Background
The Influenza Outbreak iCase was created to replace a wet laboratory practical that became too complicated and expensive to run. It was replaced initially with a paper-based PBL exercise which was not popular and received poor feedback. The technical challenge was to find decision-making software that gave students a realistic experience of limited resources and time to resolve a scientific scenario. Hot Potatoes Quandary http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com/quandary.php provided a partial solution in that it let us create action mazes. Influenza Outbreak represents a substantial amount of work, students would not be able to complete it in a single session so Damion Young attached Quandary to a database to record activity.
The Scenario
You work in a public health lab, there has been an outbreak of influenza in a local school. You need to write a briefing note for the minister before he appears on “Wold at One”. You have limited time and resources and must decide what tests need doing and interpret the results. Before starting the exercise you must demonstrate competence by answering MCQs correctly.
This OER project
I went to the JISC town meeting in Birmingham and was distinctly underwhelmed by the session but came away thinking that the outcomes were two-fold to identify the problems and barriers to sharing educational resources and to provide a mass of existing resources that can be shared. It was very clear that the JISC was not going to pay for content creation.
The next stage was organized by HEA Biosciences who made the process very painless by saying clearly that they wanted simulations, e-learning to replace lab practicals, field work etc. iCase fits neatly into the programme. We had to make it available to external users for the subject centre to review – Damion sorted that out.
Writing the proposal was very straightforward, again Biosciences told me what I needed to do clearly which was good.
The Contract
The problems only really started when the contract arrived. The University of Oxford is very large. To give some perspective on size, the medical division is about the size of many large universities on its own. My office is based in the science area in town whilst the MSD admin is largely based at the John Radcliffe which is a steep hill away from town. I carefully took a paper version of the contract up the hill to be signed. A few days later I was told that the university lawyers will only accept electronic copies. I contacted Terry who kindly sent a revised version of the contract electronically. I dispatched that to the divisional assistant registrar who deals with these matters. By now we were in early September. I was asked for a spending plan. By late September the university lawyer had returned the contract covered in comments. I contacted Terry. We then had an amazingly frustrating few weeks chasing contracts and people who might sign them. Senior academics were bothered. All these OER project involve essentially an agreement between one (of many) institutions to provide resources and document what was done in making them sharable. On the face of it not very difficult. One sensible contract should be able to cover different subject stands but no MEDEV is engaged in the same process (though they have still to produce a contract). Eventually it was decided that it was not worth lawyer time to correct the contract and it was signed – only for poor Terry to have to say that the contract itself would need modifying. It seems to me that, as is common in life, the only people benefiting at the moment are possibly lawyers. This clearly needs noting as a barrier to sharing and project outcome.
Has this affected the project, yes. We need some original graphics for the website. This was included and approved in the project proposal. We have identified suitable external companies to do the work but cannot waste more of their time until we are in a position to pay them. We are continuing with the development reviewing the current iCase and developing another because this is something we need to do to meet our teaching commitments.
December
Still no signed contract. I got the division to sign a contract but they need a signature from the Leeds before they will ask for the money. Apparently another new contract is on its way. Difficult to bother busy people again in relation to the contract.
We asked the academic concerned for permission to upload his materials officially and this seems OK. Of course the lecture has images of unknown provenance. We can spend time and money replacing these images but are left wondering if this is actually a useful way to spend time. The lecture handout is excellent it supports one lecture in an integrated series of lectures – how meaningful will this be to a student at a different institution with a different course structure? We only have the handout – no audio so in many ways we have a series of diagrams. There is a relationship between these diagrams but that was drawn out during the lecture – the audio?
January
Damion had a helpful response from Quandary. We can publish his modifications to their source code and the they have offered to put a link from their website to the development.
Decided to make a test upload into Jorum Open. I thought the easiest thing would be to use images from the lecture handout. Extracting images from ppt was easy, save at jpg. I then contacted the academic who created these images to ask for his agreement a) to pt single images into Jorum Open b) to agree the wording on the copyright notice. Exifer is a nice, free bit of software that automates adding copyright to image collections. I haven’t used it for a while so had to spend time fumbling with the package before I could get it to work.Of course when I checked the images, right click save as image from ppt only saves one part where there are multiple images in one slide so will need to redo these slides using a screen grab technique which will, inevitably, reduce the image quality.
Creating an account for Jorum Open was simple, but I forgot to wait for the confirmatory e-mail. Uploading the first file was simple, until I got to the sections asking for information about the image. Despite having a ppt file with additional notes for images, I have little idea what would be useful to someone else at another institution or am I really sure what the image is. This is skilled work that needs either the original academic who created the image or a librarian. Continued anyway until I got to the creative commons options – I need to return to the academic for instructions.
The academic confirmed the wording of the copyright text and chose “attribution non commercial no derivatives. Uploading a Flash file (animation with audio converted from PowerPoint to swf with Ispring) was remarkably painless and I could return to edit. Tried next morning and Jorum had neither remembered my login identity (despite checking “remember me for a week” nor would let me edit the deposit.
Contacted the graphics people to make an appointment to discuss our needs which is quite exciting.
Contacted another set of graphics people so that we have something to choose between.
BioOER meeting in Oxford was fun but quite intense. It was nice to meet others involved in the project. We used the top floor seminar rooms because they have a nice view. There are ceiling mikes and speakers which were installed a few years ago as we have a couple of profoundly deaf students. They were very useful when it came to a Skype contribution – even I found it loud and the shared desktop worked but would have been better full-size (though was adequate for what we needed).
Came away with a rather frightening list of things to do! Followed up by a clear, even longer, list from Terry!
Asked Prof James for a photograph, short bit of text explaining why he started iCases and a pod cast; the first tow arrived within a couple of hours and are already on the project site.
I was at an OxTalent meeting and raised the question of institutional strategy about sharing via OER. OUCS have been working with the University lawyers to produce an agreement for the Open Spires OER project. Melissa sent me one of these agreements sometime ago. I’ve arranged to meet with Pete to talk about BioOER and contracts next week. It occurred to me last night that I could just autoreplace iTunesU with iCases and the contract would probably work. Don’t expect the University lawyer will like that approach much!
The M25 Learning Technologists group has started a Ning which is great. They are asking for someone to talk about OER and Jorum Open at the next meeting. I’m going to talk about the BioOER, the OER process and Open Jorum in March.
Damion has spent most of today dealing with student queries as today is the deadline for submitting Influenza Outbreak. Some of the queries arise from programming issues which we hope to resolve but about half of them come from students doing the wrong thing, leaving it too late, not reading instructions etc. Given that our students are quite well trained already and know where to come for help, we are wondering what would happen to a student using the hosted service? It would not be practicable to provide tech support for any unknown institution where he doesn’t know what the set-up is like in the first place.
The preliminary graphics arrived as pdf for us to inspect. Pretty exciting at first as they were Oxford blue and acid green. We started going through them, particularly with accessibility in mind and began to generate a list of problems/changes for the designers. I took copies over to the faculty office as there are a couple of colour-blind people there and got them to talk through what they saw. These comments simply reinforced our list, adding little new except that one professor said oh “its green, now that you said it is green, it looked red to me”. iCases Influenza Outbreak is being used by students this term so we arranged to have photocopies of the graphics available in the IT lab during the workshop. Students, and staff helping with the session, made comments, again they were very much along the lines we had originally identified. One student made a plaintive plea for smaller screen sizes and the difficulty of horizontal scrolling. Sent the graphics company a long list of problems and changes. Strangely, we all found the design and colours more appealing as we got used to them.
March
Heard back from the graphics company, they have asked for an extension and can we delay receiving the graphics for another week? We are beginning to panic a bit.
Heard back from OUCS re the consent form. They are happy for us to use the form I modified and will take it to the General Purposes Committee next month. It took about 15 minutes to complete the form in preparation for the academic to sign. Partly because I had to look up phone numbers and exact address and partly because of the way the original form had been created using multiple tabs. Assuming we could agree on a form it would be sensible to construct either a web form or something really easy for contributors to complete.