Medical Microbiology OER@leeds

Uploading of material is going well, although if you look at my entries there don’t appear to be that many………………..This is because a number of uploads contain several files that are linked together to produce suites of materials.  I would be interested to see what people think of this idea, and whether there is any strong feeling on loading the units individually. 

I have also updated my project page (mine looked a bit twee compared to the ones the other propject partners showed at the meeting at Oxford!) and in here are some examples of the uploads - including some of the ’suited’ items.

We have a lot of materials produced using Questionmark Perception.  The challenge with these materials was to export them from our VLE in a format that was suitable for loading onto JORUM.  This appears to be straight forward.  It is possible to export the files as QTIXML files which can then theoretically be loaded to JORUM.  These files can then be downloaded by the end user and put straight into the users Questionmark files.  There is only one drawback……….only those who have Questionmark can utilise the resource…………..

Having had a break over Christmas, and had time to reflect on the progress of the project so far we have decided to do a few ‘tweeks’ to some of the items already uploaded.  Many of our presentations involve images that are readily found within wikipedia, and therefore are copyright free.  However, rather than just refer to the images as ‘obtained from wikipedia’ as we originally did, we have decided to add the distinct URL to the photo/image tag.  Although this is quite time-consuming, it does provide an air of completeness to the packages, and saves the reader trawling through wikipedia to find the appropriate image.  This once again highlights what I think is a negative to JORUM OPEN, in that it is not possible to delete your own files once uploaded.  So, I need to wait for the original files to be deleted by the JORUM technical staff before I can upload the new versions.  Although a pain, I can see their point from an administrative point of view, and to give them credit, the response time is usually quite swift.  Happy Uploading and Happy New Year to you all!

Just a quick one - I have been uploading my files onto the server, even though it isn’t live. I have 84 units to put on so I thought I’d better give myself plenty of time to do it! I found that there is a facility to edit your meta-data at your initial submission, so check this carefully! After this you can only down-load your files, not amend them. It’s fairly easy to do, the most arduous task being re-reading the units that I amended months ago to remind myself of the content so I can write accurate meta data! I also saved all my meta data and tags as word files, so that if I needed to amend them later it would be a simple cut and paste affair. So, 10 down, 74 to go……………

I’ve been trying for ages to find a way to package together engage units into a visually exciting package.  This is easy to do if you are housing things on a VLE, you just hyperlink to the permanent XID web address.  However, this doesn’t work for Jorum, the hyperlink sends you to the information page rather than the player.  So, I had to find a way to ‘internally’ link more than one engage interaction.  With a lot of fiddling and help I have finally managed to do it.  This means essentially that an entire package of engage interactions can be (hopefully!) downloaded without having to go through a web-server.  I have put these on my personal web pages:

http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bmbsrb/Microscopeplayingwithengage/Playing2/playing2/player.html

if anyone would like to see them.  Feedback would be appreciated!

Sx

Yesterday and today I have been playing with uploading material onto JORUM OPEN for the trial.  It is a fairly intuitive process, although I was guided through the initial uploads by Chris Taylor, without whom I suspect it would have been a lot harder!

The key points from my perspective were that I have a lot of materials that link together ie they are stand alone teaching materials, but when grouped, make a cohesive unit.  In order to maintain the links all of the individual files need to be uploaded at the same time, into the same file.  This makes the adding of the description very wordy, as the material in the files is very diverse.  Also adding the key words was hard due again to the diverse nature of the content uploaded.

For other units, I may upload them individually, then make reference to the fact that this is ‘part 1 of 4′ and reference the other files in the description. Again, this will make the description very verbose.

Many of our items are created in Articlaute Engage which has a very nice functionality that unfortunately can’t be catered for (at least not yet!) by JORUM OPEN.  In order to package things nicel, I need to link to permanent URL’s.  When housed on a VLE this is OK, but I haven’t yet found a way of successfully doing this in JORUM, but I am still trying!

I have also considered putting a ‘read me’ file in each master file, to demonstrate how to download the material, and how to subsequently edit the content if necessary.  This description explains which software was used to creat the resource, and which software is a pre-requisite to editing.  This has initiall taken the form of a powerpoint presentation, but I am going to try and do a few using camstudio, to provide a more visual experience.

If anyone has the time it would be good to get some feedback on the modules uploaded so far, their ease of access and so forth.

Happy Uploading!

Sx

I have been playing about with creative commons licensing, seeing how best to add the information to the works we will be submitting ( and added one to our project page for practice!)  In the mean time I have also been going through our work, paragraph by paragraph to check for possible infringement of copyright within our own works.  There are a lot of images which may have to be changed………………………..

The Medical Microbiology project page is now up and running @ www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bmbsrb/MMOER.htm

I have recently been working on developing a project page.  This should be ready very soon so watch this space!

My first blog!  Not too much to report so far, trying to investigate eXe and REload.