OCL4Ed: 3rd Learning reflection

This post contains a learning reflection (E-activity)  about what I learned along the micro Open Online Course OCL4Ed (3rd learning reflection).

We were invited to reflect about what we learned and how, connecting previous experiences with current findings. We also have to review our previous posts to personal blogs or microblogging systems.

As a starting point to this final reflection I’m going to follow the thread of my previous post where I began to describe my plan about How to introduce OER and Creative Commons in Schools.  The learning goals for that activity were to create a derivative OER using a set of different alien OER. I had to select at least one extract under «all rights reserved’ restriction to be cited accordingly with citation’s rules. I also had to insert images and text and a video from different sources and with different creative commons (CC) licenses. The final product had to be completed with a learning reflection and the post, as a whole, had to be delivered as a derivative work with the right CC license.

What I actually did is called an E-activity in this course. As soon as we posted our assignments in our personal blogs (or in Wikieducator) we must submit the URL to the course learning platform saying if we want to participate in a peer review assessment. If we decide so, we will have to evaluate peer’s works following a detailed predefined rubric. The same will be done by others with my own submissions.

Course leaders are still testing a new peer review prototype. A good and reliable peer review system is key to open online courses so I was eager to test their software even in an early stage. My opinion after having used that tool as a submitter and as a reviewer is that the prototype needs to be improved. There were some issues that causes me some trouble as for example the unexpected refreshing of the page while assessing a work or filling out the form for submitting the URL of a blog post. Besides, some works were incorrectly allocated for review but this could likely be due to a wrong submission by some participant. Say that, I must admit that it worked and it was an interesting and positive experience to assess and be assessed by peers.

There were another moment where I got a bit confused. Two different activities (1st learning reflection and 2nd learning reflection) were both demanding, if I’m not wrong, the same learning outcomes. As the task was the same I’ve just submitted it once.

My digital learning artefacts

My learning products (E-activities) along this course were:

A.- Blog Posts

  1. I completed a Course Survey
  2. A post in my personal blog to declare myself (E-activity 1)
  3. A first/second learning reflection post in my blog about ‘Why open matters’ (1st/2nd Learning Reflection)
  4. A post to create at least two multiple choice questions with feedback related to a invented  case study that we need to define (E-activity 3.1)
  5. A new post to create a derivative OER under an appropriated CC license and with an added learning reflection (E-activity 4.1)
  6. This post is my last E-activity or (3rd Learning Reflection)

B.- Microblogging

  1. I posted several tweets under the hashtag #OCL4Ed in my twitter account
  2. I posted several messages to the #OCL4Ed Community in Google+.

C.- Peer assessments and comments

  1. I commented some blog entries posted by other participants
  2. I assessed more than the minimum number of submitted works required by instructors

What I leaned and how

I learnt a lot along this course. The contents of this course are very broad and extensive and they can be applied to  large and diverse scenarios. The focus of the course was on educational actors (teachers and students) because is where OER are going to mainly be used. My previous knowledge about these topics was very poor. Although I already knew about the existence of OER and Open licenses, I’d never had to deal with them. Now, If I had to select just a few learning outcomes, I’d select:

  • The concept of OER. What they are and what they are not and, why they need to be seriously considered as the only alternative to the current privative’s educational resources.
  • Copyright and Open licenses. Understanding the copyright framework that apply by default and, on the other side, the origin and the basics of the creative commons and GFDL licenses were a valuable and useful learning. The four essential freedoms for free software users was another interesting finding for me.

On the other hand, if I had to respond with a single sentence to the question ‘how I learned‘ then that would be: I learnt (mainly) by doing! I do believe that my E-activities clearly reflect not only what but also how I learned.

Critical thinking

It’s difficult to criticize the basics behind the course topics. I’d had to raise a critical point it’d be about the strategy to deploy these initiatives in real scenarios.  People demand high usability in devices and aplications so to engage more people to produce OER we need to provide better tools and mecanish to manage open content and open license easily.

Wikieducator provides a web-based platform to create OER online. The creative commons searcher helps us to find open content and the license chooser is very intuitive to select the right license but, in my opinion, we need applications (of course opensource) to manage all of these from a single application. Another improvement could be a tool to capture automatically the relevant data (author, license, source, etc) from an existent OER so that it can be easily added to derivative works.

I installed some days ago a new extension for Firefox called ‘OpenAttribute‘ which automatically inform about licensed objects in the webpage you’re browsing, It’s definitely a step ahead but still far from what I was claiming.

Achievements

In summary, I believe that I did gained new competences both as an increase of knowledge and in ICT skills. I’m not sure to what extent all I learned will be applicable to my daily routines. A sustainable production of new OER along the next course, a step forward to start sharing some of them as genuine Free Cultural Works and a dissemination of both OER and CC philosophies are my objectives. I hope that in our year I could look back and tick them as done.

Thanks to the OERu Community for this course and for being there spreading such noble initiatives. Thanks also to Wayne Mackintosh for his continuous support and feedback. An best regards from Vigo (Spain) for all my participant colleagues in this June-July 2014 OCL4Ed course.
Licencia de Creative Commons
Este obra está bajo una licencia de Creative Commons Reconocimiento 4.0 Internacional.

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