You should have a pack of three items: a Matrix of Xgrain Learning and Teaching Items to be commissioned; an Expression of Interest form; and these accompanying Notes.
You are cordially invited to express your interest in authoring Xgrain learning and teaching item(s), using the online Expression of Interest form. Not much information is requested and your application can be very brief.
You are invited to apply to author as many items as you wish.
For each item, the project will pay £250 inclusive of any taxes and duties, once agreed and signed off by the Xgrain Associates panel, and on receipt of an invoice from you or your institution, depending on whether you are authoring the item(s) in your own time, or in work time.
If you wish to author a Teaching Case Study, the University of Edinburgh will not seek to acquire intellectual property rights in your work. You will have to agree with your institution whether or not you undertake the work in working hours or in your own time. Depending on the answer to this, either you or your institutional representative will be asked to sign a Licence for the use of your work on a non-exclusive basis. You will be identified as the author of the material at the website, unless you ask us not to name you.
If you wish to author any other item, the University of Edinburgh will seek to acquire intellectual property rights in the work. This is so that EDINA staff can make alterations to it in future in the light of developments. You will have to agree with your institution whether or not you undertake the work in working hours or in your own time. Depending on the answer to this, either you or your institutional representative will be asked to sign a Consultancy Agreement. We will ask you whether or not you wish to be identified at the website as author of the material. If changes are made in the future with which you disagree, you can ask us to remove your name from the website and we undertake to do this. We also undertake to ensure that any alterations made to the work are identified and a disclaimer of the following kind used:
"The material in this learning unit is based on material originally authored by [author(s) name]. The author(s) do not bear any responsibility for any further revision or interpretation of that material provided by EDINA, nor for any secondary use of the material by any other party."
The intention is to permit lecturing staff locally to download the learning items and customise them for local conditions, or re-word them as desired. Conditions of Use will be provided at the website. They will be required under Conditions of Use terms to give due credit to you as author of a Teaching Case Study. If you are named at the website as the original author of any other item (see note 10), they will also be asked under Conditions of Use terms to give due credit to you as original author. Because customisation and re-use of the learning items locally is regarded as an important project goal, please do not apply under this scheme unless you are willing to allow this.
All learning and teaching items will be provided on a free access basis i.e. they will not be protected behind any login.
When EDINA has received your Expression of Interest, you will be provided with a template to use. A Licence or Consultancy Agreement will follow shortly afterwards. Further instructions relating to the Licence or Consultancy Agreement will be sent at that time. The template will structure your work and make it easier for you.
Teaching Case Studies should consist of the materials you provide to the students, along with teachers' notes for the use of other lecturers describing what you did, and reflection on how the students performed and whether you would do anything differently in future. If you can also provide peer and/or student evaluations of the work done, that would be very worthwhile too. Teaching Case Studies should be around 2,500 - 3,000 words in length.
Other learning items will vary in length, but a good guideline is that the intention is to pay you just over 30 pounds an hour for 8 hours work. Another good guideline is to aim to provide around 8 - 12 "screens" of work - we may divide your work into screens to make it easier for the student to read online, and also provide a scrolling version for easy printing.
All items you have agreed to author under Agreement with the University of Edinburgh must be submitted by 5.00 pm on Thursday 31 October 2002.
For further information about the Xgrain project, see:
http://edina.ac.uk/xgrain/
For further information about the learning and teaching materials to be commissioned, and the discussions of the Xgrain Learning and Teaching Associates, please see the workshop reports available from this URL.
