Category Archives: cetis

LRMI Implementation Case Study: Open Tapestry

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Project team: Justin Ball, CTO;  Joel Duffin, CEO

“Open Tapestry is all about discovering, adapting, and sharing learning resources, whether you’re a teacher, an instructor, a professor, a corporate trainer, a learner, or just a curious mind! We help you organize your content into categories–or Tapestries–that you create. Open Tapestry’s toolset allows instructors to develop course materials in a fraction of the time, while invigorating and enhancing learners’ experience. We give you the tools to mold and shape content already on the web to exactly how you want it.”

http://www.opentapestry.com/

open_tapestryOpen Tapestry provides tools to enable users to author resources and create and share modules, or tapestries, from existing content.  The system also has some repository-like  aspects in that it searches open content repositories, harvests metadata and enables users to upload resources. Open Tapestry pulls in all types of resources at different levels of granularity. There are currently around a million resources, mostly aimed at higher education, however Open Tapestry has also worked with online high schools and a few primary grades.  While Open Tapestry encourages use of open content, but users are also able to create closed instances for their own organisations.

Open Tapestry is a custom platform built on Ruby on Rails.  The platform uses a number of open source libraries and about ten APIs, but is not currently open source itself. The code used to detect and parse open licences is based on Open Attribute, and Gem is used to interact with Canvas.

Open Tapestry supports IMS LTI to facilitate learning management system integration.  This allows users to manage content outside the LMS and then present it inside the system.

Open Tapestry harvests metadata using OAI PMH, web crawlers and RSS harvesters.  The application tries to be as inclusive as possible; any format of metadata that is found, e.g. Dublin Core, LOM, LRMI,  will be parsed and stored internally. This internal metadata can then be transformed into any number of other formats.  The system also facilitates some cross walking.  All harvested metadata is retained and users are able to add to that metadata.  A small number of vocabularies are built into the system, e.g. licence.

The metadata that exists for any given resource depends on what has been harvested, or created by users, however if a page has no metadata, Open Tapestry will produce basic fields used for indexing and searching.  Open Tapestry has two main levels of content granularity;  resources and collections (tapestries) and metadata is applied at both of these levels. Collections can be combined from multiple sources and metadata is provided for each source.

Open Tapestry has fields for all LRMI elements but to date, users have tended not to fill them in.

  • educationalAlignment
  • educationalUse
  • timeRequired
  • typicalAgeRange
  • interactivityType
  • learningResourceType
  • useRightsUrl
  • isBasedonUrl

One way to encourage greater adoption of LRMI suggested by Open Tapestry is to focus on providing targeted search for a particular audience or usecase e.g. learning management systems.  LMS are currently grappling with how to integrate openly licensed resources with closed content and LRMI could potentially provide a solution to this problem.

Open Tapestry does not share metadata records with the Learning Registry as the system is primarily a metadata aggregator, very few new metadata record are produced by Open Tapestry.

One significant issue surfaced by Open Tapestry is how to track metadata assertions as resources, and metadata records are edited and aggregated.  This is particularly important for derivative works, where it is necessary to keep track of entire genealogies of who is making the assertions recorded in the metadata.  While cataloguers are aware of the necessity of creating and maintaining high quality metadata, content creators often have low awareness of the importance of metadata until they have a problem, e.g. concerns about who carries liability for a resource or assertion. Technical solutions are required to address this problem.

Links:

Open Tapestry
Open Tapestry Case Study Questionnaire


LRMI Implementation Projects Case Studies

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As part of our work for Creative Commons on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), my colleague Phil Barker and I have been writing short case studies on a number of LRMI implementation projects that were funded between 2013 – 2014. Ten different OER platforms received small grants from the Gates and Hewlett Foundations to implement the LRMI specification and share their experiences with other developers. I’ll be posting the case studies here over the next couple of weeks and once all case studies have been completed we also plan to produce a high level technical synthesis of the projects’ outputs.

An early overview of some of the implementation projects was presented at the Cetis 2014 Conference at the University of Bolton in June.

LRMI Implementation Projects

Connexions / OpenStax CNX

Connexions, now OpenStax CNX, was launched in 1999 at Rice University to provide authors and learners with an open space where they can share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports. Today, OpenStax CNX is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes. Tens of thousands of learning objects called pages, are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime.

Curriki

Curriki provides peer reviewed open educational resources, curricula and instructional materials to support teachers, professional educators, students, lifelong learners, and parents, primarily in the domain of K-12 education. Curriki is a nonprofit organization and the majority of the resources is provides carry Creative Commons licences.

GooruLearning

GooruLearning an open and collaborative online learning community. Gooru enables teachers and students to find standards-aligned, interactive learning materials that have been rated by fellow teachers, share those materials in the form of personalized custom collections, measure students’ engagement, comprehension, and progress, and contribute to an active community of teachers and students by sharing your collections and best practices.

ISKME

ISKME is an independent, education non-profit company whose mission is to improve the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector. ISKME supports innovative teaching and learning practices throughout the globe, and is well-known for its pioneering open education initiatives. ISKME also assists policy makers, foundations, and education institutions in designing, assessing, and bringing continuous improvement to education policies, programs, and practice.

Jorum

Jorum is a Jisc funded Service for UK Further and Higher Education, to collect and share open educational resources, allowing their reuse and repurposing. Jorum’s free online repository service forms a key part of Jisc’s Learning and Teaching digital content offering. It is the first port of call for 1000’s of resources, all shared and created by those who teach or have been inspired in the FE and HE and professional skills community.

MERLOT

MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web pages, together with associated comments, and personal collections, all intended to enhance the teaching and learning experience.

Open Tapestry

Open Tapestry is a toolkit that enables teachers, instructors, professors, corporate trainers, students and learners to discover, adapt, and share learning resources. The Open Tapestry toolkit allows instructors to develop course materials and organise content into categories, or Tapestries, to enhance learners’ experiences.

Peer2Peer University

Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities.

Untrikiwiki

UntrikiWiki were funded to develop a MediaWiki extension to allow the use of schema.org markup in Wikitext. As part of this project, UntrikiWiki advocated the use of open-source extension HTML Tags on wikis.


You are free to adapt the What is Schema.org briefing

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Editable files for the What is Schema.org briefing are now available from the Cetis Publications site. The process of enabling editable copies of this publication has leads me to some reflections on the publishing workflow behind it.

We published What is Schema.org? a Cetis briefing paper for LRMI in June, as with most of Cetis’s publications it is covered by a CC Attribution licence so, according to the terms of that  licence

You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

The death of Free2Play is a good thing beyond the games industry

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Way back in February the EU commission raised concerns over business models in the mobile phone ‘app industry’. There were 4 major points of concern, these are taken directly from the EC press release :

• Games advertised as “free” should not mislead consumers about the true costs involved;
• Games should not contain direct exhortations to children to buy items in a game or to persuade an adult to buy items for them;
• Consumers should be adequately informed about the payment arrangements and purchases should not be debited through default settings without consumers’ explicit consent;
• Traders should provide an email address so that consumers can contact them in case of queries or complaints.

Two weeks ago a follow up release gave details of changes to the Google Play store that will take place before the end of September:

Reusing Open Resources: Learning in Open Networks for Work, Life and Education

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rorBack in 2003 I contributed a chapter to Allison LIttlejohn’s book Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to E-learning and I’m delighted to say that, together with co-authors Sheila MacNeill and Martin Hawksey, I have another paper in the subsequent book in this series Reusing Open Resources: Learning in Open Networks for Work, Life and Education edited by Allison Littlejohn and Chris Pegler.

UK Government Mandates Open Document Format! A Brave or Foolhardy Decision?

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UK Government Policy Announcement on Office Standards

UK Goverment policy on ODF

Image from Computer Weekly (http://www.computerworlduk.com/)

Back in October 2012 in a post entitled Good News From the UK Government: Launch of the Open Standards Principles which described how the UK government had published a series of document which outlined the government’s plans for use of open standards across government departments.

Reflections on #IWMW14

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IWMW 2.014: Rebooting the Web

IWMW 2014, the 18th annual Institutional Web Management Workshop, took place last week, from 16-20 July, at Northumbria University. The theme of this year’s event was “rebooting the web“: an idea which came from a participant at last year’s event who felt that, although he felt there was a continued need for an event focussed on the needs of those involved in providing institutional Web services, the event would benefit from ‘rebooting’.

The cessation of Jisc funding for UKOLN meant that the event would change its focus in any case. When the event benefitted rom Jisc funding we tried to ensure that we provided a forum for Jisc-funded work, including Jisc services and Jisc-funded projects, which were involved in web-related activities.

This year the content was very focussed on sharing of institutional case studies. In addition this year future-gazing was informed by observing work of early adopters, with advocacy on the benefits of new ways of working being based on organisational issues rather than technological developments.

Wikipedia and Information Literacy Article in CILIP Update

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Wikipedia and Information Literacy

Wikipedia article in CILIP UpdateThe current issue of CILIP Update (access restricted to CILIP members and subscribers) features a two-page article entitled “Wikipedia and Information Literacy“. The article, which was written by myself, Nancy Graham and Andrew Gray is based on the Wikipedia workshop sessions and talks which we gave at the LILAC 2014 conference in Sheffield in April 2014.

The article is aimed at librarians, especially those with interests in information literacy.  As we described in order to address the pressures to do more in the time available for learning information literacy:

It is a good idea to consider use of resources and methods which are: a) already in widespread use; b) with which readers already have a positive relationship; and c) which can be used to demonstrate multiple aspects of information literacy within a single context.

The City and The City: Reflections on the Cetis 2014 Conference

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The City and The City

City_and_the_CIty

The City and the City is a novel by China Miéville. As described in Wikipedia the novel “takes place in the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. These two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens (and the threat of the secret power known as Breach), they are perceived as two different cities. A denizen of one city must dutifully ‘unsee’ (that is, consciously erase from their mind or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city – even if they are an inch away.“

I read the novel earlier this year. When I saw it in a bookshop over the weekend I thought of the parallels with the Cetis 2014 conference: two plenary talks which occupied the same space but which described the ‘unseeing’ of a shared history.

#Cetis14 Open Education: From Open Practice to Open Policy

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Last week Li and I ran a session at the Cetis Conference on Open Education: From Open Practice to Open Policy.  My initial plan had been to focus on questions such as:

  • What, if any, is the value of open education policy?
  • Do institutions need open education policies?
  • Should government agencies play a role in the development of open education policy?
  • Are there conflicts between commercial interests and market forces, and open education policy and practice?
  •  How can open education initiatives be nurtured and sustained?
  • And what do we mean by “open education” anyway?!