Introduction, Innovative approaches in open educational practice at UAL

A brief overview of current Innovative approaches in open educational practice at UAL by Chris Follows, university of the arts London (ALTO and SCORE).

This video was produced for the Jorum presentation session at the ALT-C conference 2011, the process.arts sand casting core experiment videos were finalists in the 2011 Jorum L&T Competition.

Some Background context to UAL and current Innovative Approaches

Engaging with OER creation and sharing presents challenges to the Art and Design community where there is a strong tradition of studio-based practice and learning. Traditional didactic resources such as lecture notes and project briefs can be scarce in these subject areas, with the result that there can be 'gaps' when trying to create OERs along the lines pioneered by OpenCourseware at MIT and OpenLearn at the OU.

As part of my UAL fellowship in 2008 we developed Process.Arts, which offers some of the answers for capturing and sharing such situated and practice-based learning.

http://process.arts.ac.uk/ was developed in 2009 with the aim of creating a new user driven online studio community and collaborative resource that explores process in arts practice by showing the day-to-day studio/professional practice of staff and students of the six colleges of the University of the Arts London (UAL) whilst also sharing, informing and engaging with the wider community. Process.arts tries to address how we cluster all this activity together, encouraging users to collaborate, share and develop content in an space that bridges the internal and external for example:

Process.Arts is a social media platform that supports ways of representing and sharing such tacit knowledge using Video, image and audio the preferred media for capturing and sharing practice based art and design tutorials and resources.

For instance, the Introduction to Sand Casting videos (4 parts): were early experiments, the videos have been received well, attracting positive comments and over 100,000 views via YouTube - the content published remains affiliated to the institution 'the hosts', but users are free to explore and develop this content as they wish with Web 2.0 CMS functionality which provides an open social layer within an accessible, familiar, and collaborative environment.

Core casting experiments as posted on Jorum follow on from the success of the introduction to sad casting videos, the CORE CASTING vids are an experiment less formal