TED-ED Launches: Pairing Educators and Animators to Create Open Educational Resources

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on March 19, 2012

Categories: Collaboration Tools, Open Educational Resources, Research

The popular online lecture series TED: Ideas Worth Spreading has recently launched a new initiative called TED-ED: Lessons Worth Sharing.  The new initiative comes with a call to educators everywhere to submit one of their lessons which can be delivered in less than ten minutes, which will sub-sequentially be shared on YouTube with accompanying animation.  You can nominate a teacher who you believe has a valuable lesson worth sharing, or you can nominate yourself if you have a lesson in mind.  Then it’s as simple as creating an audio recording of the lesson.  The audio recording will be brought to live by animators who will create visual media to accompany the educator’s voice.  One can also nominate an animator or express an interest to animate videos.  

The TED-ED initiative is a great pairing of educators who can deliver powerful lessons with digital animators who can bring those lessons to life outside of the classroom.  It’s a bit hard to tell if there is incentive for the animators to do the animation work, or if it is all croudsourced by volunteers.   Regardless, I would love to see someone from UCT get a short lesson shared.  One can also suggest an idea for a lesson.

So far there a number of video examples on the TED-ED YouTube channel in the following categories ‘Awesome Nature’, ‘How Things Work’, ‘Playing With Language’, ‘Questions No One (Yet) Knows the Answers To’ and ‘Inventions that Shaped History’.  Below is a sample video to show what is possible through this initiative!

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Adding language subtitles on Khan Academy Videos

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on March 2, 2012

Categories: Collaboration Tools, Open Educational Resources, Research

Khan Academy has garnered a lot of attention in the last year or so as he has created and shared hundreds of instructional videos for learners to explore.  Despite some critiques of this style of education, its hard to deny the approachability of the Khan videos when one wants to explore a topic from Algebra to Organic Chemistry! 

Last year Khan Academy introduced video translations using functionality developed as part of the Universal Subtitles project.  This means anyone can now provide a language translation for any Khan Academy video.  Many of the more common languages have been added as subtitles on popular videos.  My friend and colleague Adrian Cox proposed that we try to encourage University of Cape Town students, staff and the broader South African community to participate in adding South African language subtitles to some of the Khan Videos which might be useful to South African learners;  I thought it was a delightful idea!  

Adrian intends to use the translated videos as part of his work with the Funda Initiative.  A little background on the initiative:

Funda is an organisation of student volunteer tutors that aims to improve the quality of teaching available to high school students in disadvantaged townships. On Saturday mornings, high school students are brought to UCT to be tutored and mentored. The sessions are just 2 hours and transport is provided. Thanks to the help of the excellent tutors, the students get individual attention and this really helps them to excel.  

Source Funda Project website

As the Funda project has the children physically on UCT campus, the videos may be displayed in UCT labs to assist the students in their home language.  The videos are all downloadable open educational resources, which may be in turn legally distributed to schools with facilities for showing video.  

Below I have prepared a short walkthrough of how to add subtitles to Khan Academy Video.  

 

How to add language subtitles on Khan Academy Videos

Locate a video on the Khan Academy website that you would like to translate, there is approximately 3000 to choose from!  Once you have the video page open you will have to activate the subititles tool bar by clicking on the 'Video Subtitles' button below the video. 

 

Now you will see that on each video in the bottom left there is an option to select the subtitles track for the video you are watching.

 

Subtitles are available for a variety of languages depending on the video.  The subtitles are crowd-sourced so anyone may add a new language translation for each video.  This video has a variety of translations already, from Spanish to Indonesian, but there are no South African languages.  I can add a new translation by clicking on "Add a New Translation"

 

The list of languages that one can create translations for is fairly comprehensive and includes a number of South African languages.  I am choosing Afrikaans for this example so that I can use Google Translate to translate the video (I have chosen Afrikaans as I don't speak any of the South African languages and Afrikaans is the only one available for auto translation using Google Translate)

 

This is the translation tool which displays each line of the transcript and a box below to translate the text line-by-line. One can translate each line of English into the language they have selected. 

 

When you finished the translation you need to save the transcript.  To do this you will have to log in, either by creating an account of signing in with your Twitter, OpenID, Google or Facebook account.

 

When you navigate back to the video the new subtitles track will appear as an option for anyone in the world to use.   My Afrikaans translation is now available for anyone to view once selected from the list of subtitles.
 

 

And it looks something like this!  

 

Since I used Google Translate to translate the subtitles and I am not an Afrikaans speaker, I am sure there are some errors.  Anyone can now edit and improve the subtitles based on what I have entered.

 

 I encourage you to edit and improve my translation for this video!  

Call to Action:

Adrian and I would like to encourage the UCT community and South Africans everywhere to help create language translations for some of the Khan Academy videos.  We are currently working on a list of the videos which Adrian feels would be the most helpful for the Funda project and will post them on the Project Wiki.  You can feel free to edit the wiki and update it to communicate which videos you have tranlated!  

Translating instructional videos into South African languages is also a great way to participate in Open Education Week!  Leave me a comment if you have any questions. 

 

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Open Education Week 2012 Events at UCT

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on February 24, 2012

Categories: Collaboration Tools, Research

The global open education community has defined March 5 - 10th as Open Education Week!  Open Education Week is a global, community event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially through the use of Open Educational Resources (OER).  This international event is organized by the OpenCourseWare Consortium of which the University of Cape Town is a member. There will be events held locally at over 130 organizations and institutions across the world and many of resources will be shared on the Open Education Week website.  

This is an open inviation to participate in Open Education week at a series of events held at UCT. We will be hosting a panel discussion on March 6th and series of short workshops on open education. 

Afternoon event:

Open Education Week: Broadening Learning Opportunities
When: 6 March 12.30-4.30
Where: African Studies Gallery
Sign up: http://teaching.cet.uct.ac.za/events/signup/422


12.30pm		   Light lunch
1pm Introduction and Welcome Dr Max Price, Vice Chancellor, University of Cape Town
1.15pm Introducing openness at UCT, in South Africa, Africa and the world Associate Professor Laura Czerniewicz, Director OpenUCT Initiative
1.40pm What does OE mean for Higher Education in Africa? Panel Discussion
  This panel will include 10-15 minute presentations by each panelist followed by 20 minutes discussion time. Marion Jacobs (Dean of the Faculty of Health Science),
Reggie Raju (Director: Library IT and Communication at the University of Stellenbosch),
Allison Fullard (Deputy Director Library Services at the University of the Western Cape)
Ed Rybicki (Professor in Microbiology, Project lead in the Research Portal initiative)
 
3.00 pm Examples of Openness: Broadening learning opportunities: beyond Higher education  
  Openly-licensed school textbooks go mainstream Mark Horner (Siyavula)
  Citizen Science  
3.30 pm MammalMAP: uniting African people in the conservation of African mammals Tali Hoffman (Zoology)
  Make a difference: become an ambassador for biodiversity Les Underhill (Avian Demography Unit, Department of Statistical Science)
4.00 pm OpenCourseWare excellence award Glenda Cox will hand over this award to Matumo Ramafikeng
4.15 pm Closing remarks

 

Dr Eve Gray ( Scholarly Communications in Africa).

 


Short workshops:

7 March: Finding Open Stuff workshop presented by Shihaam Donnelly
1-2pm Upper campus Student Learning centre

Sign up: http://teaching.cet.uct.ac.za/events/signup/423

This presentation showcases various sites where you can find open images, audio, video, software, comics and more. By using open resources, you are free to share your work without fear of infringing copyright.

 

8 March: Separate or together? Open Research and Open Education By Eve Gray
1-2pm Venue: MCB Seminar Rm B
 
Sign up: http://teaching.cet.uct.ac.za/events/signup/425
 
We tend to treat open education and open research as if they are completely separate issues, just as our universities tend to separate the different missions of the institutions, although these missions are delivered by the same people. This seminar will explore the shared agendas of research communication and learning materials development in what has become an increasingly collaborative, multidisciplinary and open online research environment.  Could openness become the space in which these two changing environments converge, to the benefit of the effectiveness and relevance and impact of all three of the university missions?
 
Eve Gray is an Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for Education Technology and is currently the Programme Lead of the IDRC-funded Scholarly Communications Programme. She is recognized as an international expert on Open Access to research from a developing country perspective.    
 


9 March: Finding Open Stuff workshop for Health Science presented by Shihaam Donnelly
1-2pm Venue at FHS to be announced

Sign up: http://teaching.cet.uct.ac.za/events/signup/424

This presentation showcases various sites where you can find open images, audio, video, software, comics and more. By using open resources, you are free to share your work without fear of infringing copyright.

Hope to see you there,

The OpenUCT team!

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Refelctions on the 2nd Africa Workshop for the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Platform

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on September 21, 2011

Categories: Change in Higher Education, Collaboration Tools, Open Educational Resources, Research

 

On Sunday I attended a workshop which previewed the forthcoming UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Platform.  The workshop was hosted within the framework of the Highway Africa and the Pan African Conference on Access to Information (PACAI) conferences also happening at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) this past weekend. I wanted to share some thoughts on the workshop, in particular: an overview of the UNESCO model curriculum for journalism education; an invitation to comment on the UNESCO OER policy guidelines; an introduction to the UNESCO OER Platform; and some exciting future activities to watch from the UNESCO OER program. 

UNESCO Model Curricula for Journalism Education

The workshop brought together stakeholders from journalism and media institutions throughout Africa in which UNESCO aims to support as they become ‘Centres of Excellence’ in journalism education.   The stakeholders had been involved in developing and using the UNESCO Model Curricula for Journalism Education published in 2007.  The UNESCO Model Curriculum for Journalism provides a model curriculum that any institution around the world can adopt and use in their institution. 

The Curricula is a generic model that can be adapted according to each country’s specific needs. It takes full cognizance of the social, economic, political and cultural contexts of developing countries and emerging democracies, highlighting the connection between democracy and journalism and arguing for a more cross-disciplinary approach within journalism training centres. Source

From what I understand the curricula is an open educational resource, but I did note that it does not contain an open copyright license such as Creative Commons.  It would be great to see an open license on the curriculum as well. 

UNESCO OER Policy Guidelines

Abel Caine highlighted some of the activities which The UNESCO OER Programme are involved in including the recently drafted OER Policy Guidelines for Higher Education and the forthcoming UNESCO OER Platform.

The OER Policy Guidelines for Higher Education are being drafted and UNESCO has asked for comments on the draft guidelines.  UNESCO in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) have developed these guidelines to support governments, teaching staff, higher education institutions/providers, and quality assurance/accreditation and recognition bodies.  If you are like us and have an OER initiative on your campus, and yet no policy to formally support these activities, this document might be worth a review.  I plan to take a close look at the policy guidelines in the next couple weeks and hopefully provide some feedback. 

Introduction to the UNESCO OER Platform

We had a preview of the OER Platform currently being developed by UNESCO in collaboration with the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE).  The platform will be used by UNESCO to “radically “enhance” UNESCO’s Clearing House function by offering “selected” UNESCO publications as OER products and allowing “stakeholders” to freely copy, adapt, and share their resources”. Source 

The platform will host and share open curriculum developed by UNESCO and will eventually move towards hosting more diverse types of OER.  The platform comes with the tagline “Find, compare, build and share”.  Any UNESCO curriculum on the platform can be adapted, localized, translated, or innovated upon directly in the browser.  The adaptation is linked to the original version, as well as any other adaptations of the original (or an adaptation of an adaptation!)  What makes this platform different is that it allows one to then compare revisions of a curriculum document directly in the browser.  Differences are highlighted to show where the content has been revised to match the need of the local context. 

The OER Platform uses similar functionality to the Open University’s LabSpace, which allows one to make ‘revisions’ of content; and Rice University’s Connexions platform, which uses one to ‘reuse / edit’ content on their site.  Keeping track of the versions and adaptations is the real strength of such a system, as it is then easy to see the reuse of content and how it has been contextualized within different contexts.  

It was a great workshop and I was really happy to engage with the other institutions who are looking to open educational content to improve teaching and learning at their respective universites. 

 

 More information about upcoming UNESCO OER initiatives can be found below:

UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning are "planning" to host the 2012 World OER Conference at UNESCO in Paris from Wednesday 20 - Friday 22 June, 2012.

he purpose of the Conference will be to:

  1. Highlight global best practices in OER laws or policy, projects or initiatives, and practices;
  2. Release the 2012 Paris OER Declaration calling on Governments to support the development and use of OERs

We are planning several lead-up events:

  1. UNESCO Forum on OER Policy Guidelines - UNESCO, Paris, January 2012
  2. Asia-Pacific OER Policy Forum - India, Feb 2012
  3. Africa OER Policy Forum - South Africa, March 2012
  4. Latin America OER Policy Forum - Brazil, April 2012

The 2012 World Conference will be followed up by a 2015 Millennium World Conference where we hope to show very strong progress by Governments on OER policies, initiatives, and practices.

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Do we need Google+?

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on July 22, 2011

Categories: Collaboration Tools, Educational Technologies, Learning and Knowledge Analytics, Research, South Africa

I love Google. Their tools have really changed my life, in many ways making information management a pleasure.  Now they’ve launched a new social network meant to help us organize our social life by categorizing our contacts into ‘circles’.  The circles are meant to let you control who you share content with.  Just as you might traditionally share a link, thought, picture, or video on Facebook or Twitter, now you can designate which circle of friends gets to see that content.  Makes sense right?  Some content you might want to share could be useful only to your work contacts, or even a select group within your work contacts.  So Google has given us the tools to do this, and I like many probably started building this social fabric around circles of friends.

Then I got to thinking about what I was doing and other recent experiments with Facebook.  After exporting my social data from Facebook a few weeks back I was able to computationally calculate groups of friends based on the number of connections they had within my network.  I then applied a size metric to the people in my social network who were most central to my network.  These techniques worked quite well allowing me to confirm many of the clusters that the diagram presented. The technique worked well and my network was well defined both geographically as well as by the type of social circle they existed in (eg. work, friends, acquaintances)  Below is a diagram of my social graph showing the well clustered groups of people in my network.

So I am beginning to wonder why I am deliberately now creating a new social graph in Google+.  I do find the ability to organize contacts into groups very useful, but if I can calculate these groups using a few simple social network analysis (SNA) techniques, I would rather do it that way.

In a perfect world, we would own our own social graphs.  It could work something like this: I export my social network from Facebook, Twitter, or whatever social network I have invested in; I calculated the identifiable social groups using a SNA tool like Gephi; and I can then apply that social graph to any other social network I am interested in. I can take my social graph and apply it to an image sharing site like Flickr to see which of my friends, contacts, colleagues or family have public photo collections online.

Rather than building a social network in many places (eg. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, WAYN… and the list goes on and will continue to grow:) wouldn’t it make more sense to open up the social graph standard so that it could be applied wherever we desire?

Just thinking out loud really, Ill still be playing with Google+ in the future.  I have not yet found it overly valuable though, my stream feels very heavy.  It’s lacking the simplicity that Twitter brought us by limiting updates to 140 characters.

 

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