ALTO UK – Arts Learning and Teaching Online

ADM-HEA is delighted to be part of ALTO UK, a project funded by phase three of the Higher Education Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme www.jisc.ac.uk/oer


The ALTO Project Manager, John Casey from University of the Arts London, gives details below:

The broad aim of the ALTO UK project is the creation of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in art and design subjects for staff, students and lifelong learners in the UK and elsewhere.

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. Video, image and audio documentation have been found to be the preferred media for capturing and sharing practice based art and design tutorials and resources.

Led by University of the Arts London, the project is partnering with ADM-HEA; the School of Textiles and Design, Herriot Watt University; Jorum Service, MIMAS at University of Manchester; Creative Industries and Ceramics at Kirklees College; Broadcast Media in the College of Arts and Humanities at University of Brighton; Bloomsbury Publishing Plc; Laurence King Publishing Ltd; and Bright Lemon Ltd, London.

The project will provide each partner with an institutionally branded open space in a social media platform to share these kinds of media rich OERs. The platform is based on the popular open source web content management system Drupal http://drupal.org/ and provides a user-friendly interface, rich media tools and easy integration with the rest of the Web 2.0 infrastructure such as Twitter, Facebook and Google, etc.


For further information about the project visit the project blog: http://blogs.arts.ac.uk/alto/

Listing and main image: created using wordle.net