More early queries…
2 11 2007Does 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.
There is a dearth of properly packaged RLOs to make up that 50+%…if JISC audited what’s available on Jorum and other key repositories it would probably identify only a handful of curriculum areas where it would be possible to source over half a module’s worth of RLOs – and that’s before filtering for pedagogical quality. While the call seeks the “widest possible subject coverage”, it may be that only the most generic curriculum areas are feasible.
Part of this problem is that a lot of stuff out there just isn’t packaged properly and doesn’t communicate with the host VLE – Jorum is one of the few repositories that actually makes RLOs available as properly packaged to a standard (SCORM, IMS-CP etc): too often the ‘object’ consists merely of a web link or, if you’re lucky, a compiled swf file (e.g. Merlot, but even the products of some academic projects specifically funded as ‘RLO’). One tends to find that commercial RLOs are much better packaged – but this call precludes them.
The up to 35% institutional reuse also makes for the generic and non-specialised. Academic management are like wolves with curriculum duplication – they will reorganise and merge at the very hint of it! Is the 35% two-way? e.g. includes another dept using our objects and us using theirs?
Hi Peter -
Some good questions, sorry for the delay in response, as you probably spotted I was on leave last week.
We’re not just looking 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 “up to” 35%, if you have content developed for another course you could use some of it here. And naturally we hope to see content developed or repurposed within these projects used as widely as possible.
Hope this helps
David