After finishing my own curriculum plan I have a few days to work on my own course of mental disorders. Like I did with the curriculum plan I think there is no need to invent the wheel a second time - especially after being encouraged to do so by Grete Oline - and I use the course construction of the e-pedagogy-course as a model. There are really many useful tools and notes and links... in this course we can use in our programs aswell. One question in this concern: can we use things like the tutorials and screen lectures on e-learning you, Anne Karin and Grete Oline, made during the preparation of your courses? I find this material extremely useful, and it would spare us a lot of time if we could use these materials for our own courses. Because everything you made about e-learning is useful for our students, even if we have different topics to cover. So I would be very glad if these resources would be available!
I sill enjoy the "new world" of e-learning very much, and I am integrating more and more parts of it in my campus teaching. I have 5 weeks of teaching left, and after this a lot of time to work over my lectures and seminars for the next semester!
Finally I've made my course
14 years ago
Hi Alexander:
ReplyDeleteLet me just state clear that I will no comment upon your work at this stage. Let your peer-students do their tasks first; without interruption from the teachers!
(And that is the same for all 3 of you students; I have browsed through it all three CP’s to see if you have delivered; -- and if there were something I should address in the Bulletin-board this week; but I will not comment them before feed-back time in June!)
But clearly I can address your very important question here about ”reuse” of material, and how to deal with border between to be inspired of each other and being in danger of copy’ing too much.
This is a big issue; and is an important part of the ethical issues when constructing a course.
Let use first see to this about looking into other people’s material; as parts of your peer-students—or other student’s curriculum plans. This is a project where we develop things together; and clearly one of the aims is to use the new knowledge. But it would be a nice thing to follow standard academic procedures with acknowledging the help when you present the plan other where. (As you do in papers; if you think discussing with others have helped the scientific work, you can thank them when you paper is published)
I can see that might be natural that you and Jochen Peter collaborate in developing you courses, being at the same University, it would be “un-intelligent” not to work together with developing your courses. (But as I will come back to, here are ways of acknowledging this collaboration).
As re-using materials from our e-learning course: well that is a question we must discuss with Anne Karin. The e-pedagogy course is developed within the VIRCLASS project, with grants from the Norway Opening project. So the material here (as the new e-pedagogy book with lectures) is available on the Internet free for use for anyone.
But I do not know how it is with the VIRCLASS material we have used as examples during the course. My guess is that if you want to use it for a VIRCLASS course it is OK. If you want to use it for another course, this is an issue you must discuss with Anne Karin and the VIRCLASS Consortium... But this will be clarified later, when Anne Karin is back from Madrid!
And towards using and re-using material we find on the internet: there are some quite widely accepted rules for how to behave in the Virtual Learning Environment.
Very often you will either find a Creative Commons license
(http://creativecommons.org/) attached to the work; or the name of the creator of a web-site.
If things are produced under CC-license, you can feel free to use it. If not, it is seen as polite to contact the author to ask if you can use his material in your own course. (As far as i know of, you will be allowed to this. Maybe under some specific conditions, but you will get the permition. And if not--- it is OK to know that before you use the material!?)
You might see that you need to some changes /adjustments to “fi"t the course or the learning material into your own course, adjustit to your own learning goals etc. The proper thing to do then is to state that “This course is a further development of….” Or "My course here are inspired by the work of…”
Aasmund told me about the GNU project: http://www.gnu.org/. Even though their main focus is on software development, he thinks that might be useful to know about discussiong these ethical issues.
Well: I hope this was clarifying Alexander. Do not hesitate to contact me again if there are any more questions. And I guess that your peer-students also have some reflections over this important issue?
Grete Oline
dear grete oline,
ReplyDeletethank you for your clarification. this is very useful. I absolutely agree with you that it is important to apply the scientific standards, just as in using printed material in an own paper for example. so every time I use something I find somewhere I cite it. My special topic in my blog entry was the usage of your material in the virclass course, because this is very special material only available here, and only fitting for the purposes of a virclass course. I am planning my mental disorders course strictly for the virclass program, so I hope it would be ok to use your material, because what I could use from this is related to the learning environment of it´s learning. at least at the moment I have no plans to make an e-learning course beyond virclass; and if this would change, then I wouldn´t be able to use it´s learning, and therefore wouldn´t need your material in this course.
But perhaps in deed we can speak over this when anne karin is back. I really hope to build my course not only for the purpose of becoming an e-teacher, because I want to participate in the virclass project and offer this course there. but we will see, at first the tasks at hand have to be solved ;-)
I hope your organisation reaches the goals they want to strike for, as you wrote in your last mail!
bye,
alexander