The Chiropractic Research Repository - Final FPP Project Report

Transcription

1 The Chiropractic Research Repository - Final FPP Project Report Project Name: The Chiropractic Research Repository Period Report: April to June 2015 Department: Chiropractic Academic Lead: Dr Ben Brown (Chiropractic) Project Manager: Robert Parker (LTC) Current Project Team: Mahbub Hassan, James Hamilton, Michael Grant, Mike Catabay, Cathy Rytmeister (all LTC) Copyright Consultants: Sylvie Saab, Susan Vickery, Maureen Kattau (all Library) Project Background Overview: The Macquarie University chiropractic program is made up of a 3-year Bachelor of Science degree and a 2-year Master of Chiropractic degree. As well as learning the vocational knowledge and skills required to register and practice as a chiropractor in Australia, students are also provided with the knowledge and skills to become consumers of research, and as a result, the relevant background training to enter into the higher degree research pathway. Currently this research content is interspersed through vocational content in the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. While the relevant information is available in the program, the location and pedagogical considerations have not been considered in great depth. Furthermore, information presented in earlier years is not accessible to final year students wishing to refresh certain research concepts. It is hoped that this repository will be used in several ways which are detailed below: a) A resource for the teaching of research methods to students; b) A teaching resource that can be added to, made use of by existing units, or used as a standalone, online compressed delivery of research methodology; c) A resource for staff and research students for the revision of research methods; and d) A resource by which assessment tasks can be built and tailored in the existing coursework units. This concept, which is similar to those online modules offered on Coursera, has been approved by the staff of the Department of Chiropractic, as well as the Associate Dean Learning and Teaching (Associate Professor Jenny Donald) and the Educational Developer for the Faculty of Science (Robert Parker). What was the problem or original issue that drove this project? There are two main areas in the five-year program that focus heavily on research methodology content and application; first semester in the third year of the undergraduate program, and the final year of the postgraduate program. There is research content in some of the other units in the program however it is poorly placed and duplicated in some areas. With such gaps between the delivery of the research related content, the importance of this material becomes de-emphasized and potentially lost in the mind of the student. Without the appropriate emphasis and practical application of this knowledge, the learning experience may be negatively affected and the retention poor. An additional problem that is inherent in vocational training programs is that the majority of the students have a very clear end-goal in mind, namely training for their future profession. When research methods are not delivered in a manner that is meaningful and relevant, student engagement is impaired. Research methodology is an essential ingredient of any medical and allied health curriculum and should be treated accordingly. The creation of an online repository will allow for a consistent and tailored approach to the delivery of research methods in the chiropractic program. It is hoped that it will combat issues of content discontinuity, poor student engagement and may serve as a model of delivery for other vocational training programs. Page 1

2 Figure 1: EQUELLA overview What were the original goals, objectives, and success criteria? The primary objective is to develop a workflow to create an online repository or Open Educational Resources (OER) using EQUELLA for use within the Department of Chiropractic. The process may also be used for other course materials in other departments. OER are learning materials from single pieces of content to entire courses and programs, that are available for all to use within an academic community and principally, through Creative Commons licensing, are legally available for repurposing, modifying, and improving. EQUELLA provides a single digital repository where academics and educational designers can search and find the research content for the desired outcomes or activity. EQUELLA's functionality allows: imports, or harvests of content from a variety of sources, create tagging preferences or metadata schema (vocabulary) to the harvested content, share content among your educational community, enable users to add comments and ratings to the content and track the usage of content. The principal entity is the collection. A collection stores digital learning objects and more complex multi-document types, such as lesson plans, learning sequences and online modules. Each collection contains a metadata schema and a contribution wizard. In addition, collections can also include: a workflow definition; access control rights; display template rules; and copyright and digital rights management (DRM) controls. Page 2

3 This project is some what open ended. There are many unknowns that will affect the final outputs and deliverables. There will also be an investigation into other similar repositories for teaching and research to look at future collaboration and contribution, such as: BEST - the Biomedical Education Skills and Training Network. See How will this project benefit other staff, other units or courses? The creation of an online teaching resource will have several benefits to staff: a) Staff will be able to discuss and dedicate more vocational concepts that require an in depth understanding of research methods without having to rehash or teach these methods from scratch b) Staff can be confident that their students will have an enhanced understanding of research methodology that is appropriately matched from a pedagogical perspective to the year of their enrolment, and a resource that is readily accessible The creation of an online teaching repository will have several benefits to the units/course: a) The detail and complexity of the units delivering vocational content may be enhanced by familiarising students with the language of research methodology b) By making the repository accessible to all year groups a clear pedagogy can be created throughout the chiropractic program which will foster the concept of the research consumer and improve the standard and quality of the vocational content c) The research methodology component can be delivered in a compressed format or completed online: Students from other universities enrolling in the postgraduate coursework program or postgraduate chiropractors wishing to do higher degree research can be brought up to speed on the research content in the undergraduate program in a compressed on line delivery or flipped mode d) Developing a stronger a research culture will result in increased number of higher degree research student enrolments. What was achieved: Preparatory Work There was considerable time-consuming work carried out by Dr Ben Brown to gather the digital objects from 11 hard drives over the first couple of months of the project. The metadata for the digital objects was put into a Google Sheet. This also required the creation of a new content vocabulary for tagging and aggregation. As the subject matter expert, Dr Ben Brown has produced: 782 keywords/category/vocabulary items and gathered 2801 digital objects. The vocabulary was revised into a flat hierarchy. Direct logins to the ishare staging environment based on EQUELLA were setup for some of the project team members. EQUE LLA is configured as enterprise software to be driven by other enterprise front-end user software packages such as Moodle/iLe arn, so that users upload and access the digital content via these, not directly inside EQUELLA. Some preliminary training was delivered and user manuals made available. This raises a question mark over the scalability of this work flow. Page 3

4 Figure 2: User management setup (login, authentication and security) Page 4

5 Creation of an initial EQUELLA repository Mahbub Hassan developed an EQUELLA work flow on the ishare staging environment for bulk uploading. A collection repository was defined and created using an administrator login, name CREAM: Chiropractic Research and Associated Materials. A trial bulk upload of a sample of 10 items that covered most of the types of digital objects was successfully carried out. This lead to a revision of the structure of the metadata for the subsequent bulk upload of the rest of the digital items. For inclusivity measures, an "alt text" rollover field can be mapped onto the item/image description field for implementation in ilearn. So for example, in the entry below, we could map the description field ("Description of writing a research plan" ) to the image description field within ilearn. This can be added in the scope of the next round this project if we could engage a developer to work on it with Moodle. The LTC's Learning Systems group developed a similar functionality in WordPress to pull metadata from ishare and attributes with images for the TECHE blog and used as captions/alt text on the blog post. Table 1: CREAM - Chiropractic Research and Associated Materials - Repository Data Structure Data field name Data field description Example item/itembody/name Title of the item Writing a research plan item/itembody/description Description of the item Description of writing a research plan item/lom/general/keyword Keyword(s) of the item separated by vertical bar ( ) Research Methods Writing Research Planning item/lom/technical/format Format of the item from the drop-down list Document item/itembody/attachments/filename Attachment or filename with extension Writing_a_Research_Plan.pdf item/lom/educational/learningresourcetype Category of the item from the drop-down list Lecture item/mqudata/authors/author Author(s) of the item separated by vertical bar ( ) Jenkins, H. item/copyright/origin Provenience of the item Macquarie Uni item/lom/educational/intendedenduserrole Visibility of the item MQU only Figure 3: EQUELLA digital repository relationships Page 5

6 Workflows and Application The next steps in the project included: Developed a simple data entry workflow for creating and editing individual items Finalised the bulk upload processes and the effort required to organise the materials (see below) Addressed the various copyright issues (see below) Audited content for quality involving other academic staff and postgraduates Developed a workflow for watermarking material and branding (pre-upload work) Addressed inclusivity issues for the content. This is an ongoing and university-wide issue that needs much further work Determined the access rights for world/university/faculty/unit Addressed the usability of these ishare objects in ilearn and teaching cartridges (e.g. LAMS) as Open Education Resources (OER) for different units of study Figure 4: Resource creation process for a single item Bulk Upload Workflow and Observations: The bulk upload of material was completed in the staged environment with the spreadsheet data into the CREAM repository. T he observations are: It is lot easier and manageable to run bulk upload when the items are of same type (e.g. only PDFs, or only URLs, or only images). A spreadsheet with mixed items causes errors and takes more time to fix the metadata errors. So the digital objects were separated into 3 different spreadsheets (one for URLs, one for videos, one for PDFs) and loaded separately. Some URLs were too long to fit in the meta-data field and they need to be shortened for practical use (consider using G oogle URL Shortener or Bitly for example). Some of the URLs were so long that bulk upload failed to process them. Some URLs required users to login to the corresponding journal website to view the article. This is a problem for a Learning Commons object. Uploading PDF or image had no issues, however we deleted the uploaded PDFs for copyright reasons and only one item with PDF exists now Writing a Literature Review (Writing a Lit Review.pdf). For videos, we uploaded all meta-data but not the video files yet, due to the cost considerations as this is only a trial. We uploaded one video file to Kaltura to test the process and it works fine Writing a research plan (Writing a Research Plan.wmv). We can upload rest of the videos once we move onto the production servers. There are some other meta-data that can be added to items in ishare, but we skipped those in the spreadsheet since they are conditional queries and not related to all items in general (e.g. Is this item associated with a teaching unit? If yes, then we can record unit codes etc.). We can add these meta-data anytime by editing the records in ishare as needed. Page 6

7 Figure 5: EQUELLA manual data entry form and upload link Page 7

8 Copyright Issues Advice was sought from Sylvie Saab (Executive Information Policy Officer, Library) about the copyright issues for this class of materials, i.e. open educational resources (OER). It is imperative that all the materials being aggregated into the learning commons are not subject to the CAL (Copyright Agency Limited) Licence or any copyright exception. In effect, this means that all the materials being aggregated into the repository are: Owned by the University in whole - i.e. all powerpoints or other learning/research resources do not contain material by people who aren't/weren't employed by the University unless that material is licensed for educational use; or Available under a licence that allows educational use - for example, all Creative Commons licensed material can be used for educational purposes including stored in a repository to create a learning commons. OER material are by definition licensed for educational use; or No longer protected by copyright. This essentially means that copyright protection has expired in the material. Usually copyright protection lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. If the work was created prior to 2005, the term of protection is 50 years after the death of the author; or The repository should not contain local copies of material that is licensed through the library or already available on ishare. In these instances, permalinks to either the licensed product or the material as already cataloged in ishare should be used in place of additional copies, then if the actual link to the resource changes, the library maintains it. Affordances and Opportunities for Open Educational Resources (OER) This project was an examination of how far we could use existing enterprise software services for creating a research repository. This also included the feasibility of creating and curating a Learning Commons. This purpose requires the development of an interactive environment for updating the content to maintain its currency. We want students to engage with the content, to reflect on what they are learning by tagging, rating and commenting on it and also contribute to the resources with new content. So in summary this project will contribute to the sustainability of a Learning Commons with: sharable learning resources - courseware, content modules, learning objects, learner-support materials, assessment tools, research data repositories and online learning communities resources to support teachers by creating or adapting OERs, using existing training materials and tools curated and accredited resources to assure the quality of educational practices Project closure recommendations: Once the workflow runs smoothly on the staging environment, it can then be repeated on the production environment, that will include the transfer of videos to KALTURA for delivery. Discuss and plan the creation of complementary resources such as learning cartridges that can also be stored in EQUELLA and can be added to an ilearn unit as an ishare resource. Develop within EQUELLA the scripts (search queries) that use the vocabulary to retrieve a subset of the collection for use in an ilearn unit as an Open Educational Resource (OER). Create a development ilearn unit with the research content organised into program stages from the uploaded objects. For inclusivity measures, an "alt text" rollover field can be extracted from the object description for use in ilearn. This requires software development work in Moodle. Evaluation: Thus far evaluation has been conducted informally. Ben Brown will apply for another FPP to build course resources and pedagogy in first session We will be able to conduct an evaluation using TEDS. Page 8