Work in progress, expect frequent changes. Help and feedback is welcome. See discussion page.

Executive summary

(: Will be completed after consultation and discussion of the draft with the MLE community)

Project plan

Context

MLE strategy vision and Reusable & portable content as priority area
How does this proposal link with the digital strategy?
Scoping paper: Using Wikis for Developing, Sharing and Reusing Educational Content

Strategy

Figure 1. OER maturity planning curve for New Zealand school sector.

Figure 2. Conceptual model for New Zealand schools OER collaboration.

The Ministry of Education and the Open Education Resource Foundation (OERF) propose to implement a maturity model approach to support the development of a sustainable and scalable OER collaboration for reusable and portable digital content in New Zealand schools.

The strategy aims to start planning the co-design of a national OER initiative in collaboration with the sector, ultimately shifting to a project owned and driven by New Zealands' teachers. During the initial phases the Ministry of Education and OER Foundation will support the sector in building capacity and an inventory of OER examples as the foundations for achieving an engaged national community of teachers. Ultimately, we plan to build a sustainable and active community of teachers empowered to transform learning in the classroom using digital OERs and shared experiences. Components of our theory of action are summarised below, and should be read in conjunction with the conceptual map illustrated in Figure 2.

Our big aim is to foster the development of a sustainable OER ecosystem for New Zealand teachers to create, share, repurpose and reuse digital content in collaboration with key agencies, institutions and technologies building on the international experiences of mass-collaboration exemplified by the wiki model. A key requirement is that the reusable and portable content solution must operate within the context of the MLE inititative and inter-operate well with other technical solutions that form part of that initiative.
Outputs: We believe that modelling best practice by adopting a learn-by-doing approach through cycles of continuous improvement is the best way to catalyse a successful national collaboration. Therefore we will focus on enabling educators to use wiki technology and encourage New Zealand's best teachers to develop OER examples to inspire and encourage nation-wide participation. In parallel, we also need to refine the technologies and tools making them easier to use, while finding creative ways to map our OERs with the New Zealand curriculum. Specifically the following outputs are specified for year 1 of this project:
- Wiki enabled teachers: Train 145 teachers in basic wiki authoring
- OER demonstrators: Develop 245 OER examples in WikiEducator based on the New Zealand curriculum.
Key activities Three major activities are planned to contribute to the attainment of the stated outputs.
- Training activities to build capacity and extend OER content examples: Using the Learning4Content model we will provide basic wiki training and award contestable honoraria for developing high quality OER examples.
- Software and tools development will improve usability of the technology for newcomers to collaborative online authoring. We will publish open APIs to facilitate ease of OER content integration with the technology platforms of the MOE approved LMS vendors.
- Community development and support: Establishing a thriving OER community beyond the founders and early adopters requires appropriate mechanisms to support community development. We plan to establish an OER Ambassadors initiative so that teachers will have a local point of contact and easy access to relevant and up-to-date information on the progress of our national collaboration as well as a direct feedback loop to encourage continuous improvement for the duration of the project.

Project outcomes and outputs

Project aims

Outcomes

The medium term outcomes for this project are to:

Build capability among New Zealand teachers to participate actively in a national OER collaboration in support of the Ministry of Education's initiative to establish a self-sustaining project for reusable and portable content in New Zealand schools;
Design and implement a sustainable community network of New Zealand teachers collaborating on digital OER in support of the national curriculum;
Develop a representative sample of demonstrator OER materials
Refine existing technologies and tools which will lower the technological barriers for new teachers to participate in collaborative development and reuse of digital OER;
Foster and promote the development of a national eco-system for New Zealand's OER activities including, for example: New Zealand schools^[1], New Zealand School Boards' of Trustees^[2], Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand^[3], Digital NZ^[4], the National Library^[5], National Standards^[6], the New Zealand Curriculum^[7] and interoperability of OER content with the approved LMS vendors^[8]

Overview

Figure 3: Roadmap depicting the relationships between the three streams for establishing a national OER collaboration for the New Zealand school sector

The project will implement an incremental design approach whereby each phase of the project is informed by the lessons learned and achievements of the preceding phases. The project is divided into three distinct streams:

Stream 1: Capability and community development
Stream 2: Tools development
Stream 3: OER content development

The outputs for each phase of the project should be read in conjunction with the scoping paper commissioned by the Ministry of Education: Using wikis for developing, sharing and reusing educational content.

Figure 3 depicts a 2-year roadmap, illustrating the relationships among the three streams of the project. Note that this funding proposal is restricted to activities for Year 1 in establishing the foundations necessary for a national OER collaboration in the New Zealand school sector, as depicted by the highlighted area for Year 1 in Figure 3. The capability and community development (Stream 1), and OER content development (Stream 3) continue for the duration of the project and lessons learned will inform the tools development stream. The sub-phases of tools development stream are incremental, and each phase is informed by the outputs of the preceding phase. In this way, the project utilises the benefits of agile software development based on iterative development where requirements and solutions evolve from interactions with the system and its users. The tools development stream is subdivided into four phases:

Phase 1: Establishing foundations and creating a unique New Zealand identity for the initiative (Year 1)
Phase 2: Rich text editing and meta data solutions for online content (Year 1)
Phase 3: Offline editing and repository solutions (Year 2)
Phase 4: Extending offline editing and content packaging capabilities (Year 2).

We envisage a 5th phase focusing on synchronising and federating a collection of wiki instances. However, this is dependent on international collaboration and additional offshore funding support. Synchronizing and federating a collection of wiki instances is a major technical task, and should be expected to require significant development resources to produce a robust and reliable solution, and is therefore not included in the roadmap illustrated in Figure 3. However, this would represent a major step forward in reducing local bandwidth costs while drawing on the benefits of a global content collaboration.

Guiding principles

The overall aim of this initiative is to establish a self-sustaining OER ecosystem that empowers New Zealands' teachers to transform teaching practice using digital materials which can be shared, remixed, and reused. In achieving this strategic aim the following principles underpin the design of the initiative:

The project is restricted to OER interventions. The initiative is not intended to replace or compete with proprietary content solutions used in New Zealand schools but rather to complement and augment the range of reusable and portable content available for use in our classrooms.
Funding is strategic -- and not intended for ongoing operational support. The funding support is aimed to achieve a critical mass of educators and OER content exemplars required for a sustainable and scalable OER ecosystem.
The project is designed to support teachers and schools in utilising our collective experience for the benefit of the sector. In this regard, wherever possible, we will use existing resources and skills of practising teachers across New Zealand for planned activities because ultimately the project will be driven by teachers for teachers (See Figure 1 above).
Pedagogy drives technology refinements. Consequently, tools development will focus on enhancing usability and refining the technology for educational needs of New Zealand teachers within the context of the MLE initiative.

Stream 1: Capability and community development

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.

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
Capability development	Train-the trainer workshops Plan train-the-trainer workshop Collaboratively determine selection criteria for L4C trainers (champions/early adopters) Select participants for train-the-trainer workshop Wikieducator taster sessions Trainers organise face-to-face introduction sessions at their schools Online training workshops Schedule and implement online L4C workshops Advertise and recruit teachers for training workshops	One trainer workshop (face-to-face) Train 20 New Zealand teachers to become wiki facilitators Schedule and deliver online training workshop every 2nd month, with the first workshop to start within 2 months of commencement of this project. Trainers to schedule 20 WikiEducator taster sessions (face-to-face) Train 145 teachers in basic wiki authoring (online workshops)	First 6 months ending 31 Jan 2010 Train-the-trainer workshop completed: 31 August 2009 2 Online L4C workshops 10 WikiEducator Taster sessions 70 teachers trained Second 6 months ending 31 Jul 2010 3 Online L4C workshops 10 WikiEductor Taster sessions 75 teachers trained

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

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
Community development and support	Establish NZ OER Ambassadors initiative Collaboratively determine selection criteria for school-based Ambassadors Collaboratively determine roles, and support mechanisms for Ambassadors Advertise and recruit Ambassadors for each school Establish a web journalism node Produce a quarterly newsletter that will reach a wide audience including those educators who are not actively participating in the collaboration Introduce community kudos incentives like featured teachers and featured resources Develop and maintain a FAQ resource for New Zealand teachers Build a NZ community node on WikiEducator and corresponding support resources Develop "Best practices" documents guiding effective wiki use	Selection criteria for Ambassadors published Roles and responsibilities of OER Ambassadors determined Recruit and select 150 OER Ambassadors Collaborative development of a NZ community node on WikiEducator completed Needs analysis of additional tutorials and support resources completed 4 quarterly news letters published targeting a distribution of 2000 copies NZ teacher collaboration forum established and moderated Design and implement online survey for monitoring and evaluation.	First 6 months ending 31 Jan 2010 NZ Teacher collaboration forum established - Commencement of project August 2009 Community node on WikiEducator established - 31 August 2009 Ambassadors recruited - 30 September 2009 Needs analysis for additional support resources completed - 30 September 2009 Monitoring and evaluation survey completed - 30 September 2009 Baseline survey administered - 31 October 2009 Newsletter 1 - 31 October 2009 Newsletter 2 - 31 January 2010 Additional support resources/tutorials completed - 31 December 2009 Second 6 months ending 31 Jul 2010 Newsletter 3 - 30 April 2010 Ongoing Teacher collaboration forum activities Ongoing monitoring and evaluation M&E Survey results published - 31 July 2010 Newsletter 4 - 31 Jul 2010

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.

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
Capability development	Reconfigure training materials Produce revised materials for shorter workshop now possible as a result of the usability enhancements in the technology Wikieducator taster Sessions Trainers organise face-to-face introduction sessions at their schools Online training workshops Schedule and implement new online L4C workshops Advertise and recruit teachers for training workshops	Commission development of new training materials Schedule and deliver online training workshop every month, with the first revised and shortened workshop to start October 2010. Trainers to schedule 20 WikiEducator taster sessions (face-to-face) Train 300 teachers in basic wiki authoring (online workshops)	First 6 months ending 31 Jan 2011 6 Online L4C workshops 10 WikiEducator Taster Sessions 150 teachers trained Second 6 months ending 31 Aug 2011 6 Online L4C workshops 10 WikiEducator Taster Sessions 150 teachers trained

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

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
Community development and support	Establish NZ OER Ambassadors initiative Collaboratively determine selection criteria for school-based Ambassadors Collaboratively determine roles, and support mechanisms for Ambassadors Advertise and recruit Ambassadors for each school Establish a web journalism node Produce a quarterly newsletter that will reach a wide audience including those educators who are not actively participating in the collaboration Introduce community kudos incentives like featured teachers and featured resources Develop and maintain a FAQ resource for New Zealand teachers Build a NZ community node on WikiEducator and corresponding support resources Develop "Best practices" documents guiding effective wiki use	Selection criteria for Ambassadors published Roles and responsibilities of OER Ambassadors determined Recruit and select 150 OER Ambassadors Collaborative development of a NZ community node on WikiEducator completed Needs analysis of additional tutorials and support resources completed 4 quarterly news letters published targeting a distribution of 2000 copies Bureau service established and ongoing help provided NZ teacher collaboration forum established and moderated Design and implement online survey for monitoring and evaluation.	First 6 months ending 31 Jan 2011 Newsletter 5 - 31 October 2011 Ongoing Teacher collaboration forum activities Ongoing monitoring and evaluation Newsletter 6 - 31 Jan 2011 M&E Survey results published - 31 Jan 2011 Second 6 months ending 31 Aug 2011 Newsletter 7 - 30 April 2011 Ongoing monitoring and evaluation Newsletter 8 - 31 July 2011 M&E Survey results published - 31 Aug 2011

Stream 2: Tools development

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.

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
Technology foundations	Setup WikiEducator for a national OER collaboration Research solutions to refine and improve usability for teachers Publish relevant technical information for content portability for LMS vendors	develop a distinctive NZ landing page and project (curriculum) pages implement categories that identify NZ content by curriculum tag preliminary investigation of the installation of a rich text editor for some users of WikiEducator provide a way to easily manage user lists review the existing set of templates for consistency, ease of use, and structure encouraging reuse explain existing API so that programmers can pull, reuse, and possibly even push content	Target date for this activity: 31 Jan 2010 ensure basic technical foundations are sound establish best practices for content reuse

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:

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

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.

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
Improve ease of use and reuse	facilitate online editing, including support for iDevices encourage consistent metadata for all resources	enhance the online rich text editor support a wider set of templates (iDevices) add option lists in templates to make it easier for users to select from a range of valid choices add a metadata solution (eg tab or template solution) add tools allowing individual page tagging, with display of most popular existing tags add tools for supporting formative assessment	Target date for this activity: 31 Jul 2010 WikiEducator made a convenient to use collaboration and sharing point for a rapidly growing cadre of NZ educators resource-based metadata available to facilitate searching and reuse

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.

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
Provide easy-to-use offline authoring alternative	provide offline editing alternative content peer review	research support for offline editing using OpenOffice template support one-click publishing import from wiki implement a technique allowing peer review of resources globally within a school or cluster	Target date for this activity: 31 Jan 2011 an offline, near WYSIWYG authoring alternative available schools allowed to impose their own quality review processes atop WikiEducator framework

Phase 4: Tools development - Extending offline editing

Aims: (: Need to refine the aim)

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.

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
Extend offline editing solutions to Microsoft Word.	additional offline editing options	editing connection for Microsoft Office	Target date for this activity: 31 Jul 2011

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.

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
Allow federating multiple WikiEducator instances.	synchronise multiple instances national instance institution-specific instance	robust synchronisation and conflict resolution scheme ability to produce offline copies and subsets may also be possible from this research	Target date for this activity: ?? (contingent on funding sources and development resources)

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

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
OER Content development	Develop OER content examples Co-develop criteria for selection of OER exemplars for development Co-develop ideas and classification system for different types of OER (eg lesson plans, handouts for learners, interactive multi-media simulations etc.) Co-design incentive and honorarium system for OER exemplars Support teachers in developing OER examples Establish and maintain a basic bureau service for technical wiki support Provide basic online help services for wiki syntax questions Provide limited digitisation services to wikify donations from teachers as OER	Develop 145 OER examples Basic bureau service established and maintained Source 100 donations from existing resources for digitisation in the wiki.	First 6 months ending 31 Jan 2010 70 OER examples developed 50 OER donations digitised/wikified Bureau service established - 31 August 2009 Ongoing Bureau service support Second 6 months ending 31 Jul 2010 75 OER examples developed 50 OER donations digitised/wikified Ongoing Bureau service support

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

Main Activity	Sub activities	Outputs	Target Date
OER Content development	Develop OER content examples Support teachers in developing OER examples Maintain a basic bureau service for technical wiki support Provide basic online help services for wiki syntax questions Provide limited digitisation services to wikify donations from teachers as OER	Develop 145 OER examples Source 100 donations from existing resources for digitisation in the wiki.	First 6 months ending 31 Jan 2011 70 OER examples developed 50 OER donations digitised/wikified Ongoing Bureau service support Second 6 months ending 31 Aug 2011 70 OER examples developed 50 OER donations digitised/wikified Ongoing Bureau service support

Budget proposal

Budget proposal for the two years ending 31 July 2011

Details	Year 1 Details (NZ$)	Year 1 Stream Summary (NZ$)	Year 2 Details (NZ$)	Year 2 Stream Summary (NZ$)
Stream 1: Capability and community development		70,000		62,000
Year 1: 1 Train-the-trainer workshop (20 teachers) Year 2: Revised training materials	23,500		10,000
20 WikiEducator Taster sessions – facilitor's honoraria	6,000		6,000
Year 1: 5 Online L4C workshops – facilitators' honoraria Year 2: 12 Online L4C workshops - facilitators' honoraria	7,500		13,000
Web journalism hub (4 newsletters)	8,000		8,000
OER Foundation professional management	25,000		25,000
Content development		68,500		68,500
145 OER Demonstrators	43,500		43,500
Wiki bureau service	25,000		25,000
Tools development	71,500	71,500	????	????
TOTAL	210,000	210,000	????	????

Planning notes

Technical thoughts

Links and references

[1] ttp://www.tki.org.nz/e/schools/

[2] ttp://www.nzsta.org.nz

[3] ttp://www.creativecommons.org.nz/

[4] ttp://www.digitalnz.org

[5] ttp://www.natlib.govt.nz/services/national-collaborative-services/digital-nz

[6] ttp://www.minedu.govt.nz/theMinistry/Consultation/NationalStandards.aspx

[7] ttp://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum

[8] ttp://www.minedu.govt.nz/educationSectors/Schools/Initiatives/ITAdministrationSystemsForSchools/StudentManagementSystems/SMSContacts/VendorContacts.aspx

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Reusable and portable content for New Zealand schools

Contents

Executive summary

Project plan

Context

Strategy

Project outcomes and outputs

Project aims

Outcomes

Overview

Guiding principles

Stream 1: Capability and community development

Year 1

Capability development

Community development

Year 2

Capability development

Community development

Stream 2: Tools development

Year 1

Phase 1: Technology foundations

Phase 2: Improve usability through rich text editing and educational specific refinements

Year 2

Phase 3: Offline editing and peer review

Phase 4: Tools development - Extending offline editing

Phase 5 - Federated wiki instances

Stream 3: OER content development

Year 1

Year 2

Budget proposal

Planning notes

Links and references

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