[These posts should be regarded as drafts for comment until I remove this note]

In the UKOER 2 programme Strand C funded “Projects identifying, collecting and promoting collections of OER and other material around a common theme” with the aim “…to investigate how thematic and subject area presentation of OER material can make resources more discoverable by those working in these areas” (UKOER 2 call document). The projects had to create what were termed static and dynamic collections of OER. The intent of the static collection was that it could in some way act as an identity, focus, or seed for the dynamic collection. Six projects were funded: CSAP OER, Oerbital, DelOREs, Triton, EALCFO, Open Fieldwork and a range of approaches and technologies was taken to making both static and dynamic collections. The projects are all worth reading about in more detail – however, in this context there are two possible general patterns worth considering.

Technology

Overview of technical choices in UKOER 2 Strand C

The above graph shows the range of technology used in the Strand. Although a lot could (and should) be said about each project individually when their choices are viewed in aggregate the following technologies are seeing the widest use.

Graph of technologies and standards in us by 50% or more of Strand C projects

Although aspects of the call might have shaped the projects’ technical choices to some extent, a few things stand out:

• the focus on RSS/Atom feeds and tools to manipulate them
  • reflection: this matches the approach taken by many of the other  aggregators and discovery services  for OER and other learning materials as well as the built in capabilities of a number of the platforms in use [nb “syndicated via RSS/Atom” was a programme requirement]
• a relative lack of a use of OAI-PMH
  • reflection: is this indicative of how many content providers and aggregators in the learning material’s consume or output OAI-PMH?
• substantial use or investigation of wordpress and custom databases (with php frontends)
  • reflection: are repositories irrelevant here because they don’t offer easy ways to add plugins or aggregate others’ content (or are there other factors which make WordPress and a custom database more appealing)

Community

One of the critical issues for all of these projects in the creation of these collections has been the role of community; for some of the strand projects the subject community played a crucial role in developing the static collection which then fed, framed, or seeded the dynamic collection, for other projects the subject community formed the basis of contributing resources to the dynamic collection.

Although the projects had to be “closely aligned with relevant subject or thematic networks – for example Academy Subject Centres, professional bodies and national subject associations” , I find it striking that many of the projects made those defined communities an integral part of their discovery process and not just an audience or defining domain.

Reflections on community

I’m hoping someone else is able to explore the role of community in discovery services more fully (if not I’ll try to come back to this)  but I’ve been struck by the model used by some projects in which a community platform is the hook leading to resource discovery. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum to Google – to support discovery you create a place and content accessible and relevant to a specific subject domain. The place you create both hosts new content created by a specific community and serves as a starting point to point to further resources elsewhere (whether those pointers are links, learning pathways, or tweaked plugin searches run on aggregators or repositories). This pattern mirrors any number of thriving community sites (typically?) outside of academia that happily coexist in Google’s world providing specialist sources of information and community portals  (for example about knitting, cooking, boardgames).

What it doesn’t mirror is trying to entice academics to use a repository… [I like repositories and think they’re very useful for some things , but this and the examples of layering CMSs on top of repositories, increasingly makes me think that on their own they aren’t a great point of engagement for anybody…]

[These posts should be regarded as drafts for comment until I remove this note]

Dissemination protocols

Dissemination protocols in use in the UKOER 2 programme

The chosen dissemination protocols are usually already built in the platforms in use by projects; adding or customising an RSS feed is possible but often intricate and adding an OAI-PMH feed is likely to require substantial technical development. DelOREs investigated existing OAI-PMH plugins for WordPress they could use but didn’t find anything usable within their project.

As will be discussed in more detail when considering Strand C – RSS is not only the most supported dissemination protocol, from the programme’s evidence, it is also the most used in building specialist discovery services for learning and teaching materials. The demand for an OAI-PMH interface for learning resources remains unknown. [debate!]

Jorum representation

Methods of uploading to Jorum chosen in UKOER 2 programme

• The statistics on Jorum upload method are denoted expressions of intent – projects and Jorum are still working through these options.
• Currently RSS upload to Jorum (along with all other forms of bulk upload) is set up to create a metadata record not deposit content.
• Three of the uploaders using RSS are using the edshare/eprints platform (this platform was successfully configured to deposit metadata in bulk  via RSS into Jorum in UKOER phase 1).
• Jorum uses RSS ingest as a one-time process – as I understand it it does not revisit the feed for changes or updates [TBC]
• As far as I know PORSCHE are the only project who have an arranged OAI-PMH based harvest (experimental for Jorum upload under investigation as part of an independent project – [thanks to Nick Shepherd for the update on this HEFCE-funded work: see comments and more information is available on the ACErep blog)]

[These posts should be regarded as drafts for comment until I remove this note]

OER types:

Projects in UKOER 2 have released resources at various levels of granularity from individual images  and documents through to whole courses.

A variety of mime types are used by the projects. These include: doc, pdf, spss, wiki, ppt, prezi, wmv, html5, javascript, wav, MS Office, DOM, RTF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, AVI, MPEG, DivX, QuickTime, MP3, mp4, HTML, zip, xml, qti, swf, flv.

Platform overview:

Overview of platforms in use in the UKOER 2 programme

As can be seen this graph is somewhat misleading as it aggregates the total use of web 2.0 tools giving a very large result in relation to other options, however no projects have solely used externally hosted web 2.0 platforms and  the following detailed graph shows a more useful view. The graph is much more useful in noting the comparative use of other platforms.

NB usage figures are not mutually exclusive – a good number of projects used multiple platforms

Detailed view:

Content management platforms in use in the UKOER 2 programme

• NB usage figures are not mutually exclusive – a good number of projects used multiple platforms
• Repository = repository software  platform, rather than use of another platform as a repository
• There is an strong use of SlideShare and YouTube but relatively little use of iTunes.
• There’s a diverse number of CMS used to manage content, but in aggregate their use parallels the use of repositories.
• ALTO and Tiger added a CMS layer on top of a repository to improve their user interface.
• There’s a notable interest in wordpress (especially in Strand C) as a lightweight platform to collect and aggregate OER.
• One aspect of this interest in WordPress is for SEO reasons (Scooter)
• The edshare variant of eprints is the most popular repository- interestingly a number of projects have chosen to use hosted versions of edShare. One noted key influence in this choice is the success of the UKOER 1 Humbox project in community development – at least one project (DHOER) is depositing content into Humbox.
• Plugins for wordpress to support better metadata and licensing  are being explored and developed by Triton, DelOREs, and CSAPOER [tbc])

This post is to briefly capture some of the discussion around the warm up  act – our attempt to help the workshop participants, think about some of the different challenges that arise when managing learning materials. Both to help those participants coming from a more general repository background think through any possible differences which managing learning materials might make to their practice and systems, but also to remind participants of the different requirements which emerge from different types of learning materials.

The activity was to consider the differences between an OER collection (of any type(s) of material) and a collection of high stakes summative question items (and answers/ rubrics). It was framed in terms of quickly identifying some of the key issues in managing collections, the key discovery mechanisms, and what role or functionality users might expect the chosen ‘asset management system’ to support. In retrospect the timing of the activity was perhaps too short for group discussions but a few people asked me to write up some of the group feedback, so..

Issues in managing materials for learning and teaching

• Can students contribute?
• Can you use external content?
• Do you need a formal deposit/ management workflow? (more likely to be needed if content open)
• Do you need to manage IPR?
• Do you need to worry about producing a final copy? maintaining version control?
• How do you judge / promote / surface quality materials?
• Do you need to quality screen resources?
• Do you need to update resources or provide a mechanism for them to go out of date?
• How do you manage security for assessment items? how do you manage time-to-live or other date restrictions?

Discovery issues for learning and teaching materials

• Can you find it in Google? (if not – forget it?)
• How do you navigate balance of Google and local indexing/ discovery tools?
• How much metadata do you need? from who? how much of a time commitment is it?
• How do you apply licences?
• How do you tie into/ relate to/ develop discipline specific social networks?
• How does your system overlap with/ integrate/ relate to the VLE?
• How do you support course based discovery?
• What issues are there in sharing data (data artefacts and types of data about resources) [including individual’s data/ corporate image]?
• What level and type of info do you want around assessment items?

Issues for users

• How does the system enhance learning experience?
• How does the system suggest/ support discovery of additional related resources?
• Can you find out anything about past exams? what can you find out?

There was plenty of feedback I’ve not managed to capture in this summary, but this gives a bit of a flavour of some of the issues which emerged and helped frame the approaches that the subsequent presenters discussed.

last time I counted we had a little over 250 tweets.

Once we take ‘OERHack’ and RT out of the picture we see:

250 tweets isn’t that many for 2 days and ~40 people but that’s cause everyone was busy

Beforehand the event we had some discussions on blogs.

• Musings on OER Infrastructure
• Social Networking for Metadata

OER Hack day Wiki

Ideas that we outlined but didn’t develop fully:

• PORSCHE thoughts
• Document Import/Export Service
• OER Playlist picker
• Additions to OERbit
• Prototyping a new OERca

Things that got hacked (and more or less documented)

• Extend the utility of WordPress as a host / presentation vehicle for OER collections.
• Bookmarking tools for OER
• Generating Paradata from mediawiki pages
• Hacking a Google CSE for course directories
• Metadata Extraction Tools
• SWORD desktop app
• Email-based deposit plugin for SWORD
• JS widget to Wookie widget (Jorum and OER Recommender)

These are described in more detail on the wiki as well as some notes about other things we tested and a useful list of wordpress plugins for learning resources. A fuller write-up about the event will be forthcoming but we (CETIS OERTIG, UKOLN DEVCSI, and everyone else) had a productive, fun, and busy two days.

• richer user profiles both for depositors and users
• resources to include a link to the source/ master object
• import asset plus usage info (such as which courses it’s used for) from VLE
• import asset plus usage info (such as comments and tags) from Web 2 tools
• need support for instituional management and release of assets

The other key feature for deposit tools which we wondered about was the possibility of tools recording ongoing interaction between content and users and what this might enable. At the time not much developed from that discussion but a year and a bit later it’s interesting to see elements of that discussion are (completely independently) coming to the fore in other initiatives.

Firstly there’s the work JISC has funded to develop the SWORD specification to

” push the standard towards supporting a full deposit lifecycle for all types of scholarly systems by specifying and implementing update, retrieve and delete extensions to the specification. This will enable these systems to be integrated into a broader range of other systems within the scholarly infrastructure, by supporting an increased range of behaviours and use cases. (http://swordapp.org/category/sword2/)”

Admittedly the development focused on scholarly works but extending the profile to support CRUD functionality and ongoing interaction around content and use of content between users and repository is an important step towards richer tools and services.

Then there’s the work Nick Sheppard has been doing with the ACEREP project looking at multiple deposit (and search) of learning materials with sword and the joys of trying this across repositories using various combinations and profiles of of IMS CP, METS, LOM and DC. I look forward to seeing how this project works out;I’d write more but Nick does a better job of explaining the details than I could and I expect that this project will produce one of the first SWORD-based deposit tools specifically for learning materials.

And there’s also an interest from the UKOER Ripple project at Oxford in exploring a possible use or extension of the OERca tool from Open Michigan . I want to provide a little more detail about this option because I think it’s the next step beyond a simple deposit tool and a step toward an interactive tool.

I first saw some of the details of the OERca tool last summer and got a trial account on Open Michigan’s test server – it is a workflow tool for managing basic metadata copyright clearance and licensing. The basic approach is that content is uploaded, assigned basic metadata and each component part (eg images in a powerpoint) is identified and flagged for rights clearance. The interface has a clear mechanism for assigning content to courses, work to users (dscribes), tracking the clearance progress of component parts of content, and replacing component images for which the rights aren’t clear. In a sense it’s a simple rights focused workflow tool but as Ripple point out it’s perhaps four fifths of the way to being  a deposit tools for learning materials, more than that as a concept -it is a step towards the ‘plug and play’ environment Ripple are thinking of.

Here’s an example of OERca in action from Open Michigan’s YouTube channel.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwkfVUjsm1c[/youtube]

OERca is open source software and I’d like to see it hacked at the OERTIG/ CETIS & UKOLN Hackday but I’ll note that [as I understand it ] Open Michigan have pointed out that as a tool OERca probably needs a rewrite prior to the addition of more functionality. So I hope that if we’re going to play with it we can coordinate a little with Open Michigan and think about how to work in the same direction.

• a protocol almost universally implemented in repositories and consequently (usually) publishing metadata about repository contents to the world
• a protocol frequently reviled by anyone trying to aggregate feeds from different repositories and build discovery tools and services on top of that aggregate.

I’m not going to repeat OAI-PMH’s problems in detail (PERX, the experience of the NSDL with metadata quality, Andy Powell, Jim Downing and many others have done that), suffice to say their are issues about how protocol was implemented by software, how it is used by metadata creators, and how not web-friendly it is and niche it remains.

However,  I realised recently that I’d begun to think that it must be better by now – surely the teething problems are done with – implementations more mature, record quality better, and aggregation more stable. This is, in part, because it remains the standard for sharing repository metadata and because in a number of settings it works well – there are plenty of communities using it to establish and provide services either by creating ‘closed’ controlled conditions through communally enforced ways of recording information and application profiles, guidelines and ‘political’ agreements in additional to the protocol or by creating tools that simply hack their way around whatever data they get and offer good enough services.

So it was with interest that I picked up on a discussion on twitter about what’s wrong with OAI-PMH and an upcoming paper on using Atom .[edit: I’m updating this list with fragments of conversation about OAI-PMH if I see them, and the odd link or two] It’s not the first time I’ve caught fragments of conversations on the use of feeds – for example the earlier RSS and repositories discussion.

There are a slew of issues around trying to standardise feed types (as we discovered in the discussions organised around RSS as a possible metadata deposit mechanism). See for example Feed Deposit , OER, RSS, and JorumOpen , and the two later review articles (1 , 2) as well as the email list discussions ). Given the increasing use of RSS or Atom in some of the OER discovery tools, the work listed above, and the wider promotion of it in the UKOER pilot projects, why am I so interested in this discussion about OAI-PMH and about another effort to use Atom/ RSS?

I’m happy to see this debate crop up again in the wider (library) repository community for two reasons:

1) perhaps obviously it reaffirms the issues with OAI-PMH, that they haven’t changed, and the possibilities RSS/Atom offers,

2) more importantly it’s bringing the discussion about the feeds produced by repositories into the library/ scholarly works communities. Like it or not those are the communities who are most using repositories and the communities who can to some degree shape the development of repository software and specifications. Few repository platforms natively support much customisation of the feeds they produce and until the wider repository community wants that type of functionality or control and begins to think how update or move beyond OAI-PMH* there’s little reason for repository developers to work on the problem.

Without those changes anyone wanting to manage learning materials in a repository still has to hack their own fixes, build their own repository – or not use repositories (but that’s another question).

*I should note: I like OAI-PMH – I can play with in a browser, repository explorer is a good tool, and using OAI-PMH I can get and interact with someone else’s ‘raw’ metadata. – I’m just no longer convinced it’s the right tool to share metadata – in part by how few successful discovery services there are which use it.

• learn more about ICoper -a major European project- working building tools for the discovery, recommendation, and annotation of learning materials.
• explore the issues in incorporating third-party OERs in a repository,
• explore the technologies available for the dynamic thematic collections envisaged by the OER phase 2 call for proposals, and
• investigate what needs to be done to implement these technologies.

More details of the day can be found at http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/OER_Gathering which we’ll continue to update as we get feedback.

Tag: #cetisgath

We’d originally intended to run this as two back to back events but as a result of some of our expected participants (including a number of colleagues from ICoper) having conflicting commitments and being unable to attend we’ve decided to run the two days we’d planned for the OER Gathering as a single day: June 22nd.

To help structure the day and make sure that the concentrated event is able to focus on what participants are most interested in and the questions the community has in this area, we’d like some feedback from participants and other interested parties.

If you’re attending:

• What’s your background? (developer, manager, researcher, …)
• Within the scope of the event, what are you most interested in discussing?
• If applicable, what would you like to demonstrate at the event?
• What are you most interested in hearing more about/ seeing demonstrated?
• If you’re a developer, what languages do you know/ what development environments/tools do you work with?
• If applicable, which metadata standards are you familiar with?
• If you run a repository or service that you’d like involved in the event can you provide us with some details about it (e.g. OAI-PMH base url / api functionality / feeds)?

Whether attending or not if you have any ideas of development challenges which you’d like to work on or see further specified at the event let us know (comment, email, or add them to the wiki).

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH ; http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html ) “provides an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting.” The protocol is widely used by repository software to make metadata about the resources they store available. In its use the repository acts as a data provider which is then able to be harvested by a data harvester. Two issues of note:

1. although most repositories can function as data providers the data harvesting aspect of the protocol often requires separate software and is much less widely implemented.
2. OAI-PMH specifies a minimal base metadata set of OAI_DC (~ the simple DC element set) therefore any implementation of it should be able to provide this as a minimum. Other metadata standards such as DC Terms or IEEE LOM can also be made available for harvesting.

Although OAI-PMH is a well established standard which is widely used, at this point it’s use for open educational resources is somewhat limited. OAI-PMH is not currently in use by Jorum for metadata harvesting and, as far as I know, there are not many OAI-PMH based harvesters offering aggregated search services for educational materials (outside of those within particular closed/ or semi-closed communities). DiscoverEd from Creative Commons does offer an OAI-PMH based harvest but prefers RSS/Atom based approaches (Enhanced Search for Educational Resources – A Perspective and a Prototype from CCLearn (2009) http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/discovered-paper-17-july-2009.pdf , p12). UPDATE: Please see comment from Jenny Gray below.

OAI-PMH is being used or is supported by:

• ChemistryFM (option once content is in backup ePrints repository)
• Phorus
• Unicycle
• OCEP
• Open Exeter
• OpenStaffs
• OERP (use unknown)
• Humbox

OAI-PMH is in active use by (as opposed to out of the box support):

• Phorus (harvesting catalogued resources from Intute.)
• TRUE (using a Drupal plug in?)
• ADM OER
• ChemistryFM (option once content is in backup ePrints repository)

OAI-ORE

“Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources.” (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/)

As a standard for describing aggregated or compound resources ORE has the potential to be highly relevant to some types of education materials made up of distributed web resources; its use, however, with educational materials has thus far been somewhat limited. It has however been used as an exchange mechanism for moving repository contents from one system to another.

Projects using OAI-ORE:

• ChemistryFM (export function from WordPress – will use to backup content to repository)
• ADMOER (export function from ePrints)
• HumBox (export function from ePrints)

There are a number of projects in the UKOER programme which have identified themselves as using Dublin Core, they are:

• Unicycle
  • http://unicycle-leedsmet.ning.com/
• Open Content Employability Project
  • http://cuba.coventry.ac.uk/ocep/
• Open Exeter
  • http://as.exeter.ac.uk/support/educationenhancementprojects/openexeter/
• OTTER (considering using DC)
  • http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/projects/otter
• OpenStaffs
  • http://www.staffs.ac.uk/about_us/projects/openstaffs/index.jsp
• Berlin (considering using DC)
  • http://unow.nottingham.ac.uk/berlin.html
• ChemistryFM (early intention)
  • http://chemistryfm.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/
• OLE Dutch History (early intention)
  • http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dutch/OER/
• ADOME
  • http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/sector-projects/art-design-media-open-educational-resources-adm-oer-project
• TRUE
  • http://economicsnetwork.ac.uk/projects/oer
• Open Educational Resources Pilot
  • http://www.engsc.ac.uk/an/oer-project/oer-project.as
• Phorus
  • http://phorus.health.heacademy.ac.uk/
• Humbox
  • http://www.llas.ac.uk/projects/3233
• Skills for Scientists
  • http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/physsci/home/projects/skillsforscientists
• UK Centre for Bioscience OER Project (considering use of DC Terms for html based resources)
  • http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/oer/

Projects using Dublin Core at least in part because they’re using OAI-PMH
(I’ve made the assumption those using OAI-PMH are implementing it according to the protocol and thus creating OAI_DC)

• Unicycle
• Open Content Employability Project
• OpenStaffs
• ChemistryFM
• ADOME
• TRUE
• Phorus
• Humbox

Projects creating a mapping to DC to promote interoperability
(this mapping may go beyond OAI_DC)

• Unicycle
• Berlin (investigating mapping to DC)
• Open Educational Resources Pilot (investigating mapping to DC)

Projects implementing the latest version of Dublin Core: DC Terms

• OpenExeter
• UK Centre for Bioscience OER Project (considering)

Projects for whom Dublin Core is not their primary standard

• Unicycle
• Open Content Employability Project
• OpenStaffs
• Berlin
• TRUE
• ChemistryFM (not sure – using WordPress (with OAI-ORE plugin) and institutional repository)

Reflections

• Projects will be creating Dublin Core metadata as a side effect of their deposit into JorumOpen – but this isn’t a choice to use DC in the programme as such.
• I think there is a definite tension between the ongoing use of OAI-DC as part of OAI-PMH and the uptake and use of DC Terms.
• This overview of the use of does not comment on the element / term choices used as part of the use of Dublin Core.