Founded in 1970, the Open University UK (OU) is now Europe's largest university with around ... more Founded in 1970, the Open University UK (OU) is now Europe's largest university with around 200,000 distance learners. The university's teaching and learning methods have evolved over time from paper-based correspondence learning with accompanying television ...
After extensive scoping and requirements-gathering activities, it was decided that adopting and e... more After extensive scoping and requirements-gathering activities, it was decided that adopting and enhancing an open source system to form the heart of the university's learning management system (LMS) would be the most successful strategy. While this made it possible to host ...
The UK Open University (OU) has embarked on an $8m Programme to develop an integrated virtual lea... more The UK Open University (OU) has embarked on an $8m Programme to develop an integrated virtual learning environment (VLE) to meet the online learning needs of its 200,000 distance learners. In addition, the Hewlett Foundation has recently announced funding of $9.9m for ...
The aim of this paper is to outline the lessons learned in helping academics at the University of... more The aim of this paper is to outline the lessons learned in helping academics at the University of Strathclyde (Scotland) to bridge the skills gap for their future teaching and learning. The University has recently implemented an initiative to promote good practice in the development and use of new learning technologies to enhance teaching and learning. The paper explores how concerns voiced by academic staff were instrumental in developing strategies to overcome conceptual barriers to the use of the Internet technology. This was achieved during the implementation of a skills development program at the University. This program included workshops exploring pedagogical and practical issues, skills development instruction for faculty via the World Wide Web, the creation of a community of scholars, and providing consultancy to individual departments. The metaphor of the Clyde Virtual University provided a conceptual framework on which academics could discuss and develop pedagogical issues. (Author/AEF)
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia Hypermedia, 2008
The post-graduate course, Software Requirements for Business Systems, in the Department of Comput... more The post-graduate course, Software Requirements for Business Systems, in the Department of Computing of the Open University (OU) is one of the early adopters of OU's Virtual Learning Environment. The course involves teaching systematic elicitation and documentation of requirements of software systems. On a software development project, team members often work remotely from one another and increasingly use wikis to collaboratively develop the requirements specification. In order to emulate requirements engineering practice, the course has been enhanced to include group collaboration using a wiki. In this paper, we describe the wiki-based collaborative activities and the on-going evaluation of the pedagogical effectiveness of a wiki for collaborative learning.
Kerawalla, Lucinda; Minocha, Shailey; Conole, Grainne; Kirkup, Gill; Schencks, Mat and Sclater, N... more Kerawalla, Lucinda; Minocha, Shailey; Conole, Grainne; Kirkup, Gill; Schencks, Mat and Sclater, Niall (2007). Exploring students' understanding of how blogs and blogging can support distance learning in Higher Education. In: ALT-C 2007: Beyond Control: Association of ...
Grove-Stephenson, Ian; Sclater, Niall and Heath, Andy (2002). Building a compliance audit for BS7... more Grove-Stephenson, Ian; Sclater, Niall and Heath, Andy (2002). Building a compliance audit for BS7988 Code of practice for the use of information technology (IT) in the delivery of assessments. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Computer Assisted Assessment ...
Virtual universities and virtual learning environments are becoming increasingly accessible to fa... more Virtual universities and virtual learning environments are becoming increasingly accessible to faculty wishing to develop Web-based courses. They can provide a convenient cognitive framework to assist educators in moving towards new technology-based teaching methods. The ...
Concept or Topic Maps have long been used as a method of categorizing and organizing information ... more Concept or Topic Maps have long been used as a method of categorizing and organizing information about a domain. Building them can help people conceptualize an area and spot trends or gaps, and as a presentation method they quickly provide an overview and general impression of a space. We are currently constructing a Reference Model of the Assessment Domain that takes the form of a highly interlinked dynamic website. This represents the assessment domain via the software, projects, standards and use cases of which it is composed. In this paper we present our efforts to create complimentary concept maps of the assessment domain, not as an overview, but for navigation and orientation within the domain. These concept maps, which model resources and activities independently, have been corroborated with practitioners in the e-learning community.
Alt J Research in Learning Technology, Sep 1, 2004
The COLA project has been developing a large bank of assessment items for units across the Scotti... more The COLA project has been developing a large bank of assessment items for units across the Scottish further education curriculum since May 2003. These will be made available to learners mainly via colleges' virtual learning environments (VLEs). Many people have been involved in the development of the COLA assessment item bank to ensure a high level of technical and pedagogical quality. Processes have included deciding on appropriate item types and subject areas, training authors, peer-reviewing and quality assuring the items and assessments, and ensuring they are tagged with appropriate metadata. One of the biggest challenges has been to ensure that the assessments are deliverable across the four main virtual learning environments in use in Scottish colleges-and also through a stand-alone assessment system. COLA is significant because no other large project appears to have successfully developed standards-compliant assessment content for delivery across multiple VLEs. This paper discusses how COLA has dealt with the organizational, pedagogical and technical issues which arise when commissioning items from many authors for delivery across an educational sector.
The open educational resource (OER) movement has been growing rapidly since 2001, stimulated by f... more The open educational resource (OER) movement has been growing rapidly since 2001, stimulated by funding from benefactors such as the Hewlett Foundation and UNESCO, and providing educational content freely to institutions and learners across the World. Individuals and organisations are motivated by a variety of drivers to produce OERs, both altruistic and self-interested. There are parallels with the open source movement where authors and others combine their efforts to provide a product which they and others can use freely and adapt to their own purposes. There are many different ways in which OER initiatives are organised and an infinite range of possibilities for how the OERs themselves are constituted. If institutions are to develop sustainable OER initiatives they need to build successful change management initiatives, developing models for the production and quality assurance of OERs, licensing them through appropriate mechanisms such as the Creative Commons, and considering how the resources will be discovered and used by learners.
Assessment Evaluation in Higher Education, Apr 29, 2009
This paper reports on the FREMA (e-Framework Reference Model for Assessment) project that aimed a... more This paper reports on the FREMA (e-Framework Reference Model for Assessment) project that aimed at creating a Reference Model for the Assessment Domain; a guide to what resources (standards, projects, people, organisations, software, services and use cases) exist for the domain, aimed at helping strategists understand the state of e-learning assessment, and helping developers to place their work in context and thus the community to build coherent systems. This paper describes the rationale and method of developing the FREMA model and how it may be used. We delivered FREMA via a heavily interlinked Web site. Because the resulting network of resources was so complex, we required a method of providing users with a structured navigational method that helped them explore and identify resources useful to them. This led us to look at how overviews of e-learning domains have been handled previously, and to work towards our own concept maps that ploted the topology of the domain. FREMA represents an evolving view of the domain and therefore we developed the website into a Semantic Wiki, thereby allowing the Assessment Community to record their own projects and services and thus to grow the reference model over time.
This paper describes the use of a wiki for collaborative requirements engineering. It discusses t... more This paper describes the use of a wiki for collaborative requirements engineering. It discusses the rationale for the design of the wiki activities and the processes that were put in place to deal with anticipated problem areas based on earlier experiences of team working in a distributed environment. It then examines the issues that have arisen and the steps that are being taken to improve the student experience. A significant issue is that students expectations of distance and flexible learning are in conflict with collaborative activities, and the paper discusses ...
This paper reports on the evaluation of a new assessment system, Technologies for Online Interope... more This paper reports on the evaluation of a new assessment system, Technologies for Online Interoperability (TOIA). TOIA was built from a userfocussed specification of an assessment system. The formative evaluation of the project complemented this initial specification by ensuring that user feedback on the development and use of the system was iteratively fed back into the development process.
The Scottish Computer Assisted Assessment Network (SCAAN) [1] was set up in early 1999 to promote... more The Scottish Computer Assisted Assessment Network (SCAAN) [1] was set up in early 1999 to promote the use of online assessment in higher education institutions throughout Scotland. Funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council under its Webtools initiative, SCAAN is a collaboration between three universities: Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde.
Founded in 1970, the Open University UK (OU) is now Europe's largest university with around ... more Founded in 1970, the Open University UK (OU) is now Europe's largest university with around 200,000 distance learners. The university's teaching and learning methods have evolved over time from paper-based correspondence learning with accompanying television ...
After extensive scoping and requirements-gathering activities, it was decided that adopting and e... more After extensive scoping and requirements-gathering activities, it was decided that adopting and enhancing an open source system to form the heart of the university's learning management system (LMS) would be the most successful strategy. While this made it possible to host ...
The UK Open University (OU) has embarked on an $8m Programme to develop an integrated virtual lea... more The UK Open University (OU) has embarked on an $8m Programme to develop an integrated virtual learning environment (VLE) to meet the online learning needs of its 200,000 distance learners. In addition, the Hewlett Foundation has recently announced funding of $9.9m for ...
The aim of this paper is to outline the lessons learned in helping academics at the University of... more The aim of this paper is to outline the lessons learned in helping academics at the University of Strathclyde (Scotland) to bridge the skills gap for their future teaching and learning. The University has recently implemented an initiative to promote good practice in the development and use of new learning technologies to enhance teaching and learning. The paper explores how concerns voiced by academic staff were instrumental in developing strategies to overcome conceptual barriers to the use of the Internet technology. This was achieved during the implementation of a skills development program at the University. This program included workshops exploring pedagogical and practical issues, skills development instruction for faculty via the World Wide Web, the creation of a community of scholars, and providing consultancy to individual departments. The metaphor of the Clyde Virtual University provided a conceptual framework on which academics could discuss and develop pedagogical issues. (Author/AEF)
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia Hypermedia, 2008
The post-graduate course, Software Requirements for Business Systems, in the Department of Comput... more The post-graduate course, Software Requirements for Business Systems, in the Department of Computing of the Open University (OU) is one of the early adopters of OU's Virtual Learning Environment. The course involves teaching systematic elicitation and documentation of requirements of software systems. On a software development project, team members often work remotely from one another and increasingly use wikis to collaboratively develop the requirements specification. In order to emulate requirements engineering practice, the course has been enhanced to include group collaboration using a wiki. In this paper, we describe the wiki-based collaborative activities and the on-going evaluation of the pedagogical effectiveness of a wiki for collaborative learning.
Kerawalla, Lucinda; Minocha, Shailey; Conole, Grainne; Kirkup, Gill; Schencks, Mat and Sclater, N... more Kerawalla, Lucinda; Minocha, Shailey; Conole, Grainne; Kirkup, Gill; Schencks, Mat and Sclater, Niall (2007). Exploring students' understanding of how blogs and blogging can support distance learning in Higher Education. In: ALT-C 2007: Beyond Control: Association of ...
Grove-Stephenson, Ian; Sclater, Niall and Heath, Andy (2002). Building a compliance audit for BS7... more Grove-Stephenson, Ian; Sclater, Niall and Heath, Andy (2002). Building a compliance audit for BS7988 Code of practice for the use of information technology (IT) in the delivery of assessments. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Computer Assisted Assessment ...
Virtual universities and virtual learning environments are becoming increasingly accessible to fa... more Virtual universities and virtual learning environments are becoming increasingly accessible to faculty wishing to develop Web-based courses. They can provide a convenient cognitive framework to assist educators in moving towards new technology-based teaching methods. The ...
Concept or Topic Maps have long been used as a method of categorizing and organizing information ... more Concept or Topic Maps have long been used as a method of categorizing and organizing information about a domain. Building them can help people conceptualize an area and spot trends or gaps, and as a presentation method they quickly provide an overview and general impression of a space. We are currently constructing a Reference Model of the Assessment Domain that takes the form of a highly interlinked dynamic website. This represents the assessment domain via the software, projects, standards and use cases of which it is composed. In this paper we present our efforts to create complimentary concept maps of the assessment domain, not as an overview, but for navigation and orientation within the domain. These concept maps, which model resources and activities independently, have been corroborated with practitioners in the e-learning community.
Alt J Research in Learning Technology, Sep 1, 2004
The COLA project has been developing a large bank of assessment items for units across the Scotti... more The COLA project has been developing a large bank of assessment items for units across the Scottish further education curriculum since May 2003. These will be made available to learners mainly via colleges' virtual learning environments (VLEs). Many people have been involved in the development of the COLA assessment item bank to ensure a high level of technical and pedagogical quality. Processes have included deciding on appropriate item types and subject areas, training authors, peer-reviewing and quality assuring the items and assessments, and ensuring they are tagged with appropriate metadata. One of the biggest challenges has been to ensure that the assessments are deliverable across the four main virtual learning environments in use in Scottish colleges-and also through a stand-alone assessment system. COLA is significant because no other large project appears to have successfully developed standards-compliant assessment content for delivery across multiple VLEs. This paper discusses how COLA has dealt with the organizational, pedagogical and technical issues which arise when commissioning items from many authors for delivery across an educational sector.
The open educational resource (OER) movement has been growing rapidly since 2001, stimulated by f... more The open educational resource (OER) movement has been growing rapidly since 2001, stimulated by funding from benefactors such as the Hewlett Foundation and UNESCO, and providing educational content freely to institutions and learners across the World. Individuals and organisations are motivated by a variety of drivers to produce OERs, both altruistic and self-interested. There are parallels with the open source movement where authors and others combine their efforts to provide a product which they and others can use freely and adapt to their own purposes. There are many different ways in which OER initiatives are organised and an infinite range of possibilities for how the OERs themselves are constituted. If institutions are to develop sustainable OER initiatives they need to build successful change management initiatives, developing models for the production and quality assurance of OERs, licensing them through appropriate mechanisms such as the Creative Commons, and considering how the resources will be discovered and used by learners.
Assessment Evaluation in Higher Education, Apr 29, 2009
This paper reports on the FREMA (e-Framework Reference Model for Assessment) project that aimed a... more This paper reports on the FREMA (e-Framework Reference Model for Assessment) project that aimed at creating a Reference Model for the Assessment Domain; a guide to what resources (standards, projects, people, organisations, software, services and use cases) exist for the domain, aimed at helping strategists understand the state of e-learning assessment, and helping developers to place their work in context and thus the community to build coherent systems. This paper describes the rationale and method of developing the FREMA model and how it may be used. We delivered FREMA via a heavily interlinked Web site. Because the resulting network of resources was so complex, we required a method of providing users with a structured navigational method that helped them explore and identify resources useful to them. This led us to look at how overviews of e-learning domains have been handled previously, and to work towards our own concept maps that ploted the topology of the domain. FREMA represents an evolving view of the domain and therefore we developed the website into a Semantic Wiki, thereby allowing the Assessment Community to record their own projects and services and thus to grow the reference model over time.
This paper describes the use of a wiki for collaborative requirements engineering. It discusses t... more This paper describes the use of a wiki for collaborative requirements engineering. It discusses the rationale for the design of the wiki activities and the processes that were put in place to deal with anticipated problem areas based on earlier experiences of team working in a distributed environment. It then examines the issues that have arisen and the steps that are being taken to improve the student experience. A significant issue is that students expectations of distance and flexible learning are in conflict with collaborative activities, and the paper discusses ...
This paper reports on the evaluation of a new assessment system, Technologies for Online Interope... more This paper reports on the evaluation of a new assessment system, Technologies for Online Interoperability (TOIA). TOIA was built from a userfocussed specification of an assessment system. The formative evaluation of the project complemented this initial specification by ensuring that user feedback on the development and use of the system was iteratively fed back into the development process.
The Scottish Computer Assisted Assessment Network (SCAAN) [1] was set up in early 1999 to promote... more The Scottish Computer Assisted Assessment Network (SCAAN) [1] was set up in early 1999 to promote the use of online assessment in higher education institutions throughout Scotland. Funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council under its Webtools initiative, SCAAN is a collaboration between three universities: Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde.
Uploads
Papers by Niall Sclater