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JISC Persistent Identifiers Meeting: Teaching and Learning Materials

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During the second half the JISC Persistent Identifiers Meeting participants split into five groups to discuss identifier requirements for the following resource types: research papers, research data, learning materials, cultural heritage, administrative information.

Phil Barker, Matt Jukes, Chris Awre and I composed the small group that discussed teaching and learning materials and these were our conclusions.

Constraints

Much of the discourse of the day did not sit comfortably with the teaching and learning domain. There was an implicit assumption that resources reside in repositories of some kind and are accompanied by quality-controlled metadata.

In reality teaching and learning materials are stored in many different places that can not be regarded as repositories “no matter how big the quotation marks”. These resources tend to be unmanaged and are not persistent.

Learning materials have relationships to many other entities e.g. the concept being learned, educational activities, course instance, individual people and social networks. These entities are poorly understood and modelled and are difficult to identify.

There is still a “craft” view of the process and practice of teaching and consequently there is some resistance to formalising the management of resources and activities.

There is no clearly identifiable lifecycle for teaching and learning materials and frequently no formal mechanism for their management.

Learning materials are “made public” but they are not “published” in the formal sense and metadata is often poor or non existent.

Use Cases

Composite objects – learning materials are frequently composite objects that may be ordered in one or more ways. Identifiers need to be able to identify the component parts, specify the order and potentially also to recompose and reorder them.

Open educational resources – once resources are released under an open license there are likely to be multiple different copies, formats and versions all over the place. How do you express relationship between these multiple entities?

Resource / course relationship – what is the relationship between learning materials and concepts such as educational activity or educational activity? It is notoriously difficult to assign an educational level to a learning resources but it is often much easier to assign an educational level to a course. Is it possible to extrapolate from the course to the resource?

Drivers

Institutions are beginning to recognise that learning materials are valuable for the core business of higher education, i.e. teaching and learning; and that it may be beneficial to manage them for quality and efficiency gains.

The OER movement may be a significant driver for futher work in this area.

What approaches are being used at present?

There is no clearly identifiable workflow behind the use of learning materials. The url of a learning resource tends to become its identifier and is dependant on where the resource is stored e.g. vle, repository, slideshare. Clearly however the url refers to a specific instantiation of a resource in a specific location.

There is very little in the way of established practice in terms of management and identification of teaching and learning materials. Everything in flux. In the terminology of the Repository Ecology report things are still a “mess.” A mess being:

“a complex issue that is not well formulated or defined”

Issues regarding sustainability and scalability

Do teaching and learning materials actually need to persist? There are usecases for persistence e.g. non-repudiation. Also teachers have to be confident that a resource will be there next time they need to use it.

Does it actually matter if resources are scattered all over the place with metadata that is poor to nonexistent?

And finally…
…if you know the answer to that last question please comment below!

JISC Persistent Identifiers Meeting: General Discussion

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Last week I attended a very productive and unusually amicable meeting on identifiers run by JISC and ably facilitated by Chris Awre. Besides their obvious critical relevance, my interest in identifiers goes back to an international symposium on the topic that CETIS hosted way back in 2003. That particular event generated a voluminous report and a series of usecases that I believe are still relevant today. The Digital Curation Centre ran a subsequent identifiers event in 2005 which presented various identifier technologies, a series of case studies and sparked considerable debate. I was interested to attend last week’s meeting to see how the debate regarding identifier requirements and technologies had moved forward given the significant developments of the intervening years, including Web 2.0, social networking, and OER.

And you know what? I think the debate has matured significantly. There was much greater acceptance that one size will never fit all, that there will always be multiple technologies to choose from, that choice of identifier scheme frequently depends on choice of technology platform (e.g. if you run DSpace you will use Handles) and that the technology is the easy part to solve. Previous identifier events tended to degenerate into holy wars but there was admirably little crusading evident last week. Although there was some flak flying around on the back channel.

I was slightly frustrated that, as usual, much of the debate focused implicitly on scholarly works and a particular form of “publication”. However there was much that was of relevance to the teaching and learning domain too. Here are some of the statement from the event that I would endorse:

Chris Awre, University of Hull

The emphasis on identifiers themselves can be distracting, it’s better to focus on the role and purpose of identifiers.

Identifying digital content at different phases of its lifecycle is key to the management of that content.

Identifiers need to have an associated meaning. An identifier is only an identifier if it is associated with a thing, otherwise it is just a string.

Identifiers need to disambiguate what they are identifying.

Henry Thompson, University of Edinburgh

Any naming schemes for sharing on the web are only as good as the services behind them.

Persistence of activity is critical, not persistence of technology. There are no purely technical solutions to vulnerabilities.

The only naming scheme of any technical sophistication is the Linean taxonomic scheme. (!)

Make it easy for ordinary users to mint good URIs.

Les Carr, University of Southampton

Persistence of URIs can be made difficult by institutions view of the web purely as a marketing tool.

Bas Cordewener, SURF Foundation

DOI is the only system that has a business model, but it can be expensive for repositories to implement.

Commercial influences should be kept at bay but we need to recognise that there are many different systems meeting different requirements.

Hugh Glaser, University of Southampton

Authority is established not bestowed.

Conclusion and JISC Interventions

The general conclusion of this event was that technology is not the problem, sufficient infrastructure already exists and one size will never fit all.

There was some debate regarding appropriate JISC interventions in this space but there was some consensus that JISC could usefully work with bodies such as UCISA, SCONUL and the Research Councils to provide advice on policy and business cases illustrating the appropriate use of identifiers. Case studies and demonstrators that situate solutions in context, articulate specific workflows and promote good practice in managing identifiers would also be of considerable value.

I’ll post a second piece shortly summarising the breakout group that focused specifically on identifier requirements within the teaching and learning domain.