 Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable or Jupyter Notebook servers. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning, and smart campus technology. Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable or Jupyter Notebook servers. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning, and smart campus technology. Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable or Jupyter Notebook servers. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning, and smart campus technology. Thanks for coming back after lunch. So we're going to kick off our first afternoon session with Suzanne, and she's going to be telling us about using Padlet and Snapchat to encourage engagement with core teaching materials out with the classroom. Suzanne. Can I just check? You can hear me, yeah. If I stand behind here, you won't see me, so I'm going to move out to the side. So I'm a teaching fellow at Strathclyde University. I teach prosthetics and orthotics, but my interest in using social media has expanded over the last few years, and I use Snapchat as a tutorial tool with my students. So I'll go through the forecast of why you use social media with your students in higher education. I'm sure most of you in the room will be familiar with what Padlet is, but perhaps maybe not with how you might be able to use Snapchat in higher education. I'll also talk about how I integrated Padlet within my Snapchat tutorials as well. And I'll talk a bit about the student feedback, the feedback I've got from students about using these, and a brief bit about GDPR. So particularly like this quote here, and this is why I started using social media with my students. I wanted to bridge that gap between formal learning in the classroom and informal learning out with the class. Our students have a very full timetable. They're in 9-5 pretty much every day, apart from Wednesday afternoon, so there's limited opportunity for students to come and speak to me. So I wanted to be able to give them opportunity to communicate with me out with these classroom settings. If you are considering using social media in higher education, you'd think about where your students are. If I decided to start using Twitter with my second year group, hardly any of them are on Twitter, so that would be a pointless thing. So I said to them, where are you? Where do you want to communicate with me? And this came about because I tried to set up a forum on the university BLE. The students weren't engaging with that because it took two, three, four clicks to access the forum, and that was just too much. They weren't prepared to do that. And I asked them where they are, and Snapchat was the answer, and that's why I started using Snapchat as a tutorial tool. Don't be afraid to ask your students for help. The students were very much instrumental in setting this up with me. I'll talk a bit more later about managing expectations of using social media with your students. And it's important that we model good behaviour when we're utilising social media, and the students can reflect that as well. And ultimately, be brave, just give it a try. So I'll just show you the padlet that I created for the students. So I'm aware that there are a few of you who don't know what padlet is, but I like to describe it as an electronic whiteboard. In our course in prosthetics and orthotics, the students have to do a lot of practical patient assessment techniques. And when we demonstrate these, the students are busy taking notes. They're not watching the demonstration. When it comes to the practical sessions, they struggle. So this year I said to them, how about I take some short videos of each of these patient assessment techniques. I'll pop them on a padlet and they'll integrate that and share it with you on Snapchat. So all the videos you can see here, typically less than a minute long, each of the videos has got the specific name of the clinical test. And there's a short video describing how that's done. So essentially what this meant was the students were able to, first of all, concentrate in the demonstration. They weren't busy taking notes. Secondly, it meant they had a resource that they could access out with the classroom setting. They could look at these patient assessment videos on the bus on the way home. They're sitting on the couch of an evening, that information was available to them as and when they wanted to use it. If you're using padlets, I would recommend that you make it secret or password protected. And one of the good things about padlet is that there's no sign up required by the students. I can either send the students a link to the padlet or what I did was I integrated it within Snapchat tutorials. And the module evaluations at the end were very positive. The students really appreciated having this resource. And I would say out of the comments it was, what did you most like about this course? The access to the videos featured very highly in that. So you're probably familiar with Snapchat, using Snapchat to make yourself look 10 years younger or perhaps like a rabbit. I particularly liked this one here because the filter matched my top. So essentially it's a camera app and that's what we, primarily people know it's used for pictures. This may or may not be lost on you. Snapchat has got a bit of a bad reputation for being used inappropriately with people sending parts of their body, images of parts of the body that they shouldn't to other people. So it's got a bit of a bad reputation. We need to try and get over that. And that's because typically using Snapchat, the app, the pictures disappear after 10 seconds. And that's one of the misconceptions I have to deal with when I'm using Snapchat is that it can be used in different ways. Bitmojis for me are an essential part of using Snapchat as a tutorial tool. With your Bitmoji, it's essentially creating an avatar. It can be condoned to the shape of your face, colour of your eyes, your hairstyle. This is my colleague, Sean, and I think he's got the world's best Bitmoji. Sometimes people say to me, why do you use Snapchat? Why don't you just use WhatsApp? And the problem with WhatsApp for me is that in order to be in a group of someone on WhatsApp, you need to provide them with your mobile phone number. As much as I love my students, I don't want them to have my mobile phone number. With Snapchat, the students join your group with a snap code and I'll show you what that looks like a bit later. So why do I use Snapchat? I've told you previously, it's because that's where my students are, that's where they wanted me to communicate with them. And interestingly as well, 77% of those between the age of 18 and 24 are Snapchat users. So it's a large demographic of our student population are Snapchat users. And essentially the students weren't engaging in the university VLA forums, so I wanted to find out how I could communicate with them more effectively. When I, the students helped me create my Bitmoji and they said, oh, you want to be on ghost mode. I had no idea what they were talking about. When you use Snapchat, these are my students, so they can tell you where you are with alarming accuracy down to the street that you live in. And this was created so that when students or people are having a night out, they can find out where their friends are and go and meet them. But you can see me here, I'm in ghost mode. So the only person that can see me on the Snap map is me. That's me traveling to Alts last year in Manchester. The heat maps indicate where there's a high activity of Snapchat users. So you can be on ghost mode, that's something to be aware of. So this is Deb Bath. When we traveled to Alts last year, I did a Snapchat tutorial with some of the Alts committee members. So this Deb thought that was hilarious. I could show that she was on a train and we used that to find each other. So remember I said to you, you don't need your mobile phone number to connect with each other, you can use the Snap code. This is the Snap code here. You can actually just have it up on the screen. As you're presenting to the students, they can take a picture of it and they would then add you to Snapchat. So this was the Snapchat tutorial I did on the way down to Alts last year. One of the things I quite like about Snapchat is you can see who's there. Their little bitmojis pop up and you can see who's participating. One of the things that I particularly like about Snapchat is you can have students who participate silently in the background, so silent participation. But it means they don't miss out. You might have students who are asking you lots of questions, but everyone benefits from the answers to that. So with Snapchat, how do I use it? It is optional, it's not compulsory, so the students engage with us if they want to. And I use the chat function, which means messages can actually be saved. Typically messages are deleted after five or ten seconds. If you're using the chat function, you press on the message and it can be retained indefinitely. I ask questions and the students will respond to that. Sometimes the student asks questions. And one thing that's particularly good is that the students can answer each other's questions and I can moderate that. And if they've got something a bit wrong, then I can jump in and clarify any issues that they're having with that. This is just an indication of one of the chats that we had. We talked about how to identify the tail and ovicular joint. So I was able to pop up an image of the foot and identify exactly where the tail and ovicular joint is. But the students find this a very positive experience. They find it's easier to communicate because it's less formal. It's a more relaxed way of asking questions. And importantly, they can see when I'm available. So I wasn't really aware that what I was doing was particularly innovative until Eric Stoller basically used this in the example of one of his presentations at the Open University. This is the first Snapchat message that I sent out to my students. It was an X-ray. So I was doing spinal orthotics with them. I was able to zoom in on a particular aspect of the X-ray and draw their attention to that. This was a Saturday evening. I just tried it, sent out a message. And within 10 minutes, I had like 10, 15 responses from students. And they engaged because they wanted to. And that's the magic of it as well. Students can communicate with you through the pub if they're sitting on the sofa. So what are the pros and cons to using Snapchat? The pros are that you can communicate with lots of students at the one time. Typically, students would email me a question and that one student would get the answer. With Snapchat, one student emails me and the whole group can get engages with that material. And it facilitates learning on the go, as I've said. The cons are the group size. It's limited to 32 people. So if you've got a very large cohort, then it's not going to be appropriate. But perhaps you could use it in your tutorial groups. I said I would talk about managing expectations. The students can see when I'm on Snapchat. I go on to Snapchat when I want to be there. And I pop up and they know that I'm there. They can ask me questions. And as I said, I do communicate with them out with working hours because our timetable is so full. But if that's not what you'd like to do, you can manage that and say I'll be available between office hours. So you have to manage the expectations of the students. Another downside potentially is the increased use of social media. We know about the problems that that can cause. And obviously there's an investment of time that's required as well to manage these things. So if I'm starting a tutorial on Snapchat, I'll let the students know, are you ready? I would have had enough. I'll tell them I'm logging off or goodnight. If they're not particularly engaging, I can send out, where are you? But it rarely happens because the students are very good at engaging with the tutorials. It's good for motivating. Before the exams, I'll send them good luck messages out on Snapchat. And they communicate with me using Bitmojis as well. So these are just 10. There's a blog post that I've written about 10 reasons to use Snapchat as a tutorial tool with your students. The students particularly, as I said, due to the ease of communication, the rapidity of that communication as well. And it was a less formal way to communicate. So I said previously about being able to save the messages. When a message is sent on Snapchat, there's a fine line that appears. If you press on the message, it becomes a thick line. And that's how you know that your message has been saved within that. So yeah, what about GDPR? So Snapchat and Padlet are both GDPR compliant. And that's something that we do need to be aware of. And also to be aware of the fact that not all of our students want to use social media tools. And also not to assume that our students all know how these tools work. I had one student who was very, she was quite angry, actually, that I was using Snapchat as a tutorial tool within a university setting. And she sent me quite an extensive long email telling me why I shouldn't be doing that. But part of the reason was she misunderstood the tool. She said, what's the point of communicating in this way? The message disappears after five or 10 seconds. So we shouldn't assume that students know how these tools work. So I was able to explain to her that you actually can save the messages. Also there are students who don't want to engage with Snapchat. And what I did do was I was transferring relevant teaching material onto the university VLE so the students didn't miss out on that opportunity as well. So I've got a few blog posts about how and why I was using Snapchat as a tutorial tool. There's also a YouTube video that you might quite useful and there's also some student testimonials at the end of that video as well. And Alex Spears couldn't be with us today, but along with a social media and higher education committee, I'd like you to invite you all to Sockmade HE, which is taking place in Edge Hill University on the 19th of December. So thank you very much for your time and I'd happily accept any questions. So I'm going to ask you about your choice of the use of padlet. So they're asking whether you reconsidered it when it wasn't free anymore and why padlet not a VLE? So when it wasn't free anymore, I personally paid the license for it. So yeah, I took that choice because I felt it was very useful. You get five free padlets. I could just reuse one of my old padlets and do the same thing. But I think the way, I think that the particularly liked about padlet is that all those patient assessment videos are in the one place where the students can access them very easily, rather than having them as a series of videos perhaps stacked on the University of VLE. Brilliant, thanks. And the guys online would also like to know a bit more about sort of the student view of Snapchat. So whether anyone didn't want to take part and whether anyone got disadvantaged for not taking part and whether they found it easier than traditional tools. Very much so, the feedback was that they found it easier to communicate with me because it was a less formal environment. As I said, it was optional. And I was aware of the fact that students were missing out on this communication. So all of the students are on a Facebook group. What I did do originally was I screenshotted the relevant teaching material, because there was a bit of chat that was on as well. And then I would then post that on the University of VLE, but that took me 12 steps from that. So that wasn't really a long-term solution. So the students have agreed that if there's anything, I'll ask them to take a screenshot of it and share it on their class Facebook group. And they're happy to do that. And everyone's on that Facebook group. So nobody misses out. Brilliant, thank you. Do you have any questions in here? Escape. Yes, gentlemen of pink. I know sometimes when these things are considered one, the objections is that it'll actually do this. Have you encountered that? And if so, how have you responded to it? Well, generally the people that I work with roll their eyes when I'm using Snapchat as a tutorial tool and go, what are you doing now? But the first people to come to me and say, oh, can you put a message out on Snapchat to the students, because they know that the students will read this. And I guess it's about managing expectations. The other members of staff aren't willing to do this. But I've had very positive feedback from the students myself. And you can't force other people to engage with social media and higher education. All you can do is perhaps lead by example show the benefits to the students and hope that they might bring them along with you. Just a question on the support. Now, if the students don't know how to use Snapchat, are you the one that's actually telling them how to do it? Or is IT aware that you're using it? The university unaware that I'm using it. I was invited to prevent the university learning and teaching conference by the Vice Dean Principal of the university, so the university are aware that I'm using it. Our year group sizes are quite small. The maximum class size is between, depending on year group, 3745 students. So yes, I can help them, but it's more likely that their colleagues around about them will help them with that. How much extra work is this for you, because it seems you put it in three different places? Well, I don't. I just put it in one place, and if I want the students to ask them to screenshot something, and then they'll put it on their Facebook group. And it is a bit of extra work, but it's valuable work. I really appreciate the interactions that I'm having with the students, and we've seen the positive benefit of using the patient assessment videos. The students are much more proficient when they come into patient assessment sessions, and it's valuable resource that they've got to go over as well. So yes, it's more work, but it's a bit of extra work. I appreciate it, and the students seem to appreciate it too. I love it. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Next, we are mapping the field of digital identity and well-being with... Julianne. Julianne. Okay, thank you. I'll take this off. I'm going to start with the presentation. And this is work that Krissa Thamelis and I have been carrying out as part of a European-funded research project funded under the Erasmus Plus programme. First of all, I'm going to start by putting a question out there for you to think about while I'm giving this presentation. Google has recently produced Google, and it's advice and apps that you can use on your phone to monitor your digital usage, monitor how long you're spending on your phone, what apps you're using. So it's providing you with feedback so that you can take responsibility for your own digital well-being. Mozilla have also got some web pages, and their internet health discusses issues such as information security and digital inclusion and openness, and of course privacy and security, which is very important. So who is responsible for our digital well-being? Is it ourselves? Is it just ourselves? Or is it technology companies? Is it institutions like higher education institutions? Is it governments? GDPR, of course, has is the government's help for digital security? But how much is it our responsibility? So that's what I want you to think about. So the digital well-being educators project has the intention to build the capacity of teaching staff in higher education institutions to deliver digital education and promote the digital well-being of students. The first element of this research project that I'm going to talk about here is the mapping of the territory of digital well-being education, and we've done that through looking at the educational literature and the practice that is going on in higher education institutions. We do focus just on higher education institutions. I know there's a lot of work that has gone on in schools, especially secondary schools, but we are taking the focus purely on higher education at the moment. We have also carried out interviews with staff who have delivered digital well-being interventions. They may be researchers, they may be practitioners, they may be both. And we've analyzed those 10 interviews and looked at the challenges, risks and opportunities that came out of the analysis. So that's what I'll talk to you about. That's what I'll focus on today. We do have a report which includes the full literature review and it's got case studies of digital well-being interventions that have been carried out in higher education. We don't just focus on higher education in the UK because it is funded by the European Commission and we have an international collaboration which involves partners from Ireland, Spain and Denmark. So we do take an international focus. The definition of digital well-being that we have used is taken from the just digital capability framework and you can see that there the blue line which encompasses everything is digital identity and digital well-being. The definition, I won't read it all out because I'll just pick out some of the relevant points. The definition covers personal health, safety, relationships and work-life balance. The idea of balance between the digital world and your real world is quite important there and issues of workload, overload and distraction. There are personal features but they also look at how you negotiate and resolve conflict with others. There's also this community aspect to the notion of digital well-being. So that's more than the definition that seems to be behind Google's tips and tools. So we interviewed 10 people, we analysed the data we've looked at the literature and we've looked at the practice that's going on currently in higher education institutions in Europe and we came up with several themes. I'm only picking out some of the main themes, there's an awful lot more that's in the report but the main themes that came out in terms of challenges for digital well-being research was that there's a lack of studies that evaluate changes in habits, beliefs and attitudes. It's not that there's a lack of studies, there are studies that evaluate the impact of digital interventions but they tend to focus on knowledge acquisition. You know, the educational goal, have you managed to teach something about digital well-being? So that may have improved people's understanding and awareness of digital well-being but has it actually had an effect on their beliefs, their attitudes and most importantly their behaviours and their habits. Secondly, it's a multidisciplinary field so that can be a challenge, it covers psychology, philosophy, sociology, education and it's not always very easy for one individual to access all those fields. Thirdly, the lack of an agreed definition on what is digital well-being. Google has a focus that it's mainly about personal responsibility, it's about the distractibility whereas the gist definition broadens that out and it's not just your relationship with the technology, it's also about your relationship with other people through the technology so that involves the community. However, at the University of Milan they have a digital well-being centre and GUI and colleagues there are sociologists and their definition of digital well-being has a much stronger emphasis on the effect that society and the norms and practices within a community or a society have on your own digital well-being and on how you manage your digital well-being. To give an example of that you might have normal practices that are there for your learning community. You might have a code of conduct of what's expected of people while they're using a learning environment. So while I'm talking about this, a lot of it is relevant to any kind of use of digital tools but I'm mainly focusing on how it's used in an educational setting. Secondly, the risks I've mentioned some of the risks already about attention and distraction. There's a lot of talk in the media about how mobile phones are bad in schools because they're distracting the kids from the learning. There's always tales of the distraction of students sitting in lecture theatres who are not focusing perhaps on the speaker but are on social media. So there's a lot of scaremongering about distraction and addiction. In fact, what we found were that addiction is not really addiction if you know what I mean. You don't, but anyway. There was a paper published earlier this year by Orton and his colleagues which said that smartphone addiction is a myth. It's not there. It's not really addiction. So the distractibility of addiction affects you personally and of course that might lead to stress, lack of sleep and a sedentary lifestyle. These things are mentioned in the media frequently. In terms of a community setting you see things like cyber bullying and cyber security and of course fake news and the Cambridge Analytica scandal last year where data was stolen from Facebook is of course also in the media and these can have an effect on our democracy, on our human rights and the targeting of particular social groups or particular people through the use of big data can have effects on society. For example selling make-up to depressed teenagers. There's advertising that targets teenagers who've said that they're depressed on social media and yes, they do buy more make-up so the make-up companies are targeting them. Is that ethical? I'm not sure. So opportunities a lot of what I've said about the challenges and risks have been critical of digital media of digital tools but the participants that we interviewed also commented how there were opportunities that they could see they could see the value of digital tools. The extended mind thesis is a theory that's well known in philosophy and psychology and it says that the mind is extended by the use of digital tools. So the use of the technology becomes an integral part of our thinking and reasoning processes. Google searches are a normal part of the way that we think nowadays. It may not be a Google search but it may be checking Wikipedia. So these have become normal and they have a value in extending what we can do and how we reason and think. Secondly, personalised education was identified as a potential value. Maybe not quite there at the moment but there's great potential for recommender systems and personalised education. For example if you took Apple's Siri personal assistant and transferred that to an educational setting you would have a personal tutor. Thirdly, avatars in virtual environments have great potential well actually they're already being used for treatments for phobias for changing people's attitudes which is interesting and people do use them to explore issues of identity. And finally I will conclude by saying that we should engage in the public debate over who is responsible for digital media. It's not a simple answer to the question of who's responsible it's to a certain extent it is a personal responsibility it is the digital technology companies who are responsible government can play a role and so can higher education institutions. We do need more research into ethics to critical digital pedagogy which we heard about this morning in the keynote and we need more impact studies that actually look at whether or not they're effective in changing people's attitudes and behaviours. So it could be a moral obligation really on us too as educators as technologists and in higher education institutions to promote the digital well being of not just our staff who we're responsible for but also the students that we're responsible for. Critical pedagogy suggests that if students live in a culture that digitizes and educates them through a screen then they require an education that empowers them in that sphere that teaches them that language and that offers them new opportunities of human connectivity in online learning environments. Okay I'll just finally say the project is currently developing a professional development course for educators in higher education a teachers pack with resources and a couple of apps for students and educators to help improve their digital well being and digital literacy skills. If you are interested in those they will be released in April so you can and there will be public showcase events in these locations and you can connect to us through LinkedIn group through Facebook or through the project website is there. Thank you. Thank you very much. One of the really interesting questions that we've had on Vvox is whether you think digital well being needs to be singled out as a specific problem or whether it sort of comes more under a general well being topic and I think that general well being is it is important to educate people about general well being but I think as higher education educators if we are encouraging people to use digital environments then we need to make sure that they're equipped to work in those areas. Brilliant thank you. Has anyone got any questions in here? Somebody on the Vvox is concerned whether we are creating students who can only interact digitally. I don't know about that. I teach on distance learning programs so I would be guilty of teaching students to interact only digitally but that's not all the students they're in higher education so I hope we're not teaching them all to only be able to interact digitally but I think we have to be realistic the digital technology is here to stay we need to use it in the best way and we need to teach people how to be safe and use it responsibly. For sure and I think one of the points at the very start of your presentation was about the balance between working as well and I think that comes into that as well encouraging people to have a good balance between online and offline. Absolutely and I think that's important for the staff as well as for the students we have a responsibility to the students but institutions also have a responsibility to the staff who are being increasingly encouraged to do things digitally. Brilliant thank you very much. Okay thank you. And for our final slide this afternoon Kelly is here to talk to us about Ed Share Hub. So I'm from the Computer Science School at the University of Southampton where I'm part of an enterprise team that runs within our web and internet science research group. And what I'd like to do today share some information with you about our solution Ed Share that was created at Southampton but more specifically about some of the recent work we've been doing around the creation of an aggregation service layer to aid the discoverability of open educational resources. So if you haven't heard of Ed Share before it's a digital content platform that's built on the open source software E-Prints which is also created at Southampton and it's been optimized for sharing, teaching and learning materials and many of you may have heard of E-Prints already there's a lot of institutions particularly across the UK but also across the world that are using it to support open access. But Ed Share has been heavily influenced by the design and ethos of the web 2.0 media sharing sites and it's part of a suite of products that we have available through our enterprise team at Southampton to support various forms of open. So it was originally created as part of a research project at Southampton known as the Ed Space Project and this was in support of our institutional e-learning strategy at the time and the intention was to provide a single shared safe storage location for all sorts of educational resources and this was after finding people were putting educational materials for the place. So they were closed in the VLE, they were on personal web pages or networks on people's USB sticks and the needs to gather this in a centralized location so it could easily be discovered across the university. But the project was also about a degree of staff change and culture change and facilitating more sharing and collaboration across the university. Now I should say this wasn't about creating an OER service for Southampton at the time but given the time scales that we're talking about here there was growing interest around open education and OERs specifically and it certainly was the long-term hopes for that project that this an aspirational that this would become a project that wouldn't just release materials from the closed spaces such as the VLE but they could transition to being available across the university and then openly to the world. So the output of that project was the University of Southampton Edgshare instance which was shortened to Edgshare Sotten which was launched in 2008 and following this we saw an emergence of a number of Edgshare platforms that were created to share OERs specifically and many of those came about as part of the GISC OER program that ran from 2009 to 2012 and that includes spaces such as Humbox which was focused on humanities resources, Swapbox which was social work and policy and Language Box and Loro and a couple of others as well. Now with it being built on open source software it's extremely extendable and flexible and adaptable and that's what we do at Southampton. So we started to repurpose it for other uses as well. So we also created a version to sit behind our iTunes UStall. So this was accepting submissions from across the university that were reviewed by our communications department. The content was being transcoded into the required formats and then fed through to the iTunes U front end. Our School of Medicine also created their own instance and theirs was far more about secure access so they needed to share content with their students but it needed to be controlled and only available to a white listed set of individuals due to the sensitive content. And then we started to see a shift to the bigger scale institutional spaces coming on board. So one at Edge Hill one at Glasgow Caledonian and more recently at UCL and the University of Glasgow. But there were two key points in this timeline that were really influential that I wanted to highlight. So as with many research projects and particularly ones that create software, if there's not the funds or people involved to sustain them in the long term they tend to get left. So the enterprise team adopted the project code that was created as part of that EdSpace project and we refactored it so that it could be made available as an enterprise offering for other people that wanted to create their own EdShares. And then further down the line we did some major work on upgrading the core solution and creating an upgrade path for those existing platforms and ensuring that it was going to be more sustainable in the long term alongside our other products. So this is the community of EdShares that we have that's still available and some as I say some of those recent additions and across all of these platforms they share a core set of features as part of being an EdShares but it is extremely flexible there's lots of different options and it would take me all day to go through the wealth of possibilities that there are with the software. But as I say this was focused on reproducing a Web 2.0 experience. So some of the features that are in there are immediate lightweight deposit there is no review process just as you would find on any other social media sort of sharing sites. There's lots of different ways of tagging and organising the content there's inline previews of the materials flexible editing permissions and the ability to share editing rights with people as well as many other things. Well that underlying software that sits beneath that is about open digital content and what it does is that resources that you create on there it will make the metadata open. So even if you've created educational materials that need to be closed the metadata the descriptions about them about perhaps who created it what it's about the subjects it's associated with who created it and so on are available openly on the web for harvesting and to be indexed by search engines. And what we've got here is quite a diverse community both in terms of that functionality but also motivations and reasons for having the platform. So we've got some where the focus is open but also we've got others where it's a mix of closed and open and that's fine. And just to look at a couple of examples a little bit more closely this is Humbox which was one of those just UK OER projects and is very well known in the OER community. This involved multiple institutions and a distributed project team and it's available openly for anyone to have an account and create resources on there. And when I was looking at the figures for this about 99% of the content is open and I think to be honest that 1% is probably a couple of test records that I've been creating in there. In terms of the specific features they've got they've got the ability for people to provide feedback on the materials that are shared to remix existing content and the platform then maintains a relationship between those remixes. And provides lots of support around the creation of virtual groups and the ability for those groups to showcase the resources they create or associated with. Another example is Ed Shearer at GCU at Glasgow Caledonian. This is an institutional platform and this is supporting multiple agendas. So this is supporting their institutional OER policy but it's also hosting some legacy content from other systems that have been withdrawn from the university and that was no longer funding for. But it's also about taking content from outside taking the content from out of the VLE where it was extremely expensive for them to host it with the VLE hosting solution. Now only staff and students can actually log in to have an account to create items in Ed Shearer at GCU but obviously it's open for browsing and there's lots of open content on there and there's lots of work that we did with GCU around the support and handling of video content and with it being an institutional system we've also got it linked in with lots of institutional feeds, so things like we've got course feeds coming in we've got close links with the VLE and it's linked in with single sign on and we also do things like campus recognition or network and VPN recognition so students don't have to sign in if they're on the institutional network. We gathered together some figures across our community of those Ed Shares that are still accessible because there are some that have disappeared and those that have at least some open content and you see I've grouped the institutional platforms at the top followed by those subject specific ones towards the bottom but what you can see is there's a significant amount of resources that are being shared across our community of Ed Shares and therefore their existence is already being exposed to the world and amazingly 55% of those are already open and of course this figure isn't fixed so as I took these figures the other day these figures are going to continue to grow and hopefully as we see more Ed Shares come on board it will grow even further and I'm always saying to people it's fine to have close content there is no one size fits all some content needs to remain closed for some people it's a transition in closed spaces it can seem quite scary to suddenly put them in the open but they're in a great place in an Ed Shares that from a technical perspective it's extremely easy to make them open and available to anyone but when you do have this mix of content we do need to be thinking more about how discoverable the OERs are specifically by that worldwide audience because if OERs cannot be discovered from a practical perspective they may be closed or not exist and within each platform we're already spending lots of time focusing on how we can organise and present the content and support the ways in which people are working using things like course codes descriptors and as I say linking with the VLE but as I say when it comes to OERs we need to be thinking about reaching that global audience making them accessible and discoverable to people who perhaps traditionally won't be able to access higher educational content so OER is obviously part of that story but it's certainly not the end of it and we wanted to make it possible for someone to come along and search and know that all the results that they're retrieving are open and available for reuse and to this end we've created the Ed Shares Hub now this is a separate service that we are running on our servers and it harvests that open metadata that exists across our community and there you can carry out a federated search across the network and have that confidence and convenience that you're knowing that you're only discovering the open content now how did we achieve this now obviously in the computer science school we like to write code and we can create things extremely rapidly and this was achieved through the rapid development of a plugin that we've called Synkit which was developed by my colleague Justin Bradley who's the lead for Eprints now the Synkit plugin is just installed on the Ed Shares themselves and then we have the host service running centrally now let's say we have an OER that gets created at a share at Glasgow this sends a notification to the hub and if it's recognised so we recognise and accept requests coming from that service a request will be sent back to the client for the metadata of that resource that Ed Shares will then send it back in an XML format and that metadata gets imported into the hub and then at that point it's available for searching and exactly the same process would apply if you were modifying a record so we can keep up to date with any updates that are happening to records all the time likewise if we were deleting a resource so or for example if a resource was open and it needs to be closed a notification will get sent to the hub confirms the ID and the action that it wants to take place if it's accepted it will be processed and the record is deleted it really is that simple now I do get asked about the sustainability of solutions our solution EdShare and a service like the EdShare hub and yes there are challenges but there's also a number of strengths about the way that we run so yes there's no driver for OER and we do find that that has an impact and our work with EdShare is largely focused on champions in the sector but also applying our own expertise and ideas as we move forward and certainly I'm picking up a number of things through the presentations and sessions that I'm attending at this conference and I should say when Eprints was first created Eprints had those same challenges while we were waiting for those kind of national drivers to come along with open access we were always working with champions in the sector and that's still true today now we're not centrally funded at Southampton so we can't ring fence funding to dedicate to some of these community service layers but our enterprise team now has been established within our university for over 15 years we're not for profit and we exist to sustain the software which we do through the services we provide and we're working with over 80 institutions directly to support them or host them and Eprints itself is used as I say across the world now I put this green box it sort of staggered between the two because we exist the purpose of our enterprise team is we exist to sustain the open source software and we support those who are using it now this can be a challenge to our sustainability and I've seen this point come up on Twitter earlier today because it depends ultimately on how open fits in the strategy of institutions and organisations across the sector and those making the decisions so and we also do find that people's perceptions of open and even open source can be a challenge so when we see large scale commercial providers come along you know we don't have the same multi-million pound marketing budgets that perhaps they do and in the procurement processes when we sort of convey the costs for an open source solution such as Eprints or EdShare we don't have the fee in there for a recurring license fee or anything like that to use the software and you'd think that would be great because it is cheaper than the commercial providers but actually perceptions of open source from some people sometimes can be that it's a lower quality or perhaps it's too high risk it is a mature piece of open software Eprints has now been around for almost if not longer than 20 years it's owned and managed by Southampton University Southampton but this can also be a strength because we do work across sectors we work across people that are working in the open access spaces open education and open data and we also do find that there's lots of innovation coming from these spaces and we can apply them and make them available to the community so looking ahead we are running user group meetings for EdShare I just had the first one last week at the University of Glasgow and we're hoping to run that on an annual basis with virtual meetups in between we've also got an open Google group space for anyone that's interested in being part of the conversations and contributing ideas we will be responding to feedback from some of the recently launched EdShare and certainly locally at Southampton we're following up on how EdShare's can support them in their day to day working as well as in the open and just to highlight a couple of things that we have coming up for work ahead for us is we've already got in progress that we're working on a preview service and this is in response to Blackboard Ally that when you upload content to EdShare it gets transformed into different formats now we've already been doing this for a very long time but actually what we can do is return it in far more formats if you upload a Word document for it to go through our preview generation service and it returns it to you in various formats so we want to extend that further and ensure that it's providing it in accessible formats and something I tweeted about yesterday off the back of one of the presentations towards the end of the day is exploring some integration with Synode now Synode again was created at the University of Southampton and is for transcribing media content and providing collaborative editing around transcripts there's an awful lot of things and again I could talk all day about the sort of things that we want to be doing but I think I've run out of time thank you very much thank you Kelly so we've got some questions again on the VVUX about how we can reuse them so what the content on the licenses and whether people can embed the stuff on their own VLEs in terms of the most common types of records it depends on the platforms largely it is PowerPoints and Word documents but the GCU for example they use theirs heavily for hosting their video content so lecture captures and things it really does vary across all the platforms yes you can embed content in the VLE we've specifically put a feature again this was developed through the GCU version that you can embed we focused heavily on the audio and video content the embed feature so exactly like you can do with YouTube you grab the embed code and post it in your VLE and all of the resources that we create have permanent URIs so if you post them in your VLE they will roll over to your next academic year and they won't have changed and for the content is there a specific license so they all under creative commons licenses for reuse so the licenses is down to the person that's depositing the resource in question but all the creative commons licenses are there so you can send them if there's licenses on there currently and as creative commons updates we keep them up to date as well brilliant thank you do you have any questions in here so we have some more questions online one that seems to be popular that's got some likes is whether EdShare can help with the duplication of resources across an institution we do actually have on the EPRANCE because this is an issue across our platforms when people are submitting records in support of open access and where we're getting feeds from publisher sources as well there's duplicates coming through so we do have a deduplication checker yes and there are facilities that when you are creating resource it does checks as you're entering it to see well has someone already entered something with the same title to try and reduce that duplication so yes we do have tools in there and do you have any data about the extent to which your shared resources are used by other users maybe across universities and things like that we do have a stats package that's added to all of our EdShare's and some of them advertise that dashboard and some of them don't so not specifically down to school level and things like that but we certainly do I think I put on one of the slides from Google and they're coming from a variety of sources we sort of track who the referring sites are so whether it's coming from the VLE whether it's coming from external sites so yes each repository does have a stats dashboard so you can get that data brilliant thank you so if there are any more questions in here otherwise we'll thank Kelly and all of our 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