning Design)
from both “plain file” and “website” formats in to “IMS” conformant
packages. Granada have also agreed to make their “Publisher” tool
available for the work.
Content thus packaged will then either be imported into a VLE with a
view to repurposing it within the VLE, or, where the VLE does not
provide for internal disaggregation and repurposing, an access tool to
allow a VLE “course designer” to find and import disaggregated content
for repurposing would be used. As has been found with both the 7/99
IMS projects and the MLESG Pilots such activities inevitably require
significant technical effort in ensuring the technical and information
profile of the exchange is successfully negotiated, and therefore
modification of code at the tool and/or VLE end. If best use is to be
made of the work carried out, the “end” stage of the work must be to
provide/export packaged material to repositories to ensure that outputs
from repurposing work themselves be distributed and subsequently further
repurposed. To this end the project will also work with Strand B
projects. (The project will also be seeking to work with “local”
repositories.) Again, this work will inevitably involve technical work
in negotiating the information and structural profile of such
exchanges. In addition, it will be necessary to liaise with the same
developers and those involved in providing DNER services to ensure
appropriate metadata standards are employed in such exported content.
Because the work with tools and repository developers will be done
transparently, claims of conformance can be more easily tested than with
proprietary solutions. This is very important in the context of
working with emerging specifications.