Date: 10 Apr 2012
Time: 09:30 – 16:00
Location: Herschel Building Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne Tyne and Wear , UK, NE1 7RU
Booking: The Higher Education Academy website
Contact email: Bill Foster
This event is being hosted as part of the Higher Education Academy’s OER Workshop and Seminar Series
This workshop is a practical hands-on introduction to the creation and dissemination of electronic Open Educational Resources in mathematics, statistics and numeracy. It is aimed at all in numerate disciplines who want to create such material and make it available to as wide an audience as possible. You will be using Numbas, an open-source, browser based e-learning and e-assessment system developed and used at Newcastle University. Numbas combines powerful mathematical functionality with the ability to include all that the web can offer together with your own multi-media content such as video or text in order to create rich, formative learning materials with excellent feedback. Numbas can be distributed over a wide range of platforms, an absolute necessity for electronic OER, and is SCORM-2004 compliant.
We will show you how to create material using Numbas to your own specification and requirements, and how to manage and distribute it.
Apart from the hands-on session, we will have three experts giving short talks on relevant topics:
1) OER materials: what are they and how you find and use them. (Member of the SCORE Team, Support Centre for Open Resources in Education)
2) Using electronic methods in numerate disciplines. (Professor Cliff Beevers, chairman of the eAssessment Association)
3) OER and Creative Commons: copyright and IP issues in creating OER. (Suzanne Hardy, Senior Advisor, School of Medical Sciences Education Development, Newcastle University).
An important aim of the day is to start the discussion on how the HE community can co-operate in creating OER in this vital area. For example, is it possible to have any form of quality control? If so what criteria should be used? Should there be a centrally managed database, on mathcentre for example? If not, how does the community find out about good practice/materials?
It would be useful for the hands-on sessions if the delegates who have an idea of the sort of OER materials they would like to create could give that information to the Newcastle Team when they register online. Some knowledge and use of LaTeX would be desirable, but not essential.
Programme:
9.30am Registration and coffee
10.00-10.10am Introduction and information for delegates
10:10–11:00am Setting the scene in OER for numerate disciplines, short talks by:
- David Mossley, HEA Acting Academic Lead for On-Line Learning
- Suzanne Hardy on Creative Commons and OER
- Megan Quentin-Baxter, Member of the SCORE Team (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education)
- Cliff Beevers on the use of electronic methods for assessment and learning in numerate disciplines.
11:00–11.30am Introduction to Numbas and the editor and examples of the production of OER materials
11.30–11.45am Split into teams or individuals and hands-on tasks decided for each team
11.45-12.30pm Using Numbas and other tools to create materials based on the tasks decided. This will be mentored by members of the Newcastle Team.
12.30–13.15pm Lunch
13.15–14.15pm Further development of the tasks.
14.00–14.45pm Discussion on the tasks by the teams/individuals
14.55-15.00pm Coffee
15.00–16.00pm Plenary Session on the development of OER materials for numerate disciplines in the HE community