This section seeks to direct you to a variety of OERs that use visual images, assist with their IPR implications and reflect on methods for incorporating them into your teaching and learning. 

A visual world?

On 21/7/11 a search for happy slapping on youTube provided 6,050 results and the first three videos (beneath the featured videos) had been viewed almost one million times. In 2009 it was recorded that almost 30,000 HOURS of new content were posted on YouTube EVERY DAY: on 15 June 2009, 20 hours of new content were posted on YouTube every minute. In addition there are the reported 2.5 billion photographs uploaded on to Facebook every month and in 2007 it was estimated that 3-5 million were uploaded daily to Flickr.

The use of visual images in either assessment or teaching would seem a fundamental part of the innovative teacher’s toolbox (e.g. visual criminology). The range of support from within the OER community ensures that assistance is freely available for students or lecturers wishing to take this line of inquiry: Reading visual images

"Students write graffiti to be heard. Creative Commons lets their words echo across the Internet." (Quinn Dombrowski) Crescat Graffiti is a collection of over 1,100 photographs documenting graffiti written in the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library since September 2007.

Copyright

The use of visual images is also influenced by IPR considerations and helpful guidance for your OER can be found at:

IPR Toolkit

Copyright and Intellectual Property Law

JISC-LEGAL-NEWS

A quick summary of what may/not be ‘fair use’ can also be found in Copyright and OERs.

The use of visual images in an OER may therefore be problematic although such fears can be assuaged by using:  

Wellcome images 

Flickr CreativeCommons

On 07/05/11 the latter source had 183, 211,480 images available under the six different creative commons licences.

In addition to text and images a vast amount of repurposable music is also provided by the OER movement: Soundcloud

Q1. The use of visual images in research and teaching may be increasingly familiar but how do your students consider your use of images? Should some images be reserved for lectures and seminars only?

Opinions from students regarding this kind of resource were acquired in a C-SAP project by Nick Pearce from Durham University in relation to the use of youtube in his lectures.

Concept specific immediate supported practice

This practice is also known as "scaffolding" and has been developed over the past fifteen years at Carnegie Mellon University. It can be associated with any type of teaching aid that supports a learner until they can master the learning on their own.

This method has been used by the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) via an intelligent tutoring system called "StatTutor."

It uses a specified outline of steps to follow in solving problems, or StatTutor will use scaffolding and immediate feedback flexibly, tracking and responding to individual students as they navigate the learning environment.

The use of scaffolding has equivalents in computer games with their different levels and opportunities for progression. The OLI course in Statistics is comparable to the full semester course on Statistics taught at CMU. The course at CMU used to meet 60 times face to face but as a result of the OLI approach this has been reduced to 16 and it was found that results were as good if not better than the traditional approach.

Distributed throughout OLI-Statistics, there are many “mini-tutors”, interactive activities that give students hints and feedback as they practice individual skills. Each of these was carefully constructed to respond to particular mistakes and misconceptions students would likely show.

An attempt at scaffolding can be seen in the division of this 50 minute lecture into four 'chapters' - ‘Criminology and the Power of the Image’

A transcript for the lecture is provided here

Q2. A repurposable tool to develop this approach is being considered for 2012-13: would you scaffold your visual images and other materials? If so, how?