1. Open Education, Open Educational Resources,
and their impact on research led teaching in
Classics.
Simon Mahony (University College London)
s.mahony@ucl.ac.uk
With thanks and acknowledgements to
Ulrich Tiedau (University College London)
Davor Orlič (Knowledge for All Foundation Ltd)

2. Overview and background
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UCLDH approach
MA/MSc in Digital Humanities
Open Education Resources in DH
Changing practices
Changing culture
Possible ways forward
• Questions about discipline specific approaches
• Focus on Classics
• Note: the URLs are all live in the screenshots if you wish to follow any.

3. UCLDH
What we do:
Teaching & Learning
• A new interdisciplinary degree
exploring the intersection of digital
technologies, humanities scholarships and cultural heritage
• MA/MSc Digital Humanities,
launched in 2011/12
• Substantial amount of the
core materials released as
Open Educational Resources

5. OER Digital Humanities (DHOER)
• The DHOER project is creating Open Educational Resources
(OER) from a comprehensive range of introductory materials
in Digital Humanities, making them freely available to anyone
• As well as supporting the Digital Humanities, the DHOER
project will benefit many cognate disciplines, including the whole
spectrum of the Arts and Humanities, Cultural Heritage, Information
Studies, Library Studies, and Computer Science.

6. Open Agenda
‘Open access stands for unrestricted access
and unrestricted reuse. Paying for access to
content makes sense in the world of print publishing,
where providing content to each new reader requires the production of an
additional copy, but online it makes much less sense to charge for
content when it is possible to provide access to all readers anywhere in
the world.’
Public Library of Science (www.plos.org/about/open-access)

10. Milestones in OER development
• 1998 – Open Content Initiative
• 2000 – UNESCO conference
• 2002 – MIT OpenCourseWare
• 2002 – Creative Commons (licences released)
• 2006 – OU OpenLearn [UK]
• 2007 – Cape Town Open Educational Declaration
• UK JISC/HE Academy OER
• 2009/10 – Pilot Programme [UK]
• 2010/11 – JISC/HE Academy OER phase 2 [UK]
• 2011/12 – JISC/HE Academy OER phase 3 [UK]

11. Milestones in Open Access
2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)
2003 Bethesda Statement on OA Publishing
2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to
Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

12. OER Digital Humanities (DHOER)
• UKOER II new release strand, HE Academy and JISC funded
• Teaching and learning materials from a range
of existing modules
• Introductions into the field, topics and methodology of DH
• Emphasis on the acquisition of practical and professionally relevant
skills
• JISC strand
• Also looking at the impact of digital resources on society
• User studies

16. DHOER: Digital Humanities OER
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Creating OERs
Range of teaching materials
Relevant to Digital Humanities and beyond
Each available as full module or individual objects
• Granular approach

17. Packaging teaching resources
Levels of granularity
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Full module
Individual lecture
Seminar with discussion topics and readings
Learning objects
Practical exercises
Worksheets and handouts

18. DHOER
Open Educational Resource
versus
OERs as learning objects
Introducing ‘Micro OERs’

19. Sustaining OERs
• Investment
• Academic culture
• Format suitable for re-purposing
• Size suitable for re-purposing

20. Widening the reach of OERs
Making OERs free online does NOT make
them available to all.
‘It is not technologies with inherent pedagogical qualities that
triumph in distance education but technologies which are
generally available to citizens’
(Keegan, How Successful Is Mobile Learning? 2008)

21. Further issues
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Context of a single OER?
Adequate and relevant metadata
Discoverability
No standard for classification
Assessment: credit-bearing module?
Localisation
Cultural differences
• Learning styles / layouts / graphics / symbols
• Ownership / relationship
• Sustainability

22. Growth of knowledge
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Teaching materials are improved
Becomes and iterative cycle
Peer review of materials
Returned with improvements and acknowledgement
• Digital Humanities methodology
• Equal partnerships in research and teaching
• Arts, Humanities and Technology

28. VideoLectures.NET
A global web portal for
high-definition academic videos
United Nations and UNESCO award
for the Best Educational Product of the Decade
'one of the most outstanding examples of creative
and innovative e-Content in the World in the last
decade’

29. VideoLectures.NET
‘The largest OER free and open access digital library of
academic talks’
Content built up via European research projects based in Computer
Science fields. Other content from OCW partners.
850 events
15,236 lectures
17,503 videos
Licenses: CC-NC-ND

31. With thanks and acknowledgement
Davor Orlic
davor.orlic@ijs.si
Knowledge for All Foundation Ltd
Languages & the Media, Berlin
November 23rd 2012
http://www.languages-media.com

32. Coursera MOOC (Winter 2011)
‘Introduction to Databases’
108,000 accounts
475,000 assignment submissions
3,150,000 video views (heavy use of video)
(Jennifer Widom, Stanford. Module coordinator))
LEARNERS PREFER VIDEO?
YouTube (100 hours uploaded per minute)
MOOCs (3 million accounts)
INITIATIVES AROUND VIDEO?
Open content: OCW (20,000 courses)
Massive lecture capture system: Opencast Matterhorn project (700
Universities)
Massive portals specialized in video lectures: VLN, Polimedia (25.000
academic videos)

35. transLectures
To develop innovative, cost-effective solutions to
produce accurate transcriptions and translations in
VideoLectures
Make educational repositories truly accessible both to
speakers of different languages and to people with
disabilities.

36. transLectures status
•TRANSCRIPTION (EML)
•the complete transcription of English lectures took 45000 hours
(2 months running parallel)
•TRANSLATION (XRCE, UPV, RWTH)
•different segmentation strategies for transcription and translation
being considered
•INTELLIGENT INTERACTION WITH USERS
•experimental protocol to evaluate intelligent interactive approaches
for users
•INTEGRATION
•first steps on integration software into VL, Polimedia, Matterhorn
•EVALUATION
•human evaluations for the second round of evaluation

37. The tools as getting there:
Develop open tools for transcription and translation
Deploy the tools in the Opencast Matterhorn system
Think of a business plan and ideas on a spin-off
Provide optimisations for existing languages
Plan to extend the language set to Chinese, Hindi and others
Is intelligent interaction a realistic concept?
More focus on English into Slovenian translations (Davor)
Building a community of students for evaluation

38. In the context of OERs:
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Videos that can be cut and mashed up
Small bite sized videos
Display in any platform
Freely and openly available
Text translated into many languages

40. OER and Open Resources for Classics
The two main UK repositories:
Jorum
Jisc funded repository
HumBox
Jisc/HE Academy OER Pilot Programme

50. Community approach
Digital Classicist
Jiscmail-hosted email list
Classics more generally
Classics (Liverpool) Jiscmail
OER-DISCUSS Jiscmail
Social media
Classics International (Facebook)
Twitter

51. Broad based vs granular approach
OpenCourseWare (OCW)
MIT
Coursera
OERs
‘Micro OERs’

52. OER as Learning objects
vs
Open Learning Programmes
Not a competition, just different things.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Coursera
OpenLearn
Open Access resources

60. OpenLearn
Sign in an register for courses?
There is much more.
Many resources freely available CC BY NC SA
Particularly language learning
Taster Materials for Classical Studies
Ancient Olympics

63. OER Search engine?
Xpert: http://xpert.nottingham.ac.uk/
Search: Classics
Retrieves Oxford podcasts
But
Search: DHOER
No results (so not universal)

65. Oxford University
Podcasts
What is Tragedy?
Beazley Archive
Faculty Classics
Most from Jisc/HE OER Strand 1
and hence CC licenced

67. Discoverability and more
Consistent and appropriate metadata
Appropriate open licence
Repurposable
Open format

68. Some new initiatives
Perseids: http://sites.tufts.edu/perseids
a collaborative editing platform for source documents
Alpheios: http://alpheios.net
reading tools for Latin, ancient Greek and Arabic
Iliados: http://iliados.com
grammatical and syntactical searches on the
Perseus Greek Treebank
Leipzig e-Humanities: http://www.e-humanities.net
Tools & resources under development
Source code freely available and reusable

69. Coda
Reflection on our teaching practice
Digital Humanities Pedagogy
Pedagogy of Digital Classics?
What skills do our students need?
What is the best way for them to attain them?

71. Reaching beyond the already converted
• Senate House, London (SAS)
• Institute Historical Research
• Digital History
• Institute of English Studies
• Digital Text and Scholarship
• Institute Classical Studies
• Digital Classicist
• OERs for Classics (Berlin DCB & Nottingham ClassAss)

72. References:
Marie-Claire Beaulieu (Tufts):
‘Teaching with the Perseids Platform: Tools and methods’
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2013-08mb.html
Mahony, Tiedau and Sirmons, 'Open access and online teaching
materials for digital humanities', in Warwick, Terras, & Nyhan eds.
(2012). Digital Humanities in Practice. Facet.
Davor Orlič (2013) ‘Micro Open Educational Resources (Micro OERs) are
a novel concept in online education’, videoLectures.net:
http://blog.videolectures.net/micro-open-educational-resources-microoers-are-a-novel-concept-in-online-education/