JISC

Introduction

The X4L call focused on the “repurposing of existing content”. A prime goal of the project is to educate, via participation and dissemination, FE & HE staff, both academic and technical, in practical issues that relate to re-purposing of content and to show how this can lead to re-use of content across FE and HE sectors. In doing this it will seek to provide practical examples of good practice of content re-purposing as a training resource to be used with other staff and for dissemination. The project will identify and develop re-purposable content for use and evaluation with staff and student cohorts across a range of levels of curriculum within identified curriculum areas. 

The project concentrates firmly on the repurposing of content for use within MLEs/VLEs and focuses on the various phases needed to enable this to take place effectively. These will involve formulation of the necessary procedures, and the subsequent training of both support and teaching staff to allow them to carry out:

• the identification and acquisition of content including its existing metadata where this exists
• the use of tools for the packaging of content, which employ the appropriate international specifications and standards (for example IMS and SCORM), to capture material and add additional metadata where required
• further use these of tools to disaggregate and re-aggregate the content and create standard content packages and import them into VLEs for unpackaging and repurposing; where the VLE allows it, use the VLE for further disaggregation, reaggregation and repurposing to support courses within the VLE.   This might include the export of VLE content to CD to assist with off-line working.
• the packaging of repurposed content (again using international specifications and standards) for export to digital repositories and further reuse

At the JISC town meeting for X4L “out of the box” thinking was encouraged.  To this end the project will focus on addressing the issue the vast amount of “learning content” held on HEI and FEI intranets and web servers which is not currently easily accessible for repurposing and which requires description and packaging for VLE use, as well as content from the DNER and other national non-commercial providers. In doing this work the project will:

• exploit existing tools developed under the JISC’s contribution to the IMS and other Interoperability work and contribute to their development – for example “Packman”, “Package It!", and repository systems developed under JISC and other programmes and also tools from vendors such as the Granada Learnwise “Publisher” tool.    Work at a technical level with Strand B Tools and Service developers, existing tools developers and VLE providers to ensure that the technical details of standards-based interchanges of content are effectively implemented
• carry out an investigation and formal evaluation of how the design of learning experiences for students is influenced in terms of pedagogic approach by the availability of repurposable content and evaluate its impact on teaching staff and learners.   In particular, an emphasis will be placed on promoting and evaluating “active learning paradigms” and associated cultural change

Aims and objectives and project approach

A Practical Guide to the Repurposing of Content for use with MLEs/VLEs  

Explanation  

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. 

An Evaluative Study on the Pedagogic Implications and Cultural Change implicit in the use of Repurposed Content  

Explanation  

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]: 

Contribution to Summative Reports of Strand B Projects

As a result of this work contributions will be made available to Strand B projects. 

A free Standards Conformant VLE for use in FE/HE

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.   

Formative Technical Outputs

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. [1]Beetham, H., Taylor, J. and Twining, P., SoURCE Evaluation Report [PDF], The Open University, August 2001, pp 77.

[2] Stiles, M.J., “SURF Consortium - Interoperability between COSE and MIS Systems used across the Consortium”, JISC, January 2002, pp 41