Tag Archives: ukoer

One of the reasons I love the OER Programme…

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…is that it turns up stuff like this.

The VirtualDutch timeline of Anglo-Dutch relations. It’s built using MITs Simile software and it’s packed full of utterly fascinating detail. Amongst more familiar historical events it includes such gems as the following:

1120s: first appearance of name Fleming in Scotland,
post-1154: introduction of oxtail soup in England,
c. 1310: pirate John Crab moves to Aberdeen,
1457: first recording of golf in Scotland,
1576: calls for immigrants to be sent back in English parliament (plus ça change),
1585: cacao beans enter Europe for first time,
1587: first cultivation of sprouts in Europe,
1637: crash of tulipomania
1662: piracy legally forbidden
1673: first performance of The Dutch Lover
1685: first mention of Sauce hollandaise
1689: Dutch fire engines in England
1709: first raids on molly clubs in London
1712: frog as insult for the Dutch
1793: first description of Britain as treacherous
1824: Dutch translation of Waverley
1829: Mons Meg moved to Edinburgh

Brilliant! Of course this has completely derailed any “real” work I was going to do this afternoon ;)

OER, RSS and JorumOpen

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Many of you who have an interest in open education resources and the Academy / JISC OER Pilot Programme will already be following the development of JorumOpen. JorumOpen will enable users worldwide to search, browse and download open educational resources deposited by UK Further and Higher Education Institutions and licenced under Creative Commons licence. OER Projects already have access to the JorumOpen deposit tool and the service itself, which is based on a customised version of DSpace will be available to the wider community from the 19th of January 2010.

CETIS have been liaising closely with the Jorum team in order to support the OER Programme’s requirements. One early requirement that has emerged is the need for bulk deposit and a request from some projects that this may be partially fulfilled by ingest of RSS feeds. Sounds simple enough but as with all such requirements the devil is in the detail. And in this case some of the details include which version or RSS to support, how to encode and handle licence information, what metadata to include, how to process said metadata, what is a realistic size for feeds?

In order to kick off a discussion on these and other issues Gareth Waller, Jorum’s Technical Manager (and DSpace wrangler extraordinaire) has written a short white paper titled Issues surrounding feed deposit into institutional repositories which presents the pros and cons of using syndicated feed formats to facilitate deposit into repositories such as JorumOpen. Gareth presents a succinct overview of syndicated feed formats and raises a number of questions relating to: item identification, item updates and deletions, missing items, polling periods, feed formats, metadata formats, local metadata application profiles, handling licences and whether to store links or download resources.

JISC, CETIS and Jorum would like to move towards the development of an agreed RSS profile for open educational resources so we are actively seeking comments from the community on the kind of issues Gareth raises in his paper. If you would like to comment or raise additional issues please post your comments here or on the Jorum Community Bay. You can download Gareth’s paper here or from the Community Bay.

An interesting tracking case study…

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Earlier this afternoon my colleague Phil Barker led a fascinating Elluminate session exploring resource tracking issues for the JISC / HEA Open Educational Resources Programme. One approach to tracking Phil raised was the use of unique keys or tag combinations which are embedded in resources and then released into the wild. Googling for the unique key will then indicate where your resource has been reused and by whom, more or less.

Now I’m no authority on tracking technologies but this reminded me of a very interesting article I read in the Guardian today How Belle de Jour’s secret ally Googlewhacked the press. This explains how a blogger known as Derren used some astute guesswork and a unique key combination of two terms associated nowhere else on the web to monitor whether anyone else was coming close to guessing the identity of the anonymous call girl Belle de Jour.

At the OER Technical Roundtable at last week’s CETIS Conference one of the actions participants prioritiesd was case studies and examples of different approaches to tracking. I’m not entirely sure that the above is the kind of case study the projects had in mind but it’s a pretty good real world example never the less! Just thought I’d mention it….. ;-)

Phil’s slides from the Elluminate session are available on Slideshare and no doubt there will be blog posts to follow.

OER Programme Myths

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Most JISC Programmes accrue a fair amount of myth and misunderstanding during their lifetime however the OER Programme seems to me garnering myths faster than most. So we at CETIS bring you this handy OER Programme myth busting service!

The OER Programme will produce lots of free courseware.
The programme call states that projects should release:

“…the equivalent of one complete undergraduate course worth of materials (360 credits)…”

It’s likely that the programme will release some “courseware” i.e. complete online courses. However in reality we expect a disparate range of many types of resources from a wide range of subjects and domains.

Open educational resources are just for distance learning.
Resources produced by this programme may be used for distance learning but it is probable that a large proportion will originally have been designed for blended teaching and learning.

The OER Programme will produce lots of free content for students.
A significant portion of the resources released are likely to be aimed at students but some my also be designed for use by staff.

This is just another programme about reusable learning objects.
Hopefully OER programme resources will be reusable, some of them may even be learning objects (See Courseware myth above) however the OER Programme is also attempting to change

“institutional policies and processes, with the aim of making open resources release an expected part of the educational resources creation cycle.”

It’s TLTP all over again.
Hopefully not!

It’s just about copying the OU and MIT.
Both OU and MIT are pioneers in the field of OER and we can learn a lot from their experiences however they have their own unique business models and workflows that are unlikely to be immediately transferable to other institutions. See also Business Models myth below.

It’s not sustainable.
Allocating this degree of funding to OER on an annual basis is unlikely to be sustainable however projects have been specifically asked to:

“demonstrate a long term commitment to the release of OER resources. Projects will work towards the sustainability of long term open resources release via the adoption of appropriate business models to support this. Supporting actions should include modifications to institutional policies and processes, with the aim of making open resources release an expected part of the educational resources creation cycle.”

No thought has been given to business models.
See above. The OER Programme call specifically states:

“Bidders should outline their proposed business model for the sustained release of learning resources from the institution, individual or consortium. This call does not mandate a specific business model, but suggests that bidders refer to a report commissioned by JISC from Intrallect, entitled ‘Good Intentions’ .”

It’s a waste of money.
This is a pilot programme. Whether the OER Programme is successful or not in achieving its primary aims and objectives this should be a learning experience for JISC, HEFCE and the Academy. As long as the OER Programme is appropriately evaluated and lessons are learned that inform future decisions the OER Progamme will not be a waste of money.

The OER Programme will transform HE beyond recognition.
Erm ….probably not in the short term. However we hope that the programme will act as a catalyst for institutional and sectoral change in the longer term (see Reusable Learning Objects myth above)

Anyone, anywhere in the world, will be able to freely use and re-purpose the OER Programme resources.
Sounds incredible but yes, this one is actually true!

OER Programme Technical Requirements

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Following the experimental nature of the HEFCE / Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources call JISC are adopting a somewhat experimental approach to technical infrastructure for this programme. Although the ultimate aim of the OER Programme is to change process and practice at the institutional level the catalyst for making this happen is opening access to educational resources. Or in other words, getting content out onto the open web.

Metadata

Although JISC will provide projects with technical advice and guidelines the OER Programme will not mandate the use of one single platform to disseminate resources and one single metadata application profile to describe content. However projects will 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 Programme will only mandate the following “metadata”:

  • Programme tag ukoer
  • Title
  • Author / owner / contributor (from user profile)
  • Date
  • URL
  • Technical info – file format, name & size

The first two will have to be created manually but projects are strongly encouraged to use platforms and systems that can generate or accommodate the rest.

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

  • Language information
  • Subject classifications
  • Keywords
  • Tags
  • Comments
  • Descriptions

Delivery Platforms

Projects are free to use any system or application as long as it is capable of delivering content freely on the open web. However all projects must also deposit their content in JorumOpen. In addition projects should use platforms that are capable of generating RSS/Atom feeds, particularly for collections of resources e.g. YouTube channels. Although this programme is not about technical development projects are encouraged to make the most of the functionality provided by their chosen delivery platforms.

Content Standards

The OER 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. OAI ORE may also be of value although I’m not aware of any previous implementations focused specifically on teaching and learning materials, please correct me if I’m wrong however!

What We Hope To Learn

As this is a pilot programme there are many areas where we are seeking to learn more about approaches are likely to be beneficial to the community. These include:

  • Improving institutional and individual workflows for managing content
  • Limitations and benefits of different file formats for OERs
  • Limitations and benefits of different platforms for OER sharing
  • Search engine optimisation and resource discovery mechanisms such as bookmarking and tagging
  • Persistent identifiers and version-handling for OERs. See Phil Barker’s excellent recent post on this particularly thorny topic.
  • How to track usage and impact of OERs

The OER Programme hopes to encourage projects to share their successes, failures, ideas, requirements, opportunities and good practices, and above all to be bold, innovative and experimental!

This post is based on a presentation written and presented by Amber Thomas of JISC and I at the recent HEFCE / Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources Community Briefing day. The original presentation is available from the JISC IE Repository at http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/280/

Open Educational Resources Programme Briefing Day

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A rather belated summary of last week’s HEFCE / Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources Community Briefing* meeting. This meeting pretty much did what it said on the tin – it provided the community with additional information on the OER Programme call and an opportunity to put questions to JISC and HEA representatives.

Malcolm Read and of the JISC and David Sadler of the Academy opened the meeting with a general introduction to the aims and objectives of the call – to link together a corpus of open educational resources at national level and to promote cultural change at institutional level.

David Kernohan then went on to discuss the pilot programme in a little more detail before introducing the JISC and Academy representatives with responsibility for each of the three programme strands:

  • Subject strand – David Sadler and Joanne Masterson, Academy
  • Institutional Strand – Heather Williamson, JISC
  • Individual Strand – Sharon Waller & Ellie Spilman, Academy

David stressed the ground breaking nature of this pilot project which, if it’s successful, will help to increase the range and quality of educational resources available in the public domain, facilitate re-use, build capacity and expertise across the sector adn act as a catalyst for institutional change. All projects are encouraged to include a range of content and to attempt to embed the practice of opening access to educational resources within their institutions beyond funded phase of the programme. Sustainability is key.

Next it was over to Amber Thomas to outline the technical requirements of the programme, which I’ll cover in a separate post, followed by an excellent presentation from Liam Earney of the CASPER Project on the realities of addressing legal considerations based on the experiences of the RePRODUCE Programme. Liam stressed that “open” means the ability to download and modify resources, not just to read them, but added that many institutions have contradictory policies on what can be done with educational materials. The main lesson projects must learn is to allow lots and lots of time for rights clearance and to allocate sufficient resources and budget to this task.

Unsurprisingly Liam’s presentation on legal issues set the tone for much of the following discussion with many of the questions relating to the practicalities of rights clearance across project consortia. Many of the other questions focused on the logistics of constructing bids, the practicalities of putting together consortia agreements, and what constitutes match funding. A somewhat opportunistic question that surfaced more than once was given that educational content represents a valuable asset from the institutional perspective can JISC funding be used to effectively buy out this content? Malcolm Read quickly pointed out that HEFCE are not offering money to “buy” content and that the commitment they are looking for from institutions is sustainability.

For a fuller record of the day’s discussions, and in particular the question and answer session see http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23oerday However to my utter, utter, shame I used the programme tag #ukoer rather than the briefing day tag #oerday for the earlier part of the day so see also http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ukoer

Presentations from the day are available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/oer/briefingday.aspx

* I was told that JISC no longer use the term town meeting but no one was able to tell me why!