2016: ASCILITE 2016 Conference Proceedings: Show Me The Learning

ASCILITE Conference - Symposia / Panels

• The promise and pitfalls of social media use in Higher Education

  Julie Willems, Chie Adachi, Trish McClusky, Iain Doherty, Francesca Bussey, Marcus O'Donnell, Henk Huijser

  Social media is pervasive in all aspects of modern life, including health, education, parenting, entertainment personal relationships and current affairs. In Higher Education however, social media is becoming a site of tension between those pursuing connected and innovative educational practice on one hand and an increasingly constrained policy environment reacting to reputational damage resulting from subversive and risky online behaviour by students and staff on the other. Social media has polarised academics, many of whom dismiss it as time-wasting and trivialising academic work and others who embrace it as an open and evolving form of scholarship and academic practice. Students engage with it for learning despite the expected norms of traditional academic practice. This symposium will highlight and explore key issues dominating current debates around the use and misuse of social media in Higher Education drawing on the wisdom of the crowd to find solutions to such challenges.

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• Open Education Licensing: A toolkit for achieving openness in the global education market

  Robin Wright, Luke Padgett, Derek Whitehead, Carina Bossu

  The adoption of open education resources (OER) by Australian higher education can enhance innovation, as well as increase access to teaching and learning in the digital environment. But without a clear understanding of the copyright and licensing challenges inherent in adoption of OER, Australian educators will not be able to create education resources, or disseminate them globally. This panel session will explore the potential impact of copyright and licensing decisions on Australia's creation and use of OER and their global reach. It will provide a forum to introduce the audience to a new Open Education Licensing toolkit, developed by the Open Education Licensing project; the project has been funded by the Australian Office for Learning and Teaching. Panel members will deal with four main topics: copyright licensing in Australia, how open licensing can transform education in Australia, the different ways copyright material can be used, and the toolkit developed by the OEL project. Panel members will discuss the research and development process underpinning the OEL toolkit and ask audience members to see the toolkit interface and explore the benefits it can provide for their own activities.

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• Open Education Licensing : Making online education really work

  Robin Wright, Carina Bossu, Luke Padgett, Derek Whitehead, Tony Carew, Beale van der Veer

  Open education will play an important role in digitally enabled learning for a global society. Resources that are openly available for re-use and re-mix are an important part of digital literacy and will be a key component in the online offerings of Australian higher education institutions in the future. However, one of the most significant issues for educators moving into the open environment is the need to understand those copyright and licensing decisions which must be made in order to make resources open. The Open Education Licensing (OEL) project aims to ensure that online material is available for re-use. It also aims to place open content into an evolving knowledge ecosystem in Australian education. The OEL Toolkit will help Australian educational developers make informed licensing decisions for use of their resources in the open environment.

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