DevCSI OER Hack Day Report

I am woefully late in amplifying this, however Kirsty Pitkin has produced an excellent summary of the joint UKOLN CETIS DevCSI OER Hackday that took place in Manchester last month. The two day event drew a wide range of participants from the UK and US including delegates from the Universities of Leeds, Newcastle, Oxford, Bolton and Nottingham, East Riding College, Harper Adams University College, the Open University, the US Learning Registry Initiative, Open Michigan and ISKME, together with colleagues from JISC, CETIS and UKOLN.

Kirsty’s report includes video interviews with many of the hackday participants and also presents a comprehensive summary of the projects developed at the event. These included:

  • The Course Detective – a Google custom search engine to search over the undergraduate prospectus pages for all UK universities.
  • WordPress tools, hacks and workflows for OER
  • Generating Paradata from MediaWiki – how to contribute paradata back into the Learning Registry by building a simple data pump that mines MediaWiki and transforms it into a paradata envelope for the Learning Registry.
  • Sacreligious – an OER version of Delicious, built on Django.
  • Xpert / Learning Registry Connection – working with the Xpert search API to parse it and push it into the Learning Registry

You can read Kirsty’s full report here: OER Hack Day, and I can also recommend the OER Hack Day Social Summary

JISC CETIS OER Technical Mini-Projects Results

After a slight delay caused by all those public holidays and an unscheduled absence on my part, it gives me great pleasure to announce the results of the JISC CETIS OER Technical Mini-Projects Call. Having taken into consideration the comments and discussions on the oer-discuss JISCmail list, a pannel of JISC and CETIS staff selected the following two projects for funding.

1. CaPRéT Cut and PAste reuse and Tracking from Brandon Muramatsu, MIT OEIT and Justin Ball and Joel Duffin, Tatemae.

2. OER Bookmarking Initiative from Paul Horner, James Outterside, Suzanne Hardy and Simon Cotterill, University of Newcastle.

JISC and CETIS would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who submitted proposals for this call and also to those who contributed to the discussions on the mailing list.

We’ll be undertaking a short informal evaluation of the Mini-Projects Open Call shortly so I hope you’ll let us know what you think about this new way of selecting and funding small scale projects.

In the spirit of this open call most of the projects have agreed to allow us to circulate the markers comments on their proposals as follows:

CaPRéT Cut and PAste reuse and Tracking
~ Brandon Muramatsu, MIT OEIT and Justin Ball and Joel Duffin, Tatemae.

1. Usefulness of idea
It would be useful to have a plugin to a browser to track reuse in a way that doesn’t require anything of the end user. This bid also extends the growing interest in analytics. Although it only works for websites this is a not insignificant portion of OERs. It is similar to image attribution tools and Open Attribute both of which have proved successful. Limits are that it’s not going to be able to track everything and relies on action by users and providers. The interaction with this community would also benefit UKOER.

2. Experience of project team
The team are highly experienced and have demonstrated a clear willingness to engage on the list.

3. Demand for outputs
There is a demand for the outputs: everyone wants to get the end results of analytics. Although only scoped for html text but there is enough demand for this. One question is how are they going to market it/ make use of comms channels – it will be better the more it’s used.

4. Is the project achievable?
Yes. Can it also be integrated into content management systems that people use (wordpress/ xerte/ drupal etc plugins?)

5. Does the project build on existing work?
Yes. It builds on their experience and shows willingness to engage with Open Attribute and related work, We would like clarity on how these outputs would be licenced and how they fits with related commercial initiatives.

6. Does the project duplicate existing work?
No, especially as it focusses on use rather than access; There is a need to work with open attribute.

7. Technical approach
Good technical approach. It is assumed that when you’re copying and pasting from a website you’re turning it into an object. but often you would edit it in text tools etc: it could easily be lost and there may be a reliance on what text tools will permit.

8. Quality of proposal
Very good

9. Fund?
Yes, but would like more detail wrt to license and commercial interest/ proposed future.

OER Bookmarking
~ Paul Horner, James Outterside, Suzanne Hardy and Simon Cotterill, University of Newcastle.
1. Usefulness of idea
There was a mixed response to a bookmarking tool on the oer-discuss list but more than enough interest and demand for this to be considered relevant.

2. Experience of project team
The team are experienced and have demonstrated a clear willingness to engage on the list. We note though that their technical experience is not well evidenced in bid.

3. Demand for outputs
There is a demand for a service that doesn’t have the current insecurity of delicious and possibly offers richer structured information and a more localised control over future service developments. The proposed service has the potential to seriously enhance quality of available metadata/ paradata.

4. Is the project achievable?
We’re not sure – there are some issues in the proposed scale and scope of project which are of concern: the plan to build a web scale service, and the assumed community-based sustainability plan. However, this is a demonstrator and if it manages expectations carefully it has potential. Social tools need scale to work so proof of concept developments are tricky – a designated community (for example medical education) might help get suitable scale. There’s a lot of development mentioned in this bid, it may be overambitious.

5. Does the project build on existing work?
A not insignificant issue is that the bid doesn’t build on existing bookmarking projects or tools, however discussion on the list indicates a willingness from the team to engage with external services (via APIs). We would encourage the team to investigate the possibility of working with OERCommons / ISKME?

6. Does the project duplicate existing work?
Yes – but with potential demand for the duplication and opportunity to collaborate.

7. Technical approach
The aspect of the work lining to dynamic learning maps is quite innovative, we’d like to see more of this kind of approach.

8. Quality of proposal
The bid could use some more technical detail in places

9. Fund?
Yes with the proviso that they can they address the issues and questions raised here and on list as well as carefully managing expectations. This is not the type of service that JISC would fund further – this should be seen as seed funding to enable the team to develop a viable tool and attempt to secure further support from other sources.

Development of Visual Vocabulary Management Tools
~ Dr Ian Piper, Tellura Information Services Ltd
1. Usefulness of idea
Vocabulary management is an issue for organisations and [centralised] initiatives – it is however, much less clear that it is currently an issue or problem for OERs which are released in highly distributed, diverse, and uncoordinated ways. In itself this is a useful idea and lack of mechanisms and tools to manage and share controlled vocabularies more widely is a recognised problem but, even within the library community, it is not clear that there is a consistent demand to reuse vocabularies developed by others (apart from the very large scale controlled vocabularies that operate with their own business models and support structures). On a related note it is potentially unclear what the provenance of existing vocabularies in the proposed system would be, or their relevance to OER.

2. Experience of project team
Tellura Ltd has highly relevant experience and the outputs of their earlier projects are well regarded. They have also have demonstrated a clear willingness to engage on the list.

3. Demand for outputs
This project is about managing small localised vocabularies, and assumes that people outside the ‘creating’ community want to use those vocabularies. As yet there is unclear demand for such a service in the OER environment and, perhaps more widely in JISC. We would like to have seen some more evidence of the demand for vocabularies to be reused. There might be more of a demand from e-content or repositories people, or bigger institutions such as the OU.

4. Is the project achievable?
Yes, probably.

5. Does the project build on existing work?
The project builds strongly on existing work. There is a concern, arising from this, that the deliverables seem somewhat focused on extending the existing work rather than building on the outlined investigations of innovative technical approaches.

6. Does the project duplicate existing work?
Not in the OER space.

7. Technical approach
The ability to visualise data in innovative ways can result in a step change in the uptake of tools and service. We liked the investigation of cql as a native query language, the investigation of SKOS and a RESTFUL web service approach. It’s a solid approach and correctly uses things we’d liked to see used.

8. Quality of proposal
Very good

9. Fund?
No. It is, however, a good bid and will be passed on to other parts of JISC in case it is of interest to their efforts (collections/ repositories).

Ranking and SEO – light on a dark art

Search engine optimisation can seem like a bit of a black art, particularly given that search engines can and do change their algorithms with little or no prior warning or documentation. However there is growing awareness that if institutions, projects or individuals wish to have a visible web presence and to disseminate their resources efficiently and effectively search engine optimisation and ranking can not be ignored. Indeed at the JISC HEA OER Phase 2 Prorgamme meeting in January the projects flagged up SEO as being an area where they would appreciate more support and guidance.

Coincidentally the day before the programme meeting Jenny Gray of the OU raised a query on the oer-discuss list about an unexplained drop off in traffic to OpenLearn from google, which she suspected was a result of a change to the google algorithm. Several people responded with helpful suggestions including Lisa McLaughlin of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) who forwarded some invaluable advice on search engine ranking and optimisation from her colleague Julie Walling.

Julie has now written a similar post on the ISKME Research blog: Trouble shooting a Drop in Search Engine Rankings. This helpful blog post outlines a set of questions that can be used to troubleshoot whether a drop in rankings is the result of a change in a search engine algorithm, or due to an issue with the website in question. Recognising that SEO can be extremely complex and that the cause of ranking changes elusive, Julie sets out some basic principals to bear in mind. These include:

1. Structure sites so they are as content rich as possible
2. Pick one keyword per page and stick to it
3. Include your keyword in the anchor text of internal links
4. Attract high value external links

I can highly recommend Julie’s blog post to anyone interested in learning more about google ranking and search engine optimisation more generally and as an added bonus she also provides links to other useful resources on this arcane but important topic.

This is not a blog post…#lwf11

Earlier today while listening to the livefeed of Learning Without Frontiers #lwf11 I had the misfortune to hear Katharine Birbalsingh presenting. Not since a recent Alt-C keynote have I seen such a vitriolic twitter backchannel. And in my opinion it was justified. Several people in my twitter feed missed the presentation but picked up on the backchannel and asked me to blog a summary of the talk. We’ll I’ve written a short summary but I’ve decided not to post it because that would just be providing publicity for opinions that I actually find quite objectionable. So if you want the summary let me know and I’ll send it to you. I don’t really want such nonsense on my blog.

Dan Stucke has blogged a short sumamry of the presentation on his blog here.

JISC CETIS OER Technical Interest Group

In order to provide a focus for the wide range of technical activities that the UK F/HE community is engaging with in the general space of “open educational resources” CETIS are establishing an OER Technical Interest Group. This group will provide a forum to explore a wide range of technical issues relating to the creation, description, dissemination, aggregation, discovery, use and tracking of open educational resources. In addition, the group will help to surface and identify current and best practice in these areas.

Who is the OER Technical Interest Group for?

Anyone with an interest in technical issues relating to open educational resources and the wider areas of open education and educational resource management in general. Participation is not restricted to JISC HEA OER Programme projects, we would welcome and encourage participation from outwith the UK and from across the educational sector including schools, colleges, work based learning, life long learning, etc.

How do I participate in the OER Technical Interest Group?
To join the group just add a comment below to identify yourself, sign up for oer-discuss@jiscmail.com and look out for blog posts and tweets tagged #oertig

Rather than create a new mailing list, the OER Technical Interest Group will initially use the recently launched JISC oer-discuss list. An additional technical list will be established at a later date if necessary.

What will the OER Technical Interest Group do?

  • Together with UKOLN’s DevCSI initiative the group will run an OER Hackday on the 31st March / 1st April 2011 at Manchester Conference Centre. For further information and to sign up for this event visit http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/devcsi/oer_hackdays/
  • Provide a forum for the forthcoming JISC CETIS OER Mini Projects. JISC and CETIS intend to fund a series of OER Mini Projects in 2011 to explore a range of specific technical issues already surfaced by the JISC / HEA OER Programmes and recent CETIS events including #cetisrow and #cetiswmd. All participants will be eligible to apply for Mini Projects.
  • Engage with and disseminate initiatives and activities outwith the UK F/HE sector including Creative Commons, OCWC and the US Learning Registry.
  • Run a series of public events over the course of 2011 building on past CETIS events such as #cetisrow and #cetiswmd.
  • Provide a forum to raise and discuss technical issues.

What kind of technical issues will the OER Technical Interest Group explore?

The group hopes to explore a wide range of technical issues including but not restricted to:

  • Feed deposit
  • Web search log analysis
  • RSS end point registries
  • Use of open source repositories for managing educational resources.
  • Tracking open educational resources.
  • License encoding.
  • Self description and embedded metadata.

Further information about CETIS OER Technical Interest Group projects and activities will be posted on the CETIS blogs and circulated through the usual channels. If you are interested in participating please add your name below along with any comments or issues you would like to see the group explore. Thanks,

OER 2 Technical Requirements

Following the experiences of projects funded under the HEFCE / Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources Pilot Programme CETIS have made some minor revisions to the technical guidelines for the current OER 2 Programme. These guidelines reiterate and hopefully clarify the guidelines provided in the Programme Circular and presented at the Programme Start Up Meeting.

Resource Description

As with the OER Pilot Programme, the OER 2 Programme will not mandate the use of one single platform to disseminate resources and one single metadata application profile to describe content. However projects still need to ensure that content released through the programme can be found, used, analysed, aggregated and tagged. In order to facilitate this, content will have to be accompanied by some form of metadata. In this instance metadata doesn’t necessarily mean de jure standards, application profiles, formal structured records, cataloging rules, subject classifications, controlled vocabularies and web forms. Metadata can also take the form of tags added to resources in applications such as flickr and YouTube, time and date information automatically added by services such as slideshare, and author name, affiliation and other details added from user profiles when resources are uploaded. Consequently the OER 2 Programme only mandates the following “metadata”:

Programme tag – ukoer

Project tag – each project should devise a short tag for use in conjunction with the programme tag. e.g. projectname

Title – of the resource being described

Author / owner / contributor – Most systems, whether repositories, vles or applications such as SlideShare, YouTube, etc allow registered users to create a user profile detailing their name and other relevant details. When a user uploads a resource to such a system these details are usually associated with the resource.

Date – This is difficult to define in the context of open educational resources which have no formal publication date. Most applications are likely to record the date a resource is uploaded but it will also be important to record date of creation so users can judge the currency of a resource.

URL – Metadata must include a url that locates the resource being described. The system must assign each item a unique url.

Licence information – Creative Commons is the preferred licence for programme outputs. The cc:license element can be used to provide a URI for the licence chosen and the dc:rights element can be used to provide general textual information about copyrights, other IPR and licence. Embedding the license within the resource is also recommended where practicable. Projects may refer to the OER IPR Support Project for further guidance

Technical information such as file format, name and size may be added but is no longer mandatory.

The hash symbol # should be added to the programme and project tag for use on twitter. E.g. #ukoer for twitter, ukoer for blogs etc.

Projects are also encouraged to think about providing additional information that will help people to find and access resources. For example:

Language information – The language of the resource.

Subject classifications – Specific subject classifications vocabularies are not mandated for the OER Programme. However if a controlled vocabulary is required, projects are advised to use a vocabulary that is already being used by their subject and domain communities. It is not recommended that projects attempt to create new subject classification vocabularies.

Keywords – May be selected from controlled vocabularies or may be free text.

Additional Tags – Tags are similar to keywords. They may be entered by the creator / publisher of a resource and by users of the resource and they are normally free text. Many applications such as flickr, SlideShare and YouTube support the use of tags.

Comments – Are usually generated by users of a resource and may describe how that resource has been used, in what context and whether it’s use was successful or otherwise.

Descriptions – In contrast to comments, descriptions are usually generated by the creator/ publisher of a resource and tend to be more authoritative. Descriptions may provide a wide range of additional information about a resource including information on how it may be used or repurposed.

It’s also useful for projects to be aware that once OERs are released they can easily become separated from their metadata descriptions, if this information is recorded in an associated file. Consequently projects are encouraged to consider embedding relevant descriptive information within the open educational resource where practicable. For further discussion of this approach see Open Educational resources, metadata and self description.

Delivery Platforms

Projects should deposit their content in JorumOpen and in at least one other openly accessible system or application with the ability to produce RSS and / or Atom feeds; for example an open institutional repository, an international or subject area open repository, an institutional website or blog, or a Web 2.0 service.

The RSS / ATOM feed should list and describe the resources produced by the project, and should itself be easy to find. Where a project produces a large number or resources it may not be practical to include them all in one single feed. In such cases it may be necessary to create several feeds in order to list all the resources. If a number of feeds are required to represent the whole collection, the discovery of the complete set of feeds should be facilitated. A number of approaches to enable this are possible, e.g. by creating an OPML file and using multiple instances of the element in the HTML header, or simply listing all feeds in a human readable web page.

There are many other approaches that projects may choose to investigate and use to facilitate resource discovery including search engine optimisation, site maps, OAI-PMH or APIs for remote search (SRU, OpenSearch, ad hoc RESTful search). CETIS will provide further guidance on these approaches in due course.

Projects will be expected to report to JISC on resource use so it is highly recommended that if the chosen delivery platform has tracking functionality this should be switched on and monitored.

For an overview of the wide range of delivery platforms used by the OER Pilot Programme projects may find it useful to refer to the UKOER Technology Overview

Content Standards

The OER 2 Programme is expected to generate a wide range of content types so mandating specific content standards is impractical. However projects should consider using appropriate standards for sharing complex objects e.g. IMS Content Packaging, IMS Common Cartridge and IMS QTI for assessment items.

What We Hope To Learn

We have learned a great deal from the technical choices and experiences of the OER Pilot Projects but we still have much to learn about how to describe and distribute open educational resources most effectively on the open web. Consequently we strongly encourage projects to share their comments, queries, successes and frustrations with CETIS and with other OER 2 projects. CETIS OER Programme Support Officer R. John Robertson will be undertaking informal technical review calls with all OER 2 projects over the course of the programme. Feel free to comment here, or contact John with comments, queries and suggestions.

Open e-Textbook Use Case

This open e-textbook usecase was produced as a contribution to the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 Study Period on e-Textbooks by Phil Barker, R. John Robertson and myself. We’d be interested to know if this is an area that others are interested and whether anyone has any comments.

Scope

A teacher wants to collate open educational resources to create an open e-textbook

Description

A teacher collates a range of open educational resources from different sources with different Creative Commons licences and creates an open e-textbook.

The source content may include assessment items, video, images, sound, text. This content may contain embedded licence information (e.g. in the exif or id3 file information for images and audio respectively), or licence information included as images or text in the content, or associated licence information in lmetadata records linked to or packaged with the content.

Level of participant(s) addressed

Applies to all participants.

Description or list of the technologies used

A wide range of technologies may be used. These include repositories, content management systems, web 2.0 tools, content-authoring systems, virtual learning environments, course management systems, search engines, licence embedding or attribution tools.

Scenario Sequence

  • Determine topic, curricula, textbook scope, learner requirements
  • Search for stuff
  • Find stuff
  • Evaluate stuff
  • Check licence
  • Select stuff
  • Assemble collection of stuff
  • Edit stuff
  • Format e-textbook
  • Create e-textbook
  • Disseminate e-textbook
  • Revise textbook

Primary Actor(s) and Role(s)

Teacher (content editor/ assembler)

End goal of activity

Students are provided with an open e-textbook tailored to their requirements by their teacher.

Trigger(s) / Pre-condition(s)

The teacher must be able to find sufficient clearly licensed open educational resources that meet their requirements

What issues or challenges have been encountered during the implementation and use of the e-Textbooks?

  • Content interoperability
  • Display of different media formats
  • Handling interactive content
  • Clear licensing
  • Licence compatibility
  • Maintaining granular licence information

Who is using what is described in this use case?

Widely used by learners, other teachers, and learning technologists.

Additional Information Relevant to Understanding the Use Case

A similar use case could be constructed for an e-textbook which did not use OER. However, the licensing implications and rights management implications would be very different.

Education institutions, the music industry and the church at #cetis10

Two interesting tangential conversations kicked off on Twitter this morning during Anya Kamanetz keynote at the CETIS Conference. One on the validity of comparing the challenges currently facing Higher Education to changes in the music industry and the other on the role of the church in founding education institutions and the effect of the Reformation on the church. So for those who missed these fascinating (yes really!) discussions on twitter, here they are again…

Comparison with the music industry

Anya made that point that although recording industry sales have slumped people are now spending more and more money on downloads and ticket sales to attend live performances. So although artists may receive less income from sales of recorded music they gain more income from live performances. Paul Walk of UKOLN felt comparing education to the music industry was unhelpful and David Kernohan argued about the validity of Anya’s assertion within the music industry itself. However Mike Ellis of Eduserv argued that this is indeed a reasonable model for comparison.

paulwalk Paul Walk
oh…. another comparison with the music industry :-(

dkernohan David Kernohan
musicians don’t mind about not selling music as they make money from live performance!! Not many musicians agree.

paulwalk Paul Walk
can we have a rule: no bogus comparisons to (mostly speculative) points about music industry business models?

m1ke_ellis Mike Ellis
@paulwalk don’t see it as that bogus – question is about openness, where the value is in the chain, how to cope

paulwalk Paul Walk
@m1ke_ellis music industry is pretty much passive entertainment. Hope HE hasn’t reached that sorry state yet…

m1ke_ellis Mike Ellis
@paulwalk you’re being too specific, surely? The point was surely not about the mode of use but the env in which the content lives

paulwalk Paul Walk
@m1ke_ellis I think the mode of use is crucial to figure out appropriate business models though

The Church, the Reformation and Educational Institutions

Early in her keynote Anya made the point that our current educational paradigm has changed little from the 11th century when educational institutions were founded by the church. I forget the details but somehow this kicked off a discussion on twitter about the impact of the reformation on the church and the role of the church in the formation of educational institutions.

KavuBob JohnRobertson
AK: “the cathedral of rationality”, sage on stage pointed to 1088ad illustration of origins; scarcity of knowledge

dkernohan David Kernohan
of course, churches *founded* universities to meet their needs as employers. (sound familiar?)

KavuBob JohnRobertson
@dkernohan yes, but (in Scotland post-reformation) there was an intent to educate whole populous->v. high literacy rates from 15thC

dkernohan David Kernohan
– comparing HE reform to the Reformation. Not sure the Reformation worked that well for the church, all told?

sheilmcn Sheila MacNeill
@dkernohan was thinking much the same thing

KavuBob JohnRobertson
Reformation just got hijacked to become the right to sit at home and watch football on Sundays #innerchurchhistoriancringe

philbarker Phil Barker
@dkernohan well, reformation certainly lead to *more* churches

KavuBob JohnRobertson
@dkernohan @sheilmcn i’d argue that- led to fresh thinking & renewed spirituality on both sides of the Ref split & more critical engagement

KavuBob JohnRobertson
@dkernohan @sheilmcn though perhaps no one has a neutral stance on that question :)

dkernohan David Kernohan
@KavuBob @sheilmcn aye, but also to several bloody wars, insurrections, torture…

sheilmcn Sheila MacNeill
@dkernohan @KavuBob I’m off to watch tv