Just to let you all know I am in Berlin at Online Educa, and will respond to emails and blog comments pretty much within the hour. But for you to phone me would probably cost as much as your project would receive in funding if successful! So unless it is really urgent, just mail or blog comment.
One common query at the moment is the 10 page limit… this does *not* include the cover-sheet, FOI declaration, letters of support or staff CVs.
We’re not just looking in this call for the reuse of RLOs in the narrowest sense - rather you could be reusing anything from a single image or a page of text, right up to an entire online activity or assessment. We do appreciate the current difficulties with interoperability of packaged learning objects across VLEs and repositories, and there are various projects involving JISC, CETIS and others working to address these issues.
We know that this will be a difficult project to sell to senior staff (that is part of the reason we are running it!), how projects manage to work through institutional systems will be very interesting to us.
35% reuse is, deliberately, “up to” 35%, if you have content developed for another course you could use some of it within this allowance. And naturally we hope to see content developed or repurposed within these projects used as widely as possible.
Does content specially commissioned by the lead institution count as “external content”? No. We don’t need to fund projects to tell us that institutions can commission and use content designed for them. External content is content that has not been specifically designed for you to use.
Our institution or area doesn’t have “departments”, are we ineligible? No. As long as you can identify your module (or comparable “chunk” of learning) to a subject area that you teach, that is fine.
What kind of resources do you want to see projects using? Anything from single images right up to an entire activity. Be creative!
Our validation cycle is longer than you allow for - can we still bid? Yes… note in the circular that there is a substantial gap between when the funding ends and when the final report is due. We have done this precisely because we know that things take time. But bear in mind you would still be funded for the same time, and you should really consider telling us about this in your outline workplan in the bid document.
I’ve already been approached by publishers and related agencies looking for an involvement in this call. I have to be careful to say that JISC does not recommend or endorse any of these agencies, nor will it disclose details of your correspondence without your permission to other agencies.
So I have made this post, for commercial companies to respond to below, registering their interest in the call and readiness to adhere to the letter and spirit of the circular. If your project is interested in finding a commercial partner to work with, why not start with examining what those below can offer?
A few people have asked about the “percentages” of content from different sources that successful projects can use. For those who haven’t yet memorised the circular, this is paragraph 14, point 3.
“Use of identified materials. Projects must identify at least some of the materials they intend to use at the bidding stage. Materials should be sourced in roughly these proportions, however we hope to see higher percentages of external content used by successful projects:
Now, as I’m sure you will all have guessed, we have no way of accurately measuring the percentage proportion of content from each category. Rather, these figures are intended as a guideline to help you to see the kind of thing we are looking for. And in the assessment process, we will be using these figures as a guideline too, to remind us of the kind of thing we initially asked for.
But there will be no quantifiable metrics, not here.
This funding is HEFCE/HEFCW capital, which in layman’s terms means that it has to go to institutions that already receive funding from one of these organisations (either directly or via a partnership agreement). This has the unfortunate side effect of excluding the following groups:
However, hopefully our efforts here will highlight a lot of issues that will be of benefit to you in whatever part of the education world you call home, and please do consider reusing and repurposing content whatever your funding situation.
[edit: I think Scotland vs Georgia is best not mentioned in this blog again]
The JISC Circular (4/07) has now been published, so we expect to be receiving questions and queries starting from about now.
Please feel free to leave queries as comments on this blog (which will be updated to answer them) and to see the supporting materials (so far we have a very good briefing paper there for you, and a set of links to useful JISC work) by clicking on the “contact” link above.
Thank you!
Our first questions regarding this call all started with the fragment above. And ended there, as we had to stop and correct a major misconception.
This call is not about you repurposing your own content. This is about bringing content in from outside the institution, and using it to revamp one of your modules (and about documenting the process, of course).
Yes, we know that is difficult, and that many institutions may find major internal blocks on this kind of reuse. But a large part of government thinking about content has been based around the idea of it being created once and reused freely. We’d like to identify and remove barriers (all kinds of barriers) so this can happen.
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