[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]

Analytics

Analytics and tracking tools in use in the UKOER 2 programme

As part of their thinking around sustainability, it was suggested to projects that they consider how they would track and monitor the use of the open content they released.

Most projects have opted to rely on tracking functionality built into their chosen platform (were present). The tools listed in the graph above represent the content tracking or web traffic analysis tools being used in addition to any built in features of platforms.

Awstats, Webalizer and Piwik are all in (trial) use by the TIGER project.

Tools

Tools used to work with OER and OER feeds in the UKOER 2 programme

These tools are being used by projects to work with collections of OER, typically by aggregating or processing rss feeds or other sources of metadata about OER. SOme of the tools are in use for indexing or mapping, others for filtering, and others to plug collections or search interfaces into a third-party platform. The tools are mostly in use in Strand C of the programme but widgets, yahoo pipes, and feed43 have a degree of wider use.

The listing in the above graph for widgets covers a number of technologies including some use of the W3C widget specification.
The Open Fieldwork project made extensive use of coordinate and mapping tools (more about this in a subsequent post)

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

Tools to make OER

OER creation tools in use in the UKOER 2 programme

[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])

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

Descriptive choices

Descriptive metadata in use in the UKOER 2 programme

Dublin Core

“The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative “popularized the idea of “core metadata” for simple and generic resource descriptions” and its initial 15 descriptive elements became an international standard and a component of the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The Dublin Core community has subsequently developed in two directions – one developing application profiles to support particular implementation communities and the other developing in a way that would make its data structures more compatible with RDF and support the uptake of Dublin Core around Linked Data (http://dublincore.org/metadata-basics/). At this time there is, therefore, a very wide spectrum of usage of Dublin Core.” (http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/johnr/2010/03/17/the-use-of-dublin-core-metadata-in-the-ukoer-programme/)

As in the first UKOER programme Dublin Core metadata is by far the most widely used descriptive standard in the programme. As in that programme, it is not clear what version of Dublin Core metadata projects are using (many are likely to be using some form of the basic DC Metadata Element Set, some may be using the newer DC Metadata Terms structure), nor is it clear if there is any common set of metadata element choices in use (the programme’s descriptive requirements are representable in Dublin Core and this is likely to form a common set, but there are other valid ways to present this information)

As noted in commenting on the first  UKOER programme, many projects will be using Dublin Core because it is probably the most commonly implemented interoperability standard in repositories and is also a required part of the OAI-PMH protocol.

It is, however,  noteworthy that some of the projects are developing a wordpress plugin to support the creation of DC metadata based on items in blog posts rather than the blog post itself (for more details please refer to the Summary of Strand C [forthcoming]) .

IEEE LOM

““Learning Object Metadata (LOM) is a data model, usually encoded in XML, used to describe a learning object and similar digital resources used to support learning. The purpose of learning object metadata is to support the reusability of learning objects, to aid discoverability, and to facilitate their interoperability, usually in the context of online learning management systems (LMS).”http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/What_is_IEEE_LOM/IMS_LRM

The LOM standard is available from the IEEE store. There are also many Application Profiles of the LOM data model. One of which is the UK LOM CORE http://www.cetis.org.uk/profiles/uklomcore/uklomcore_v0p3_1204.doc ” ( http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/johnr/2010/03/11/the-use-of-ieee-lom-in-the-ukoer-programme/)

The use of IEEE LOM in the second programme is quite a bit lower than in the first UKOER programme. Two possible reasons for this are: 1) fewer projects are using learning object repositories so there is less native support for LOM 2) in the first programme a number of HEA subject centres may have had significant quantities of existing content in the LOM which they released under an open licence, in the second programme projects may not have had relevant legacy content in this form. [Note: these are speculative].

exif

Exif is a standard widely used in cameras and smartphones for storing and transferring information about images, audio, and associated tags. More information is available in the Wikipedia article.
In use by the Open Fieldwork and ORBEE projects.

MeSH

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings ) is not a descriptive metadata standard as such but it is rather a controlled vocabulary used in the description of medical resources. It can be used and referenced with a number of metadata standards such as Dublin Core and IEEE LOM.
In use by the PORSCHE project.

Geo Microfromat

“geo (pronounced “gee-oh”) is a simple format for marking up WGS84 geographic coordinates (latitude; longitude), suitable for embedding in HTML or XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. geo is a 1:1 representation of the “geo” property in the vCard standard (RFC2426) in HTML, one of several open microformat” from http://microformats.org/wiki/geo.
In use by the Open Fieldwork project.

KML

Keyhole Markup Language: “KML is an XML language focused on geographic visualization, including annotation of maps and images. Geographic visualization includes not only the presentation of graphical data on the globe, but also the control of the user’s navigation in the sense of where to go and where to look.” The major implementation of this standard is in Google Earth and Google Maps.
In use by the Open Fieldwork project.

paradata

Paradata is a rapidly evolving specification to describe activity and review data for digital assets. The initial specification was developed by the NSDL) in connection with the US Learning Registry initiative.
In conjunction with SRI International the Oerbital project developed an experimental template to generate paradata from mediaiwki pages at the OER Hackday.

Packaging choices

Packaging formats in use in the UKOER 2 programme

IMS CP

“IMS Content Packaging “describes data structures that can be used to exchange data between systems that wish to import, export, aggregate, and disaggregate packages of content.”http://www.imsglobal.org/content/packaging/ .” (http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/johnr/2010/03/08/the-use-of-ims-cp-in-the-ukoer-programme/)

ADL SCORM

““The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) integrates a set of related technical standards, specifications, and guidelines designed to meet SCORM’s high-level requirements—accessible, interoperable, durable, and reusable content and systems. SCORM content can be delivered to your learners via any SCORM-compliant Learning Management System (LMS) using the same version of SCORM.” (http://www.adlnet.gov/Technologies/scorm/default.aspx )” (http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/johnr/2010/04/01/the-use-of-adl-scorm-in-the-ukoer-programme/)

Two  projects are using both IMS Content Packaging and ADL SCORM – EALFCO and ALTO. ALTO’s use may relate to the capabilities of the tools they have chosen to use.

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/)””

OAI-ORE – a number of projects mentioned this standard. For three of the four projects the standard is supported out of the box by the repository platform they were using  and it is there is no indication of actual or intended use. Part of the OSTRICH project team (the partners at University of Bath) were investigating the possible use of OAI-ORE with their repository.

Other content related standards in use

Other assorted standards in use in the UKOER 2 programme

The other standards graph is a miscellanea of other standards which projects are using which are distinctive but don’t easily fit into other categories.

IMS LD

The IMS Learning Design specification provides a flexible markup language to encode pedagogies  (http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/)

The ALTO project is usingconcepts and structures from IMS-Learning Design to inform their work but they are NOT implementing the specification

IMS QTI

“IMS Question & Test Interoperability Specification http://www.imsglobal.org/question/ is a standard used to support the interoperability and exchange of digital assessment items (questions, answers, and data).” (http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/johnr/2010/03/03/the-use-of-ims-qti-in-the-ukoer-programme/)

IMS QTI, one of the content types whose release surprised us in the first UKOER programme, has again been released by a number of projects (De-Stress, OER Cafe, Ripple).

HTML5

HTML5 is a work in progress of the latest update to HTML the defining specification of the world wide web.
The De-Stress project used this specification.

epub

“EPUB is a distribution and interchange format standard for digital publications and documents.” http://idpf.org/epub

Although mobile delivery and etextbooks were not an explicit part of the call both DHOER and Triton are experimenting with the epub format to explore these options.

OPML

OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) http://www.opml.org/spec is being used in the progamme by the Triton project to support exchanging lists of RSS feeds.

iCalendar

the iCalendar specification is an exchange format for calendar information which can be used to record diary information or request meetings.
The EALFCO project was investigating the use of this specification.

The SDK is available here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/

There is perhaps a bigger discussion to be had around the role of next generation interfaces and how form-factor, input control, and haptic feedback have rapidly moved from the nice idea to the commercial mainstream and how this will impact on the role and function of technology in learning and teaching (as well as life more generally), but this release is a significant step forward in the development of gestural interfaces (One of the key tech developments in MIT’s tech review this year).

There have already been a number of interesting projects that have hacked the Kinect to run in windows and I’m looking forward to seeing what develops with a more robust, documented, and supported [perhaps?] SDK.

It’s already been used to control games, AR drones at dev8D, interactive video conferencing, and offer some forms of basic screen interactions (mouse-like and touch screen like).
For some examples:

It is also of note that one of the responses to this years dev challenge at Open Repositories 11 was a repository interface controlled by Kinect. [I’ll post a link, screencast if I find one].

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).