www.le.ac.uk

China’s interest in Open Education, OER, MOOCs, and Big Data

Terese Bird Learning Technologist & SCORE Research Fellow Institute of Learning Innovation University of Leicester

What shall we talk about?

• What is Open Educational Practice and OER?

• Uni of Leicester’s OER

• Chinese Open Course harvested from iTunes U

• What is China looking at?

• How OER can help Chinese students choose your university

• China’s MOOCs

Photo by ToGa Wanderings

on Flickr CC-BY-NC

Open Educational Resources (OER and Open Ed: Their time has come • Reaching for overseas

students

• Distance learning

• MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)

• OER as ‘soft marketing’

• JISC Factors 2011:

– Financial constraints

– Reputation

– Course marketisation

(McGill, 2011)

iTunes U Reach – HEA OER International Aims & Objectives

• To gather and create high-quality open-licensed learning materials by University of Leicester for release into iTunes U

• To document and arrange into a framework the procedures and standards utilised in the choice and preparation of iTunes U OER

• To ascertain how international students who use iTunes U materials find, select, and view/listen to them, and to discover whether and how these students make conclusions about the universities that provide them.

• To inform and listen to University of Leicester academics in discussion considering how iTunes U may be of use to share out their materials and message to international students

Online Survey N=102 ‘potential students’ (Bird, 2013)

Do you use, or have you ever used, iTunes U?’

‘Do you use, or have you ever used, iTunes U?’ – by country

How do/did you select suitable materials?

What was your reason for selecting these materials? (Choose all that apply)

Have these materials helped you to achieve this aim?

As a result of your experiences with these materials, would you consider studying at the institution that produced them?

Leicester’s Multimedia OER

• YouTube channel videos

• Narrated presentations

• Still images or screencasts with voiceover

• Audio lecture recordings

• Audio research vigniettes

• Ebooks – pdf, epub, .ibooks

• http://iite.unesco.org/pics/publications/en/files/3214700.pdf

Open Course app

• Netease software company joined OCW 2011

• Harvest CC-licensed(?) VIDEO of interest to interns working at Netease, for OpenCourse app:

– Western law

– Media / Social Media

– Philosophy / Death

– Kahn Academy

– TED

Open Class Netease

Baidu

Our university’s OER can encourage enrollment by Chinese students

• Agents

• League tables

• After being accepted, students search for course content and sample lectures

What did China look at on Univ Leicester iTunes U? 1-10 August, 2013 Subject Video Audio Doc Browse/Subscribe

English 5 5 20

Medicine 13 10 1

History 1 4

Engineering/Programming 2

Psychology 10

Media & Communications 7

Management 4 5

Forensic Science 2

Actuarial Science 6 1

Chemistry 6

Public Lectures 1

Final tips for a Chinese Connection

• Post a video on YouTube, embed it on Youku

• Try Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter

• Contact Netease or Baidu to suggest your university’s open material for their app

Image from

Netease

recorded

lecture by M

Sandel

Thank you!

• Bird, T. (2013). iTunes U Reach: Case Study of University of Leicester’s Release of Open Educational Resources for International Students through iTunes U. Leicester, UK.

• McGill, L. (2012). OER Synthesis and Evaluation / OER Synthesis and Evaluation Project. OER Synthesis and Evaluation Project. Retrieved March 09, 2013, from https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/29595671/OER Synthesis and Evaluation Project