Funding proposals/Reusable and portable content for New Zealand schools/Reporting/August09

Year 1

 * Anticipated budget: NZ$70,000
 * Key outputs
 * 20 Trainers trained
 * 20 WikiEducator Taster sessions (Face-to-face)
 * 5 Online training workshops
 * 145 Early adopters trained in collaborative wiki authoring
 * NZ teacher community node established and supported
 * 150 OER Ambassadors selected and appointed
 * Web journalism node established and 4 Newsletters published

Capability development
Aim: To identify and train "early adopters" in collaborative authoring of OER to form the foundation for scaling-up a national OER collaboration for New Zealand schools in year 2.

Community development
Aim: To establish initiatives and support resources to foster the development of a sustainable and scalable community of New Zealand teachers empowered to transform teaching through OER

Year 2

 * Anticipated budget: NZ$62,000
 * Key outputs
 * 20 WikiEducator Taster sessions (Face-to-face)
 * 12 Online training workshops
 * 300 Teachers trained in collaborative wiki authoring
 * 100 additional OER Ambassadors selected and appointed
 * Web journalism node continued and 4 Newsletters published

Capability development
Aim: To build a core cadre of teachers with the capability to participate in collaborative authoring of OER in support of the national curriculum.

Community development
Aim: To establish initiatives and support resources to foster the development of a sustainable and scalable community of New Zealand teachers empowered to transform teaching through OER

Year 1

 * Anticipated budget:
 * Key outputs:
 * Distinctive NZ landing page established
 * Research and requirements specification for rich text editing solution
 * Explain existing API for LMS vendors
 * Implement rich text editing solution incorporating option lists for pedagogical templates
 * Implement solution for taging and mapping NZ content to national curriculum.

Phase 1: Technology foundations
Aim: To establish a unique New Zealand identity for the national OER collaboration and to research technical refinements for the next phases of tool development.

Phase 2: Improve usability through rich text editing and educational specific refinements
Aim: To make the wiki easier to use for all teachers for authoring, searching, and reusing OER content.

The instructional device templates serve two important functions within WikiEducator: With that in mind, it is important that any rich text editor facilitate building this structure into resources and not clutter them with inconsistent presentation-oriented markup.
 * encourage authors to consider the pedagogical structure of each page of their resource
 * provides a small amount of structure within a page which tools can exploit for reusing the content in different ways

Year 2

 * Anticipated budget:
 * Key outputs:
 * authors are provided offline editing alternatives using standard office software
 * facilitate peer review of contributed resources

Phase 3: Offline editing and peer review
Aims: Attempt to blur the distinction between the repository technology and a desktop application.

OpenOffice provides a comfortable suite of tools for authors that prefer to work offline. Similar to the work done embedding a rich text editor into WikiEducator, care must be taken to provide all of the features authors expect without unduly cluttering the resulting resources making them difficult to reuse. iDevices should be easy to use. Using an existing wiki page as a starting point should be possible. Publishing to the wiki should be straightforward, with clear messages if a conflict takes place because of a simultaneous edit by a collaborator. Embedded images (or other media) should be checked for uniqueness and share existing files where possible.

Phase 4: Tools development - Extending offline editing
Aims:

Further adapt WikiEducator to teacher authoring habits, adding at least minimal support for offline editing using Microsoft Office tools.

Microsoft Office's proprietary nature makes this difficult to do in a robust, future-proof way. The solution investigated here may range from a droplet that post processes and uploads pages to an add-in that attempts to add a wikitext output filter.

Phase 5 - Federated wiki instances
One major piece of work that we envision is the ability to synchronise multiple instances of MediaWiki. For example, this would allow a school or cluster to run their own local instance if they had the need and the IT support to do it. Or it could allow a national instance of WikiEducator separate from the global instance hosted offshore. Achieving this in a robust way will require significant resources outside the scope of this proposal.

Stream 3: OER content development
Aim: Develop a critical mass of OER exemplars to serve as examples for teachers to create, share and reuse digital content.

Year 1

 * Anticipated budget: NZ$68,500
 * Key outputs
 * 145 OER exemplars commissioned
 * 100 Existing resources digitised or converted into wiki format.
 * Wiki bureau Service:
 * Online support services for teachers developing OER
 * Limited support for digitising or wikifying existing resources

Year 2

 * Anticipated budget: NZ$68,500
 * Key outputs
 * 145 OER exemplars commissioned
 * 100 Existing resources digitised or converted into wiki format.
 * Wiki bureau Service:
 * Online support services for teachers developing OER
 * Limited support for digitising or wikifying existing resources