Technology

Some Quick Numbers on WordPress & MediaWiki at UBC

The three main platforms that support open education at UBC are UBC Blogs (WordPress), UBC Wiki (MediaWiki), and UBC CMS (WordPress). They are used in a lot of different ways but on the start of Open Education Week, I thought I’d post some quick stats Scott helped me pull for a recent presentation. All numbers are current to the beginning of March.

UBC Blogs

  • unique users: 28,777
  • unique blogs: 21,207

UBC Wiki

  • unique users: 16,658
  • pages/files: 56,436

UBC CMS

Since September 2014, there have been almost 10,000 new users across the platforms. The team that helps develop these platforms not only do a fantastic job supporting set of a robust, always up tools that underpin a lot of UBC’s open education efforts but they are also involved in numerous innovative projects that push our understanding of how these technologies support teaching and learning, such as UBC’s Open Badge Pilot.

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presentation

Student as Producer, Rethinking Technology (Slides)

Novak and I recently had the opportunity to present twice at this year’s Open Education conference. Overall, the conference was great, and while it was filled with amazing presentations that I’m still mulling over, the true value of the conference was the people, the conversations, and the networks that were formed and re-enforced. Sort of like higher education. But, also sort of like higher education, I’m focusing on content here by posting slides.

Our first presentation was an expanded look at case studies at UBC that have embraced the Student as Producer model. The student as producer model, which came to our attention from work done at the University of Lincoln, emphasizes the role of the student as collaborators in the production of knowledge. In this model, the university’s approaches to learning and research are closer aligned; for example, students, similar to researchers, are asked to share their work beyond the walls of the classroom and not just with their immediate instructor or adviser. There’s a lot of amazing students and instructors at UBC who are doing pretty neat things and it was fun to talk about the approaches and philosophies that support and enable this work:

Our second presentation was entitled “Rethinking Technology’s Role in Sustaining the Future of the University.” My part of the presentation was highlighting a bit of the future trends or issues that are being fretted about and looking at approaches that work. Basically, for me, it comes down to two themes: 1) our systems and management of technologies need to empower and enable all users; and 2) we need technologies that better support open. As Novak’s Law states: The best way to promote a university is to expose the work of its people, including students, staff, and faculty:

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MOOC

I Write Things: MOOC Edition

MOOC Pilot ReportI recently pushed out a design and delivery report on UBC’s initial MOOC pilot.  Over 8,100 students earned certificates through the first round of these open-access courses. Learning materials from the MOOCs have also been used by UBC students in credit-bearing courses. Additionally, instructors made efforts to facilitate the reuse of their learning materials through the use of Creative Commons licenses and the transferring of content to additional platforms beyond Coursera, such as external YouTube channels.

You can download and read the full MOOC report here (direct PDF link). Additionally, Tony Bates has also added some thoughtful commentary in his blog post entitled What UBC has learned about doing MOOCs.

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Purpose

Novak’s Law

The best way to promote a university is to expose the work of its people – Novak Rogic

A while back, my colleague Novak made the above comment at a conference and I jokingly commented on twitter that I was going to refer to that statement as “Novak’s Law”, which seemed to resonate with a few people. The reason it resonated, I believe, is that it is one of those self evident statements that everyone pretty much intuitively grasps even if it takes some organizational confidence to empower the people (faculty, staff, and students) who make up a university to share their knowledge and work broadly, both formally and informally.

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presentation

Open Badges, Flexible Pedagogies, Hands-On Learning (Slides)

Recently, I had the opportunity to co-facilitate a couple of different sessions with Erin Fields, a librarian at UBC (which continues my ongoing strategy to associate with innovative and passionate people and then integrate myself into their presentations). The first session took place at the CTLT Institute and focused on starting a conversation around how open badges could be used in higher education. My part was a mostly an open badge 101 workshop which built on this overview I had written earlier. The session was also used to help inform the development of a UBC funded project that will be developing a badge infrastructure and framework. More information about that project can be found at http://badges.open.ubc.ca, including a nice write up of the workshop. As a side note, there was also a related workshop which focused more on student perspectives of badges and the full notes of that session are worth checking out.

Anyway, here’s the slides from our session:

Erin and I presented again at ETUG and this time we focused on how to integrate some of the innovative pedagogies found in maker culture into classroom teaching. Rather than focus specifically on the making itself, we tried to trace the embedded practices (which, as Audrey Watters notes, involve such radical themes as small group discussion, collaboration, peer-to-peer learning, experimentation, inquiry, curiosity, and play) with effective learning. Erin weaved in educational theorists like Frerie and Papert, while I focused on some of the emerging practice frameworks like Mike Neary’s work on the Student as Producer Model.

Here are those slides:

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