Open Educational Resources and their place in teaching and research for Classics. Classical Association Conference 2014. CA14

1. Open Educational Resources and their place in
teaching and research for Classics.
Simon Mahony (University College London)
s.mahony@ucl.ac.uk
With thanks and acknowledgements to
Ulrich Tiedau (University College London)
@simon_mahony
#CA14
#DigiClass
All original content is licenced under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

2. Overview and background
• UCLDH approach
• Open Education Resources
• Changing practices
• Changing culture
• Why this is important
• Possible ways forward
• Questions about discipline specific approaches
• Focus on Classics

3. UCLDH
What we do:
Teaching & Learning
• A new interdisciplinary degree
exploring the intersection of digital
technologies, humanities scholar-
ships and cultural heritage
• MA/MSc Digital Humanities,
started in 2011/12
• Substantial amount of the
core materials released as
Open Educational Resources

5. OER Digital Humanities (DHOER)
• The DHOER project is creating Open Educational Resources
(OER) from a comprehensive range of introductory materials
in Digital Humanities, making them freely available to anyone.
• As well as supporting the Digital Humanities, the DHOER
project will benefit many cognate disciplines, including the
whole spectrum of the Arts and Humanities, Cultural Heritage,
Information Studies, Library Studies, and Computer Science.

6. Open Agenda
‘Open access stands for unrestricted access and unrestricted
reuse. Paying for access to content makes sense in the world
of print publishing, where providing content to each new
reader requires the production of an additional copy, but
online it makes much less sense to charge for content when
it is possible to provide access to all readers anywhere in the
world.’
Public Library of Science (www.plos.org/about/open-access)

9. Milestones in OER development
• 1998 – Open Content Initiative
• 2000 – UNESCO conference
• 2002 – MIT OpenCourseWare
• 2002 – Creative Commons (licences released)
• 2006 – OU OpenLearn [UK]
• 2007 – Cape Town Open Educational Declaration
• UK JISC/HE Academy OER
• 2009/10 – Pilot Programme [UK]
• 2010/11 – JISC/HE Academy OER phase 2 [UK]
• 2011/12 – JISC/HE Academy OER phase 3 [UK]

10. Milestones in Open Access
2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)
2003 Bethesda Statement on OA Publishing
2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to
Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

11. OER Digital Humanities (DHOER)
• UKOER II new release strand, HE Academy and JISC funded
• Teaching and learning materials from a range
of existing modules
• Introductions into the field, topics and methodology of DH
• Emphasis on the acquisition of practical and professionally relevant
skills
• JISC strand
• Also looking at the impact of digital resources on society
• User studies

15. DHOER: Digital Humanities OER
• Creating OERs
• Range of teaching materials
• Relevant to Digital Humanities and beyond
• Each available as full module or individual objects
• Granular approach

16. Packaging teaching resources
Levels of granularity
• Full module
• Individual lecture
• Seminar with discussion topics and readings
• Learning objects
• Practical exercises
• Worksheets and handouts

17. Widening the reach of OERs
Making OERs free online does NOT make
them available to all.
‘It is not technologies with inherent pedagogical qualities that
triumph in distance education but technologies which are
generally available to citizens’
(Keegan, How Successful Is Mobile Learning? 2008 )

18. Further issues
• Context of a single OER?
• Adequate and relevant metadata
• Discoverability
• No standard for classification
• Assessment: credit-bearing module?
• Localisation
• Cultural differences
• Learning styles / layouts / graphics / symbols
• Ownership / relationship
• Sustainability

19. Growth of knowledge
• Teaching materials are improved
• Becomes and iterative cycle
• Peer review of materials
• Returned with improvements and acknowledgement
• Digital Humanities methodology
• Equal partnerships in research and teaching
• Arts, Humanities and Technology

20. OER and Open Resources for Classics
The two main UK repositories:
Jorum
Jisc funded repository
HumBox
Jisc/HE Academy OER Pilot Programme

31. Community approach
Digital Classicist
Jiscmail-hosted email list
Classics more generally
Classics (Liverpool) Jiscmail
OER-DISCUSS Jiscmail
Social media
Classics International (Facebook)
Twitter

32. Broad based vs granular approach
Open Course Ware
MIT
Coursera
OERs
‘Micro OERs’

33. OER as Learning objects
vs
Open Learning Programmes
Not a competition, just different things.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Coursera
OpenLearn
Open Access resources

43. OpenLearn
Sign in and register for courses?
There is much more
Many resources freely available CC BY NC SA
Particularly language learning
Taster Materials for Classical Studies
Ancient Olympics

48. Other platforms
Udacity: 'Advance your career …' (build portfolio)
Mainly programming and Computer Science
edX: 'great online courses […] world's best universities'
Founded Harvard & MITx (now includes Berkeley)

51. OER Search engines?
Xpert: http://xpert.nottingham.ac.uk/
Search: Classics
Retrieves Oxford podcasts
But
Search: DHOER returns no results (so not universal)

53. Oxford University
Podcasts
What is Tragedy?
Beazley Archive
Faculty Classics
Most from Jisc/HE OER Strand 1
and hence CC licenced

57. Some new initiatives
Perseids: http://sites.tufts.edu/perseids
a collaborative editing platform for source documents
Alpheios: http://alpheios.net
reading tools for Latin, ancient Greek and Arabic
Iliados: http://iliados.com
grammatical and syntactical searches on the Perseus Greek Treebank
Leipzig e-Humanities: http://www.e-humanities.net
Tools & resources under development
Source code freely available and reusable

58. Discoverability and more
Consistent and appropriate metadata
Appropriate open licence
Repurposable
Open format

59. University MOOCS?
University London International Programmes
Class Central: Taster courses hosted by Coursera
Comp Science, Business, Education, Law
King's College London: MOOCs
In partnership with FutureLearn
Causes of war
UCL: UCLeXtend
eXtend your learning with UCL
Introduction to Digital curation
Marketing ploy for the big players?
Advocacy and public engagement?

60. Coda
Reflection on our teaching practice
Digital Humanities Pedagogy
Pedagogy of Digital Classics?
What skills do our students need?
What is the best way for them to attain them?

62. Selected references
Digital Classicist Wiki: Educational Resources
http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Educational_Resources
Mahony S (2013) 'Open Education, Open Educational Resources, and
their impact on research led teaching in Classics', Digital Classicist
Berlin, TOPOI (video & slides)
http://de.digitalclassicist.org/berlin/seminar2013
Mahony, Tiedau and Sirmons, 'Open access and online teaching
materials for digital humanities', in Warwick, Terras, & Nyhan eds.
(2012). Digital Humanities in Practice. Facet.
Marie-Claire Beaulieu (Tufts):
‘Teaching with the Perseids Platform: Tools and methods’
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2013-08mb.html
Davor Orlic (2013) ‘Micro Open Educational Resources (Micro OERs) are
a novel concept in online education’, videoLectures.net
http://blog.videolectures.net/micro-open-educational-resources-micro-
oers-are-a-novel-concept-in-online-education

63. Slideshare: simon_mahony
http://www.slideshare.net/simon_mahony