DELILA dissemination day #delila

Today I'm attending the Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation (DELILA) project dissemination day in London, UK. This project focuses "on converting existing content to ensure that it is openly licensed and adaptable by other users." In its second phase it aimed to "extend the range of materials openly available, document benefits offered by OER [Open Educational Resources] to those involved in the learning process, and promote collections of OER materials."

The day started with an introduction from Ruth Stubbings, representing the CILIP Information Literacy Group. She highlighted some of the open educational resource projects that they have supported.
Then Jane Secker (LSE; DELILA Project manager) led off the main proceedings with Why, why, why DELILA? . The project is funded by JISC and the Higher Education Academy. The project partners are the University of Birmingham, the CILIP IL Group and the Londone School of Economics. The project is paired with the CPD4HE project at University College London.
The aims of DELILA are "To provide a model of embedded digital and information literacy support into teacher training at higher education level", to release some learning objects, and also to do work on making repositories for these resources more usable. They are hoping to develop a model for developing information literacy of new/trainee teachers.
They took account of the UKPSF (so they could identify which skills for teaching were being addressed) and the CORRE framework (which guides you through conversion from an item like a ppt to an Open Educational Resource).
One of the things they had noticed was that the resources were not very easy to find in repositories, just on the retrieval level. Therefore they decided to use the SCONUL 7 Pillars as a basis for tagging information literacy resoiurces, and FutureLab's digital literacy model (included in this document)as a basis for tagging digital literacy resources.

The project partners started with an audit of the resources they already had in their institutions, which were candidates for conversion to educational resources. They created some worked examples of the converted objects and put them on the DELILA website. In the process they discovered there were even more intellectual property issues than they had thought: in particular, there tend to be a lot of screenshots in these resources. Also Microsoft clipart cannot be used under a Creative Commons license. On the whole the decision was to take out screenshots (as, e.g., someone might want to update them anyway). They have developed a sheet for evaluating the educational resources, too.
One thing I didn't know was that you could include licence information in the properties of a Word or PowerPoint document (which is useful if the statement in the text of the document gets removed). As already noted, they also worked on the interface to the repository, e.g. so it includes a thumbnail of the resource.
I should also mention that the idea is that, as well as local repositories, items should also be submitted to the national repository JORUM.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Checking details of the workshop and having a coffee in Pret this morning.