iTunes and You
In the iTunes and You project, we propose to take existing disparate material, which has been published as open content for research and teaching by humanities staff at the University of Southampton, and work with the university marketing department to repackage it as learning modules in the form of iTunesU course packages. This will be an innovative way to showcase how research and teaching resources can be combined in bite-sized ways which maximises their use for by a global audience of learners.
Timescale
October, 2012 - December, 2012
Key contact(s):
Kate Borthwick, project manager, LLAS
Funded by:
The Higher Education Academy as part of the HEA OER International Project, itself part of the HEA/JISC UKOER Phase 3 programme.
Project aims and outcomes:
iTunesU is often seen as exclusively for high-quality video or audio recordings and it can be an intimidating place for researchers and teachers to consider when wishing to publish their work openly. Each institutional site is managed by a central team of gatekeepers who are likely to monitor quality and control the deposit process. This can be off-putting and can present university staff with obstacles to engagement. This project aims to work at reducing the barriers to publishing work on a university’s iTunes site by indicating ways in which the process could be simplified, demystifying the iTunesU selection process, and creating exemplar models of how research and teaching materials can be repackaged as mini-courses.
This project will focus on open research data and OERs that have been published by Southampton as part of the JISC-funded OpenLIVES project. This material consists of oral testimonies collected from Spanish migrants, and includes images, learning objects, and various teaching materials. Materials are in Spanish and English and have wide applicability across a range of disciplines and to a range of audiences. All resources are currently available in the teaching and learning repository, the HumBox, and are published as separate files.
Ultimately, this project aims to provide a case study of how humanities academics have engaged with issues around publishing their research data openly alongside OERs in a community repository setting, and then describe how this work was extended into the more polished, showcase-style format of iTunesU. This process will capture a range of ways of engaging with open practice and offer practical exemplars of how academics can make best use of open practice to showcase their own work.
Objectives:
- To repackage a range of existing OERs (research data and teaching material) into iTunes course modules
- To work with the university marketing department to understand better how academics can engage with iTunesU
- To produce a simple, pedagogical guide as an OER for other academics to use in understanding how to package research data and teaching resources for iTunesU
- To initiate a process within Southampton, which can be an exemplar for other academics to engage with open practice and open showcasing of both research and teaching work via iTunes
- To initiate monitoring of impact of Southampton OERs in the global community
Links:
The Higher Education Academy: www.heacademy.ac.uk
HEA/JISC UKOER Phase 3 programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer
Further resources available on our website:
LLAS manages the HumBox teaching and learning repository: www.humbox.ac.uk
Find out more about the OpenLIVES project from our website http://www.llas.ac.uk/projects/OpenLIVES and project blog http://openlives.wordpress.com/
LLAS has long-standing experience of leading Open Educational Resource projects, such as HumBox, Community Cafe, FAVOR and OpenLIVES. We have also collaborated on the JISC-funded Faroes, Oneshare and HumBox Impact projects.
