oer – Data Science, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Consulting in Koblenz Germany

Creating an award winning video doesn’t need much technology or technical know how.

Rene — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 15:18:18 +0000

After I won the community award in the Wikipedia Video contest in the category documentation and interview with my pointer in C video I would like to share some experiences on creating educational videos. This is mainly to encourage anyone to do the same as I did.
Have a look at the winning video again if you don’t remember it

In my opinion it doesn’t take much more than a real interest in education. So the video that won the award was used for me in a real teaching scenario. I only had one dry run before recording my one and only and published version of it (which still with more iterations could be a little bit shorter, more focused and slicker). Most time (about 3 hours) for the process was in planning how to present the learning content – something everyone teaching something should do anyway. The entire time it took me was less than 5 hours including planning, dryrun, recording, uploading and sharing with students.
The impact: From originally 16 Students that where participents in my class the video has been watched about 10 thousand times by now. Especially it was included in the wikipedia article on pointers and thus is hopefully a helpful resource for people interested in that topic.
Most important I did not need expensive technology. As you can see from the attached picture I did not even have a proper way of fixing my digital camera. The microphone was the internal one from that very digital camera. I used a couple of books together with a ruler to bring the camera to the correct position in order to be able to have a nice shot of the whiteboard that I was using. Other than that I used two lamps for proper light and lowered the outside courtains of the window.

What I am basically saying: Everyone who owns a camera (which most people nowadays do) can take a video and explain something. You can contribute your explaining video to the growing knowledge base on wikimedia commons. You can contribute to the ongoing discussion weather wikipedia articles should be enhanced with videos or not. Most important if you do everything like me on the whiteboard you will most certainly not run into any of the copyright problems that I ran before.
So what are you waiting for? I am sure you are an expert on something. Go and give it a shot and share your video here in the comments but also via wikimedia commons and maybe include it even within some wikipedia article that is fitting well.

About the future of Videos on Wikiversity, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons

Rene — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 18:47:27 +0000

In the following article I want to give an overview of the discussions and movements that are going on about video and multimedia content for wikipedia and her sister projects. I will start with some positive experiences and then tell you about some bad experiences. This article is not to wine about some edit war it is more about observing an undecided / open topic within the community of wikipedians.
During my time as a PhD student I actively contributed to open educational resources by uploading so far 52 educating videos to wikimedia commons. Some of those videos have been created together with Robert Naumann. Another share of the videos was uploaded by him. So a large fraction of those videos have been made for the web science mooc an can be found at:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_for_Web_Science_MOOC_on_Wikiversity
Last week we submitted the following video to the OPERA Award, which is an award for OER video material. It was established with the goal of having more of such content.

As you can see it was selected to be the media file of the day on November 2nd on wikimedia commons (*cheering*) can anyone show me how this has happened? I was looking for the process but I did not find it.
Also I have included another video about pointers in C (in German language: Zeiger in C) into an wikipedia article.

Does wikipedia like videos within articles?

From my experience the Pointer video was removed a couple of times from the german wikipedia article related to that topic and then also brought back to the article. So it seems like there isn’t any consensus within the community yet about having videos. Interestingly enough I was asked by some wikipedians to submit my video for a video competition they are doing. So the goal of this competition is to have more content creators like me to upload their material to commons and include it into Wikipedia articles. This effort seems to be founded by money which was donated by the users. There seems to be a similar project in the english wikipedia. So well at least money is flowing towards the direction of creating more video content.
Even though these seem to be strong arguments I have the feeling that not the entire Wikipedia community supports this movement – or one could call it strategic move. 1 year ago without knowing about these kind of efforts I have tried to include some of the web science videos to wikipedia articles. For example I included the following video:

to the corresponding wikipedia article it was removed with a statement of saying this would be video SPAM which in my opinion is a little bit of an overreaction.
A summary of the discussion can be taken from my slides of my talk at the german open educational resources conference:

If you are interested you can find the entire discussion at the discussion page of the ethernet frame article

Problems for creating video Content for Commons:

Obviously there is a problem about the copyright. So for example I have pointed out in the past that creating a screencast during lecture on a Windows machine means committing a copyright violation since the the start button and the windows interface by Microsoft EULA are protected by copyright. Also in former discussions at #OER13de we agreed that it is hard to collaboratively edit videos (sorry link in german language) because the software often is not free and wikimedia commons does not support uploading the source files of the videos anyway.

Conclusion

It is not clear if video content will survive in Wikipedia even though some strategic movement is put into that idea. The people who are against this have pretty decent arguments and I also say that it is really hard to have a tool for collaboratively editing video files. If one does not have such tools even access to the source files of the videos would make it hard for people to work on this together. So I am curious to see what the competitions will bring and how the discussions on movies will evolve over time.
At least in wikiversity we are able to use our videos for teaching as we anticipated and I am pretty sure this space won’t be affected by the ongoing discussion.

How to host your oer MOOC on wikiversity

Rene — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 11:29:47 +0000

Last year we have created a MOOC on Web Science. We had chosen Wikiversity as a platform for hosting the MOOC. The reason for this was the high trust we had in the Wikimedia foundation strengthening the open movement. The main problem we experienced with Wikiversity was that the software running Wikiversity is obviously a Mediawiki which is great for collaboratively building an encyclopedia. It is not so well suited to provide a learning environment in which students can focus on an interactive learning experience. Also it is hard for teachers to learn how to use the Mediawiki software.
So I decided to spend some time together with Sebastian Schlicht (my student assistant, who did an excellent job) to build a little bit more of infrastructure on top of the mediawiki on wikiversity to provide a better interface for learning. Watch the demo here:

As you can see we created a platform that supports:

A click and point experience for teachers to create classes
On page discussion for students which supports the standard discussion system in Mediawiki
a nice modern navigation which adapts to users while interacting with the page

For me with this system our videos, quizes and scripts content shines in a much brighter light than it did before. For the first time I have fun consuming our the content of the MOOC.
For me this was an important step towards my goal of freeing educational content. Not only that our MOOC is completely OER we now also create core infrastructure for any teacher to create more classes that are OER. If you consider doing such a class feel free to drop be a message and receive free support. You could also start reading the documentation of the MOOC-Interface or see the slides(:

I am looking forward to hear back from you.

Web Science MOOC – first lessons about Ethernet and Internet Protocol online

Rene — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 21:55:01 +0000

2 months ago I started to create the Web Science MOOC and now you can join our MOOC as a student. We will start online streamed flipped classroom lessons on October 29th. Our MOOC is truely open meaning that all the teaching material will be provided as open educational resources with a creative commons 3.0 attribution share alike licence.
In the first month we will learn about the following topics

Ethernet
Internet Protocol
Transfer Controll Protocol
Domain Name System
URIs
HTTP
HTML
RDF
Javascript / CSS

The Ethernet lessons can be found at:
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Web_Science/Part1:_Foundations_of_the_web/Internet_Architecture/Ethernet

The Internet protocol lessons can be found at:
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Web_Science/Part1:_Foundations_of_the_web/Internet_Architecture/Internet_Protocol

Since wikiversity in comparison to other MOOC platforms is truely open you might also want to watch some of my introductory videos. They are in particular helpful to show how to make the best use of wikiversity as MOOC platform and how one can really engage into the discussion. You can find the videos at:
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Web_Science/New_here

but maybe your are already interested in watching some of the content right here right away:

MOOCs at Wikiversity: A Barcamp proposal for #OERde13

Rene — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 06:49:26 +0000

I would like to have an discussion with people that have experience or are interested in MOOCs and Wikiversity. The goal is to checkout the possibilities for creating (otherwise over commercialized) MOOCs in an OER environment (especially wikiversity).

Background:

According to my former blog post there are 3 ways for creating a MOOC that is truely OER:

Out of these I would love to discuss what possibilities exist in the context of Wikiversity and how such a MOOC could benefit from the ecosystem of other Wikimedia projects (e.g. books, commons, wikipedia and of course wikiversity itself)
I would also love to create a list of requirements for wikiversity software with functionalities needed (e.g. access to multiple choice results of students) to create an OER MOOC. This list could be present to the wikimedia foundation in order to extend the wikiversity software.

My experiences:

I have created a German online course in Wikiversity on how Computers work
Currently I am creating an English MOOC on Webscience which we will use in our university together with flipped classroom for the Web Science lecture. The content of the first block is almost ready: