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Institute of Educational Technology > Research & Innovation > Research Projects > Enabling Remote Activity (ERA)

Enabling Remote Activity (ERA)

Project website

http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/era/

What research questions the project addresses, aims & themes

Dunkeld 2008The Enabling Remote Activity (ERA) project provides opportunities for mobility impaired students to fully participate in fieldwork learning activities. Field-based activities are regarded as essential to the development of a range of professional and personal skills for undergraduate students within geography, earth and environmental sciences. Students are taught investigative skills enabling them to interpret features within the landscape; establish technical skills such as sketching and the use of field equipment; and learn to collaborate with peers. It is widely recognised that students enjoy field activities, and these facilitate deeper learning and understanding. However, due to issues such as cost and access, students do not always have the opportunity to participate in fieldwork. By using mobile and communications technologies ERA provides practical solutions to the challenges of fieldwork accessibility.

  • To what extent can mobile networked technologies providing live, real time video and audio, support the participation of students in fieldwork activities to locations they are not able to reach themselves and enable them to achieve the same learning objectives?
  • Can a mobile networked technology system enable remote students to participate alongside colleagues undertaking fieldwork studies in parallel with their activities, and engage in interaction with the fieldwork students and tutors?
  • How does a mobile networked remote learning system affect teaching and learning practices of a fieldwork based course?

How the research questions are addressed by the project (methodology and activity/environment)

Focus groups, fieldwork testing, interviews with students and tutors, participation in conferences and seminars.

Findings and outputs

See Publications, below.

Project impact

Working in the car, looking at a photo on the computer screen, 2008The remote activity approach has been used on The Open University courses SXR339 ('AncientMountains'), and SXR369 (Environmental change: the record in the rocks) . These are OU summer residential courses, a one week series of field trips in locations throughout the Scottish Highlands, and coastal north east England. These courses are run biannually. To date, three mobility impaired students have completed the SXR339 course using the ERA equipment, one in 2006 and two in 2008. For the SXR369 course, we worked with a group of mobility impaired students, to explore how the system might work in a group setting as opposed to a one-to-one student-tutor configuration.

ERA ran a workshop at ALT/JISC TechDis Rewiring Inclusion Conference on February 9th 2010 in Nottingham.

The system has been tested alongside an Earthwatch field exploration of Masaya Volcano, Nicaragua, an expedition led by Dr. Hazel Rymer, OU, to prove live video and audio links via satellite to the Open University.

Demonstrations:

Presentations:

  • Mobile and network technologies to support fieldwork learning: Developing technology to enhance fieldwork presentation to the OU Classical Studies Department. 20th December 2011. PowerPoint file (5.5MB)
  • Technology enhanced fieldwork learning: Network and mobile technologies for improving accessibility and collaboration in fieldwork invited presentation to students on the Human-Computer Interaction and Multimedia MSc course at the Universidad Ray Juan Carlos, Madrid. 14th December 2011. PowerPoint file (3.8MB) and Windows Media Video file (531MB)
  • Remote fieldwork: Synchronous and asynchronous communication support for fieldworkers workshop presentation at the HigherEducationAcademy's Geology, Earth and Environmental Sciences Subject Centre's (GEES) one-day conference on ' Geoscience Graduates for the 21st Century'. University of Leeds, UK. 19th January 2011. PowerPoint file (3.8MB)

The equipment is available for loan from the Disabled Students Office for other courses within The Open University. This approach is now being incorporated in the development of future fieldwork courses by The Open University Science Faculty.

The team received an award for the 'Handheld Learning Award 2008: Special Needs - Innovation'.

The project won an OU Teaching Award (2008).

Publications

http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/era/wiki/Publications

Collins, T.D., Lea, J. and Gaved, M. (2010). Remote fieldwork: Using portable wireless networks and backhaul links to participate remotely in fieldwork. In: The Proceedings of the 9th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mlearn 2010), 19-22 October 2010, Valletta, Malta. Also available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/24711/ (last accessed January 2011).

Lea, J. & Collins, T.D., (2009). VoWLAN Toolkit Technical Report - JISC Rapid Innovation Project Report. December 2009. Available at: http://tinyurl.com/3ayzd79 (last accessed January 2011).

Gaved, M.B., Collins, T.D., Bartlett, J.M., Davies, S.J., Valentine, C.P., McCann, L.D.D.H. and Wright, M. (2008). ERA: On-the-fly networking for collaborative geology fieldwork. In The Proceedings of the 7th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (MLearn 2008). Telford, Shropshire, UK. 8th-10th October 2008. Also available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/17106/ (last accessed May 2012).

Davies, S.J.M. and Bartlett, J. (2007). Report for the Enabling Remote Activity project. Available as: ERA JISC TechDis Report.

Gaved, M.B., McCann, L.D.D.H. and Valentine, C.P. (2006). ERA (Enabling Remote Activity): A KMi designed system to support remote participation by mobility disabled students in geology field trips. July 2006. Available as: KMi Tech Report KMI-06-15.

Keywords

Remote learning, mobile, fieldwork, technology enhanced learning, earth sciences, accessibility, STEM

People involved

Trevor Collins, Knowledge Media Institute - t.d.collins@open.ac.uk
Mark Gaved, OU Business School - m.b.gaved@open.ac.uk
Jessica Bartlett, Earth and Environmental Sciences - j.m.bartlett@open.ac.uk
Sarah Davies, Earth and Environmental Sciences - s.j.m.davies@open.ac.uk

Project partners and links

OU Disabled Resources Team, Disabled Students Services

OU Office for Learning and Teaching

OU Faculty of Science

KMi

The Centre for Open Learning of Mathematics, Science, Computing and Technology (COLMSCT) CETL

The TechDIS HEAT scheme

IET

Retrieved from "http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/era/wiki/Funding"

Funder(s)

Funding has been received from JANET, JISC and the The TechDIS HEAT scheme.

Start Date and duration

Start: Spring 2006.

End: Ongoing.