JISC and MIT: comparing notes on ed tech

Posted on December 11, 2009 by johnr

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to join a conversation between JISC and MIT OEIT (http://oeit.mit.edu/) to exchange information about current initiatives and possible collaborations. The general themes of the conversation were openness and sustainability. There was an agreed sense that, currently, “Open is the new educational tech” (Vijay). The areas of strategic interest, competencies, and knowledge of open institutes are now central to much educational development. JISC’s work in many diverse areas has contributed to the growth of openness both the successive programmes of work connected to repositories (including the cultivation of developer happiness) and more recently the JISC and HEA OER programme.

Vijay outlined some of the thinking that MIT OEIT are doing around innovation and sustainability outlining where they fit in that cycle and the limiting dependencies of innovation. In a four stage innovation cycle. MIT OEIT are mostly involved in the initial incubation/ development phase and the early implementation phase. They’re not in the business of running services but they need to ensure that their tools are designed and developed in ways which are congruous with sustainability. One key point in their analysis is that the limiting factor for innovation is not your organisational growth (whether the size of the project, design team, or facilities) but the growth of nascent surrounding communities in other parts of the value chain.

As a result, MIT have found that sustainability and embedding innovation isn’t just about more resources it’s about basic design choices and community development. Openness and open working allows the seeding of the wider community from the outset and allows a project to develop competencies and design skills in the wider community). This resonates with some of observations made by OSS Watch and Paul Walk. We then discussed the success of the Wookie widget work carried out by Scott Wilson (CETIS) and how that has successfully developed from a JISC project into an Apache Foundation incubator http://incubator.apache.org/wookie/.

The conversation continued around the tech choices being made in the UKOER programme noting the strength in the diversity of approaches and tools that have been in use in the programme and the findings that appear to be emerging- there is no dominant software platform, choices about support for standards are being driven, in part, by the software platforms rather than a commitment to any standard. [I’ll blog more on this in January as the technical conversations with projects are completed]. We also noted upcoming work around RSS and deposit tools taking place both following on from the JISCRI deposit tools event and emerging from the UKOER programme [see Jorum’s discussion paper on RSS for ingest http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/lmc/2009/12/09/oer-rss-and-jorumopen/]

Brandon then highlighted the SpokenMedia project (http://spokenmedia.mit.edu/) creating tools to automatically transcribe video of lectures both for to enable better search and to make materials to be more accessible and scannable. The tools achieve up 60% base accuracy and are trainable up to 80% accuracy. MIT hope this will make lecture video significantly more browseable and are exploring the release of an api for this as an educational service.

We then discussed some projects working in areas that support bringing research data into curriculum. MIT have a series of projects in this area under the general name of STAR (http://web.mit.edu/star/) which provide suites of tools to use research data in the classroom. One successful implementation of this is STARBioGene allows Biology students to use research tools and materials as part of the core curriculum. Some of the STAR tools are desktop applications and some are cloud-based, many have been made open source.
The wider uptake of the project has contributed to the development of communities outside MIT who are using these tools – as such also it’s an example of growing the wider uptake community outlined in their innovation cycle. One consideration that it has raised about communities of use is that some of the visualisation tools require high performance computing (even if only needed in small bursts). The trend toward computationally intensive science education may create other questions of access beyond the license.

Another interesting tool that we discussed was the Folk Semantic Tool from COSL at Utah State University: on the one hand it’s another RSS aggregator for OERs, on the other, for users running Firefox and Greasemonkey it’s a plugin to add recommendations for OERs into any webpage (which runs off a single line of javascript). http://www.folksemantic.com/

MIT: M.S. Vijay Kumar & Brandon Muramatsu JISC: David Flanders, John Robertson (CETIS)

Managing OERs: the problem of version control?

Posted on December 9, 2009 by johnr

Proposal: those releasing OERs should not invest undue effort in attempting to maintain version control over copies of their material other than those they directly manage.

This post looks at one possible administrative or management concern or challenges emerging from the technical side of working with Open Educational Resources. My response to this concern is (more than usual) opinion rather than advice and hopes to provoke some debate.

There are plenty of reasons why version control of files is critical. These range from managing which version of a document you can safely delete to making sure you’re reading the right document or installing the most up to date patch. Good version control is a key part of content production, file management, and dissemination. Any repository, content management system or other tool – need to clearly distinguish between current and older versions. Older versions may or may not be maintained (whether publicly or privately). In itself this creates a question of what those releasing resources should link to. At its simplest version information about research papers is important to distinguish between pre-print and post-print. However, when papers are published that usually represents a final version of that paper (and not many repositories are [currently] likely to make public multiple versions of an article.

Educational resources on the other hand are usually considered less finished in that even once they are used for teaching year by year [in theory] they regularly evolve to reflect feedback, changes in course content, and developments in teaching style. These iterative versions may often blur into each over as in the lecturer’s mind they are the notes for topic ‘x’ rather than discrete intellectual works. Unless a course or class is completely restructured these assets are likely considered to be one entity [There is a case to be made that these materials are perhaps in need of more rigorous versioning]. For academics who’ve engaged with the idea of Open Education or simply appreciate the visibility it offers this may create a desire to update the materials they’ve released and replace them with new versions. Indeed, if they discover an error in their materials, or their thinking shifts they may be insistent on trying to manage the available copies of their work.

Local repositories or services managing OERs will doubtless develop their own policies and practices to support or address this concern and it makes sense to keep the available learning resources updated. The policies and practices will likely diverge over whether older versions of materials are kept and/or made available to the public. This process gets more interesting though when we consider what interaction projects have with other services which have copies of (rather than just link to) their resources – to what extent do you try to version secondary copies of your resources?

I think there are several factors that shape how OER producers should respond to this question:

strictly speaking you have no legal right to request the removal or update of such resources. Once released under an open license the content is out of your control as long as the license is conformed to. [Note: I am not a lawyer but part of the entire point of most open licenses is that they are non-transactional and irrevocable].
most services or individuals that have taken copies of your resources are likely to be very happy to take updated copies as well.
although most notification or harvesting technologies or standards can support (in some form) the deletion, creation or updating of records [and this would potentially support pointing to a new version]; they deal with metadata rather than allowing remote file management [AFAIK] and even if they did support remote file management few people are going to enable such a feature.
manually distributing updated copies is a possibility but is time intensive and also relies on the policy, procedure, and practice of the third party service.

Considering these factors, I don’t think under normal circumstances OER distributors should be concerned about how their materials are versioned once they leave their local service. This does imply that there may always be some degree of confusion but I’d suggest that on the web there is (even when concerted efforts are made to reduce it) and that responding to the confusion requires consumers of OERs to exercise the same information literacy skills that they need when interacting with any online resource.

This said I think there are steps OER producers can take to promote the visibility of their current resources: one such would be to include a purl or other appropriate uri which points to for the latest version in the resource and metadata where this is possible, whether as a cover page, a subtitle at the start of a video, or other such mechanism, there is a compelling case that resources should include information about where they’ve come from – not only to promote the latest versions but also to note the resource provider. I’ve talked previously about this idea of that resources should be self-descriptive. There may be limit cases in which there is a compelling case to try to remove every trace of a resource but these are unlikely to be common.

Technical challenges for managing Open Educational Resources

Posted on November 13, 2009 by johnr

At the CETIS conference this year, Lorna organised a session offering Roundtable about technical issues facing projects engaging with Open Educational Resources – as most of the attendees were drawn from the UKOER programme. Although there will doubtless be more refined versions of this list I’ve created a first pass of the issues. The full list is on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/RJohnRobertson/cetis09-oer-technical-roundtable . The tweets from the session are on http://twapperkeeper.com/Cetis09find/. The issues list is probably more usable via slideshare but to give an impression:

Nested list of brainstormed issues

DepoST : what would a repository deposit tool look like for learning materials?

Posted on November 6, 2009 by johnr

The morning sessions a the recent JISCRI deposit tools show and tell meeting in London (DepoST) offered a whirlwind of elevator pitches for the many existing repository deposit tools. Details of the tools from the pitches have been neatly captured by David Flanders on the JISCinvolve blog.

In the midst of the afternoon sessions there where a few of us with an interest in learning materials (and particularly Open Educational Resources) who had a think about what might be different about a tool for depositing learning materials in a repository (Rory McNichol, Richard Davies, Julian Tenney, Pat Lockley, Phil Barker, J.M.Gray, Antony Corfield and myself). In our discussions we didn’t talk that much about mechanisms but focused more on the features that such a tool might require. [Subsequently Phil has blogged an inital view on the possible deposit/ harvest mechanisms http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/philb/2009/10/28/feed-deposit/ – his post is about the questions we need to address now; this post and our discussions on the day looked at the what next question]

Our short list of possible differences centered, not on technical diferences as much on the importance of context. In particular the context of the use of the learning material. We thought that future developements should look not only at the deposit of a learning material but also consider the ongoing ‘deposit’ of usage information in some form- allowing the repository to gather feedback about the resource. From this point, it’s fair to say that our conception of a deposit veered somewhat towards including elements of a repository interface (tool or otherwise) that would allow discovery and ongoing data excahnge about a learning material. As such the following isn’t so much of a requirements specification as a trying to pin down information from the user or other systems that would help improve how learning materials are managed and accessed.

Our shortlist of key features was:

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

Having written this I’m very aware that SWORD works because it’s so simple. Partly this is because putting papers into repositories is, mostly, a one directional technical process [it is of course a much more interactive social/ political / administrative process] and SWORD has been very careful to limit in what it is trying to do. Consequently any work in this area looking to expand the scope of deposit tool/ repository interface functionality should be very cautious in adding mandatory extras. However, feedback and usage information are becoming increasingly important for scholarly communciations and data sets are likely to prove to be much more interactive resources (in a similar way to learning materials) as how they’re being used is key information). In a similar way institutions (as well as authors) are increasingly becoming the creators and/or distributors of resources so the ‘corporate’ deposit interface is likely to become more prominent.

Our discussion created more questions than answers in my mind, but it’s clear that, however deposit tools develop, we’d like them to be able to capture more context, but that this has to be done in lightweight ways that reuse rather than recreate information – we’ve had complex standards that ask for this type of information for a while but we have always asked users to input it.

Our full discussion is pictured below.

Notes about features of a repository deposit tool for learning materials

Notes from the web: Making Standards that Work and a Sordid History of Learning Object Repositories

Posted on November 5, 2009 by johnr

A few quick items of interest form the web this week. Two offer a perspective of the process of making standards (looking at OAI-PMH); another is an interview with Brian Lamb reviewing the history of Learning Object Repositories.

Talking to DC [Washington] (Adam Bosworth, Adam Bosworth’s Weblog)

In a post based on his experiences with standards development, Adam outlines seven guidelines for good standards development
http://adambosworth.net/2009/10/29/talking-to-dc/

Keep the standard as simple and stupid as possible.
The data being exchanged should be human readable and easy to understand.
Standards work best when they are focused.
Standards should have precise encodings.
Always have real implementations that are actually being used as part of design of any standard.
Put in hysteresis for the unexpected.
Make the spec itself free, public on the web, and include lots of simple examples on the web site.

Making Standards that Work (Dorothea Salo, The Book of Trogool)

http://scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2009/11/making_standards_that_work.php
Relfecting on Adam’s post, Dorothea relates some of those principles to her own experience and view of standards development in particular commenting on OAI-PMH.
OAI-PMH is an interesting example because it’s so widely used and, as Dorothea says, so simple. When it works, it works well (even if we might now like to change some of it to be more web friendly). However, metadata sharing works best in defined communities. When OAI-PMH doesn’t work, it’s a mess as frequently it’s the data harvesters who notice but who are dependent on the data providers (and potentially also their technical support) to change anything. Interestingly the OAI-PMH Static repository specification pushed some of the emphasis back onto the data provider – as their base information in xml had to be valid xml before it would be mediated by a gateway (but SRs are a whole other story with lots of potential but their own problems.)

The Sordid History of Learning Object Repositories or, a chat with Brian Lamb (Jim Groom, bavatuesdays)

One of the interesting things about the UKOER programme is how much freedom projects have to choose how they are going to store, describe, manage, and share their resources. They are using a wide variety of approaches, which include repositories, content management systems, and web pages of rss feeds. They’re also using a wide variety of ways to descibe stuff. All of the approaches though are some way from the sort of educational world which the original learning object repositories envisaged and which Brian Lamb reflects on here:
http://bavatuesdays.com/the-sordid-history-of-learning-object-repositories-or-a-chat-with-brian-lamb/. I still think repositories have a lot to offer the management of learning materials but they’re not the only option, are better as part of a wider suite of tools, are really hope they aren’t going to ask users about semantic density. To my mind Brian’s relfections highlight a number of reasons why the UKOER programme is implementation nuetral.

I’ve also realised that I’ve not yet pointed to a related resource from CC Talks about OERs A chat with Stephen Downes on OER http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17860 I was also going to talk about Pete Johnston’s latest installment about Simple Dublin Core but that’ll have to wait for another day (http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2009/11/simple-dc-revisited.html)

Notes from the web: Proposed NSF Repository, and Open Textbook act

Posted on October 7, 2009 by johnr

Just a few quick points of interest from the web about developments in the US which are worth noting:

A new subject repository and OA mandate?

“In addition to the $20 million grant announced today, the Libraries received a $300,000 grant from NSF to study the feasibility of developing, operating and sustaining an open access repository of articles from NSF-sponsored research. Libraries staff will work with colleagues from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and the University of Michigan Libraries to explore the potential for the development of a repository (or set of repositories) similar to PubMedCentral, the open-access repository that features articles from NIH-sponsored research. This grant for the feasibility study will allow Choudhury’s group to evaluate how to integrate activities under the framework of the Data Conservancy and will result in a set of recommendations for NSF regarding an open access repository.” (http://releases.jhu.edu/2009/10/02/sheridan-libraries-awarded-20-million-grant/)

(via Glynn Moody URL12124123431 and Open Education News http://openeducationnews.org/2009/10/06/nsf-considering-repository/).

This is great news! if as a result of the feasability study all publications which result from NSF funding need to have, at least Green OA, licences – this will significantly impact OA in the Sciences.

This comes in the same week as US Senator Durbin has introduced a bill proposing funding for the creation and sustained development of open textbooks. As David Wiley notes the bill also includes a clause realting to federally funded materials

“In General- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, educational materials such as curricula and textbooks created through grants distributed by Federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, for use in elementary, secondary, or postsecondary courses shall be licensed under an open license.” http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-1714

(via David Wiley http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1103 and Open Education News http://openeducationnews.org/2009/10/01/the-open-college-textbook-act/)

I’m not sure what the odds are of this bill being passed, but alongside all the federal data being released and made openly available there is a definite shift in US goverment policy towards a position that if the public money pays for something the public should have as much access to it as is reasonable.

More than this, if educational resources produced in relation to NSF funding do end up having open licences we’re going to end up with a lot more OERs and a lot more (US) institutions having to take a serious look at how they manage their learning materials.

Open Education: project or process and practice?

Posted on September 9, 2009 by johnr

I’m new enough to the Open Education world that I can’t tell how unusual the closure of Utah State’s OpenCourseWare initiative is (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Utah-State-Us-OpenCourseWare/7913/ and http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/967). It’s probably the largest OCW initiative in the US after MIT and in a summary of its successes earlier this year the Utah State University online news noted that it gets 50000 visitors a month http://www.usu.edu/ust/index.cfm?article=34468. To all extents and purposes it has been a success but it’s now a success that’s, at best, on hold.

At the risk of simplifying the undoubtedly difficult and complex issues behind this decisions, it strikes me that for USU Open Education has been a project. A successful project, and one that has been good for the institution, but a project nevertheless. But in academia and in recessions projects are always vulnerable – they are, almost by definition, additonal to institution’s core business.

For Open Education and for Open Access, USU’s decision reinforces the need for sustainable approaches – a need to embed the work of making things open into the normal processes and practice of the institution.

I’m not suggesting that Open Education can be done without any additional cost to the institution, that it’s easy, or that all those invovled in the initiaive at USU didn’t do all that they could (and way more than I could). There are plenty of things that you have to do on top of normal practice and process before you can make content freely available and higher costs if you want to maximise the benefits to your institution. Open Education like Open Access is not free to provide.

Unfortunately I suspect that most OER (and most OA) initiatives face the challenge that they have to start from the position that institutions aren’t actively managing their digital stuff and that staff aren’t always considering IPR when they create materials. I’m not sure how many institutions would be able to say that they have organised copies of all their lecture materials and research papers (irrespective of whether they want to be Open or not). An OER initiative that tries to do all that work for the institution, without the instituion undergoing some changes to the basic institutional processes of how we do education. runs the risk of remaining a project (irrespective of their funding source). I’d suggest that the sustainability of OER and OA initiatives is entirely dependent on if institutions choose to manage their digital stuff. [I also don’t know how much of an issue this was at USU]

I’ll finish with three quotes drawn from the USU example that I take as a warning to any project:
“In the tradition of land grant universities, Utah State University OpenCourseWare assures that no individual who is prepared and who desires the opportunity to advance his or her education is turned away. USU OCW provides an unprecedented degree of free and open access to the knowledge and expertise of our faculty for the benefit of every citizen of the state of Utah and every person in the world. As we enter the 21st century, services like OpenCourseWare will enable land grant institutions to more fully accomplish their missions.” (Stan Albrecht, President, Utah State University on http://ocw.usu.edu/)

“The cause? The effort ran through grant money from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and $200,000 from the state Legislature. It needed $120,000 a year to keep going. But it failed to secure any more state or university money, Mr. Jensen said, despite being the third-most-visited Web site hosted by Utah State University.
“It’s just a bad timing issue,” Mr. Jensen told The Chronicle this morning. “The recession hit. People wanted to keep us up, but the economy was just such that we could not find money anywhere.””( “Utah State U.’s OpenCourseWare Closes Because of Budget Woes”, Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Utah-State-Us-OpenCourseWare/7913/)

“2009-10 AUTHORIZED BASE BUDGET [of $] 226,327,800″ http://www.usu.edu/budget/documents/legislature/2009/budget%20summary_fy2009%20leg.pdf

Sadly this suggests to me that for USU, Openness was a project.

Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 3)

Posted on September 2, 2009 by johnr

The first two parts of this foray into metadata requirements for Open Educational Resources examined: 1) how the required information for the UKOER programme compared with the requirements for the Jorum deposit tool and the DiscoverEd aggegator 2) how the UKOER requirements compared to the information projects thought would be necessary for particular activities (find, identify, use, cite, manage, select). In this final part I’ll offer some personal reflections on the implications of these comparisons and comment on the role of educational metadata and annotations.

It was perhaps predictable, though not essential, that there would be close correspondence between the programme requirements and Jorum’s requirements but it was good to see that the UKOER’s metadata requirements were comparable to those of ccLearn’s aggregator. I’m glad to note that alongside The University of Nottingham initiative UNOW and the Open University’s Open Learn, Leeds Met’s Unicycle project are also thinking about this (http://twitter.com/mrnick/statuses/3575276663 ). As outlined in part 2, what proved more interesting is that, when as a programme we thought about some of the information that the users of our resources would need, the programme requirements were a subset of that list.

One thing I’d highlight here, before I do that, is that the one piece of information that we agreed was essential to use an OER was clear licence information. I’m sure that this will get discussed a lot more but in the wider discussions going around the programme it is becoming clear that this information needs to be available as part of the asset for people to read (for example, as a cover page statement), in the metadata (to support licence specific searching), and in the RSS feed – so that it’s clear to aggregators.

Educational description

Part 1 noted DiscoverEd’s use of educational content and sparked some comments about the use of educational context – specifically focused on the issue of educational level; in part 2 information about educational context emerged from our discussions aboutwhat we would want to know to interact with the OERs.

Developing best practice guidelines for eduational metadata in the UKOER programme is an ongoing process and one in which we’ll probably be tracking what the projects find useful as much as, if not more than, we make recommendations. CETIS has existing guides to metadata at http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Guides_to_metadata and summaries of relevant metadata standards at http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Educational_metadata_standards . We’re begining to gather specific guidance, links, and best practice information at http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Educational_Content_OER but these guidelines are very much just beginning.

As Phil and Andy L noted on part 1 -if you’re dealing with resources ranging from primary school to postgraguate or CPD, the ability to quickly filter by broad educational level is quite important and for the purpose of wider interoperability recording educational level allows a richer service in some aggregators (currently DiscoverEd). But it’s hard to know what an appropriate and useful granularity would be – especially given that the audience of an OER is global. Perhaps, stating on the resource what class or course something was used for is a good idea as it provides the user (though not the system) with an understandable point of reference. In terms of metadata – if Jorum uses UKEL (I can’t remember and can’t access it) this is probably the right vocabulary to use. Given the focus of the programme on HE the appropriate (multiple) UKELs may be able to be added to batches of project resources – though broad this would give aggregators with a wider remit something to work with.

In terms of wider educational description – intended use, context of use, requirements for use, instructional method, are a few of the candidates. However, providing this sort of information has the potential to rapidly move away from the light touch approach to metadata that has characterised the programme thus far, and significantly add to the ‘cataloguing’. A quick glance at the practice of many of the successful OER initiatives suggests limited educational metadata may be the way to go; OCW & MERLOT record the item type but with vocabularies geared to their collections.

The upcoming technical discussions with projects will begin to establish what educational information they are recording and help frame some guidelines.

Usage information

Some other types of information that our discussions suggested would be really helpful (especially in the context of managing OER collections) was usage information, user ratings, and comments. This presents somewhat of a challenge. As:

Usage statistics are often application specific and not part of structured metadata.
Annotations are a sort of metadata but they actually form resources in their own right and it’s both tricky and somewhat messy to include them in metadata – especially if the resource and metadata then move (as they are intended to). As I understand it one possible approach would be to use OAI-ORE to associate distributed annotations that you were aware of with a resource.

I’m not yet aware of best practice in this area, nor aware of what projects are planning to do about recording OER use or distribution, but suspect that:

is beginning to move towards the bigger discussion about tracking of OERs.
is going to depend a lot on the capabilities of the tools and systems projects are using and how they record anntoations or ratings.

More details of about both of these issues will again emerge through the technical discussions but I suspect best practice for statisitics or an investigation of tracking are getting outside of the scope of our work.

Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 2)

Posted on August 31, 2009 by johnr

In Comparing metadata requirements (part 1) I examined the required and suggested metadata for Open Educational Resources in the UKOER programme, for the Jorum deposit tool, and the DiscoverEd aggregator. In this second part of the comparison I’m going to try to capture some of our initial discussions fom the UKOER programme session about metadata and then very roughly compare the brainstorming we did as part of that event with the requirements of the programme and other initiatives.

To begin with let’s have a look at a graphical overview of the requirements from the three initiatives. The graph below displays an overview of the metadata requirements of the UKOER programme, the Jorum deposit tool, and the DiscoverEd aggregator service. Full height bars are manadatory elements, three quarter height bars are system generated elements and half height bars are recommended metadata elements.

Graphiical Overview of Metadata Requirements Relating to the UKOER Programme

Graphical overview of metadata requirements relating to the UKOER programme

In the elluminate session, we asked the participating projects to consider what metadata they would require to:

identify
find
select
use
cite
manage

a resource. Participants then shared their suggestions in the chat box. I’ve put the data together and were appropriate combined or split entries. The below graph represents the group’s suggestions of which possible pieces of information are important for each of the outlined functions. (Some caveats are in order. The exercise was not rigorous, the number of participants answering at a given time varied; the first question ‘identify’ had a higher broader repsonse rate – this may relate to how we explained the exercise. The answers were free text and not from a prior list. Unless specified the idea of a date is counted for both creation/ initial use and upload/ publication. It also became clear that for functional purposes rights mostly collapsed in to licence (thus it was dropped from the graph).

Condensed outputs of metadata responses

Graph displaying a summary of metadata requirements for functions from brainstorming in 2nd Tuesday session

The idea of educational level is implict in educational description /context and so it should probably be included with that category (this has not been done in this graph however, as educational level is singled out in the requirements). It is not entirely clear what was intended by some of the descriptions – e.g. coverage.

Examining the graph it is clear that there are some key pieces of infromation for particular uses. Across the entire set of functions the key information appears to be: author, date of publication, subject and description, educaitonal description/ intended use (if combined with educational level) and usage data.

The key information for each function was:

identify – subject
find – description
select – licence
use – licence
cite – date of publication
manage – usage data

By way of enabling a comparison with the metadata requirements, the top three responses for each function where collated (and then taken as factor of one) – this was done to provide an approximate indication of overall importance that could be compared to the requirements data.

OER required metadata compared to brainstorming

From this comparison it is interesting to note the following:

Of the two contentious mandatory metadata elements: file format/ mime type was actually considered to be functionally important.
Recording the Language of an OER was not considered to be critcial for any of the functions – though all the initiatives consider it important (this may be attributable to the programme-based context of our discussion).
The institution/ publisher is surprisingly unimportant functionally (unless you are, like Jorum, hosting materials).
Licence is probably the most important piece of information for an OER.
Usage data and user ratings are considered to be critical pieces of information – they are not however included in metadata profiles – however, it is likely that this information would be generated over time by the relevant host services

There’s probably more to say about this data and more to do with it but for now at least – that’s plenty to reflect on.

Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 1)

Posted on August 26, 2009 by johnr

In our elluminate session on metadata and aggregation for Open Educational Resources, Phil and I spent some time gettting everyone to think through the information required to interact with an educational resource in certain ways (such as: (re-)use, cite, find, identify, manage). this produced a lot of responses prioiritizing different bits of information that are needed. I’ve not gone through my notes thoroughly yet but on the whole particapants agreed that the metadata which the programme asked for was needed (the main element of contention was file format and size which thankfully are probably the most automatable of metadata).

With this in mind I was interested to read about ccLearn’s developments in developing a tool to provide an enhanced search of aggregated OERs and their metadata reccomendations for sources.

“DiscoverEd is an experimental project from ccLearn which attempts to provide scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. Metadata, including the license and subject information available, are exposed in the result set.” http://wiki.creativecommons.org/DiscoverEd_FAQ

There’s a lot more to be said about their work as I’m still trying to figure out how it is similar to and differs from all the previous work done on aggregating repositories (at first glance – it’s got the advantage of web friendly syndication/ transport standards but potentially less robust/ standardised descriptive standards). Today however, I thought it would be interesting to compare minimum metadata sets for OERs that I’m aware of and that are intended for multi-organisation/ insitutional use (i.e. not just what a given organisation has decided as a minmimal set for its metadata).

UKOER Mandatory Metadata:

from: http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/lmc/2009/03/30/metadata-guidelines-for-the-oer-programme/

programme tag
author
title
date (uploaded/ creation)
url
file format
file size
[I’m fairly sure rights is on some versions of this list but it doesn’t appear on this one]

Suggested metadata

language
subject classsifications
keywords
tags
comments
description

DiscoverEd metadata

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcLearn_Search_Metadata

All the metadata is optional but the following is highly recommended :

title
summary
language
education level
licence
subject

Jorum’s OER deposit tool

Gareth Waller summarized the Metadata requirements of the the Jorum OER deposit tool in comment on http://repositorynews.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/musing-about-metadata-for-oer/
“The profile is as follows:

Mandatory metadata set:

Title
Overview (Description)
Keywords
Author Name
Licence

Recommended metadata set:

Project name
Creation date
Classification (JACS subject classification)

System Generated metadata set:

Publisher
Contributed Date
Language
Identifier

The ‘keywords’ metadata is currently user generated and does not use a controlled vocabulary.”

Comparing the lists it’s obvious to see some of the reasoning behind the chosen metadata sets. For example, that Jorum’s deposit tool can take advantage of information from Shibboleth and user profiles. It is also very encouraging to see their overlap but I think for me these sets raise a few issues:

Knowing a file size is important, but are we reaching a point when this information is part fo the programme/ browser?
- I think we still need to record it but am not sure as I’m fairly certain that often when a file size is displayed to someone selecting/ downloading it’s being generated from the file/ by the browser not from the metadata.
Educational Level…
- I’m surprised to see this in ccLearn’s list – for all it’s simplicity it’s thus far proved a nightmare to agree on educational levels. not only is is nightmarish cross culturally but even within countries it’s not easy. I’ll pass over UK Educational Levels quickly and point out a project I’ve mentioned before Standard Connection – an NSF project trying to map curricula within the US. I’m not sure what progress they made but do know it certainly wasn’t straightforward.

The inclusion of educational level does however point to the difference between what educators think is necessary and what is easy to provide. I’ll come back to this in part 2 when I’ll try to wrangle some sense out of our elluminate session surveys.

I’ll note two things in passing by way of interim conclusion:

that OCW are discussing if they should have a minimal metadata set (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/1493).
that the suggested basic metadata for ccLearn is similar enough to the required and suggested metadata for DiscoverEd that there’s no reason that UKOER projects can’t (at no extra cost ) publish their collections there too. The University of Nottingham initiative UNOW is doing this already. [edit: the Open University’s initiative Open Learn is there too]