2. Community building and user
engagement: developing the
potential of LORO
Some background
Project objectives
The report: activities & outputs, findings,
dissemination, conclusions
4. Languages Open Resources Online
http://loro.open.ac.uk
LORO is about:
• ...making all teaching materials for all levels
and languages available to all users,
• …allowing users to share their own materials
with the OU languages community,
• …making all tutorial materials available to the
wider languages community,
• …starting a change in the way we work (OER,
access, reflection, transparency, quality).
5.
6. SCORE Fellowship project objectives
• Continue engaging OU users and raising
awareness of the benefits of OERs for teaching
and learning;
• Engage active users into further dissemination
activities within and beyond the OU;
• Explore links with other languages institutions to
promote the use of LORO and widen the
community of potential users;
7. SCORE Fellowship project objectives
• Explore links with HE providers across Europe
to share practice around LORO and OERs for
languages;
• Evaluate the effectiveness of LORO and the
extent of the culture change in teaching
practices amongst OU users.
9. Talking OER
• Raising awareness
• (DoL, OU, language teachers)
• Research events
• Impact of OER (23 March 2011)
• Learning by sharing, Bologna
(29-30 March 2012)
10. From OER to OEP
Make openness and OER part of other
activities
DoL Training workspace
Performing Languages
www.performinglanguages.eu
Collaborative Writing and Peer Review
11.
12. Although the primary aim of the learning
partnership is not to produce materials but to
share experiences and develop common
understandings, the resources we produce for
our project (such as workshop activities,
lesson plans, texts and video recordings) will
be made into Open Educational Resources
(OER), freely available under a Creative
Commons license. (…) In this way, we will
ensure that the experiences and ideas from
this project can be either replicated by others
as such, or adapted to their specific context
and needs, thus increasing the impact of the
project.
13.
14. Collaborative Writing and
Peer Review Project
• Give and receive
feedback
• Introduction to peer
review
• Generate ideas
• Keep up to date with
technology (e.g. Jing)
• Maximise use of
existing resources
• Create and share
resources
adapted from a slide by Caroline Rowan-Olive
15. Working across languages – adapting
resources from different languages
slide by Caroline Rowan-Olive
16.
17. OER (languages) workshops
Reusable Reuse Game, Chris Pegler, National Teaching Fellow, The Open University
http://www.slideshare.net/orioleproject/chris-pegler-reusable-card-game
19. How do we measure impact?
• Metrics (eprints inbuilt + google analytics)
• Surveys (questionnaires + usage polls)
• Data from forums
• Focus groups
• Narrative frames
(Barkhuizen, G. and Wette, R. (2008) ‘Narrative frames
for investigating the experiences of language teachers’,
System, 36, 372–387)
20. Quantitative data
• 1.5 million page views to date
• 20,000 downloads in the last 6 months
• over 1100 registered users
• over 2500 resources
• 900+ visitors a month from around the world
(data from LORO inbuilt stats and Google analytics)
21. 100
0
90
0
80
0
70
0
60
0
50
0 For their course
r r e
40
0 From other courses
m r s
30
0
20
0
10
0
0
2010
0 2011
1 2012
2
22. Teachers are using LORO…
• To find resources for their teaching
“I often also check what other teachers have done
to teach the same topic or a similar structure”
• To find inspiration and ideas
“even if I don’t find anything I can use, it starts the
ideas flowing in my head”
• To standardise their practice and ensure
comparability of the student experience
“to make sure the contents covered in my own
tutorial are similar to those used by the rest of the
course team and tutors”
23. Benefits of using LORO
• Increased confidence in one’s own
practice
“Seeing other work enables you to judge your own,
and reassures you that you are doing the right
thing”
• Freedom to develop other aspects of
one’s teaching practice
“It gives us time and space to create some
individual styles”
“I can concentrate on how I will teach culture or
how to teach through the asynchronous forum”
24. Benefits of using LORO
• Value of feedback on one’s work
“gives me an opportunity to gain useful feedback
on the work I do”
• … but there are constraints
“peer comment should be extended, but the
restraints of all our workloads make this a problem”
• Increase quality of teaching materials
“sharing the resources I have created with
colleagues stimulates me to write very good
materials, test them and improve them so that they
can be used by someone else. LORO really
pushes me to produce better materials”
25. “When something you’ve done is going to be
on paper for years and your name will be
attached to it, you feel the need to ensure it is
perfect. When it’s online, even if it’s open to
the rest of the world, it is incredibly
temporary, it can be changed all the time.
There is no perfect final product. I’ve never
been so aware of it before.”
(participant in the Collaborative Writing and Peer Review project)
34. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is
around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Newbiggin Hall Scouts http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fallen_tree_-_geograph.org.uk_-_495932.jpg
35. White, D. Manton, M. JISC-funded OER Impact Study, University of Oxford, 2011
36.
37. A theoretical framework: activity
theory & expansive learning
When whole collective activity systems,
such as work processes and organisations,
need to redefine themselves, traditional
models of learning are not enough. Nobody
knows exactly what needs to be learned.
(…) learners are involved in constructing
and implementing a radically new, wider and
more complex object and concept for their
activity.
Engeström, Y (1987) Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to
developmental research.
