What platforms are UKOER 2 projects using to host and manage their content? What types of content are they releasing? This is a post in the UKOER 2 technical synthesis series.

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

OER types:

Projects in UKOER 2 have released resources at various levels of granularity from individual images  and documents through to whole courses.

A variety of mime types are used by the projects. These include: doc, pdf, spss, wiki, ppt, prezi, wmv, html5, javascript, wav, MS Office, DOM, RTF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, AVI, MPEG, DivX, QuickTime, MP3, mp4, HTML, zip, xml, qti, swf, flv.

Platform overview:

Overview of platforms in use in the UKOER 2 programme

As can be seen this graph is somewhat misleading as it aggregates the total use of web 2.0 tools giving a very large result in relation to other options, however no projects have solely used externally hosted web 2.0 platforms and  the following detailed graph shows a more useful view. The graph is much more useful in noting the comparative use of other platforms.

NB usage figures are not mutually exclusive – a good number of projects used multiple platforms

Detailed view:

Content management platforms in use in the UKOER 2 programme

• NB usage figures are not mutually exclusive – a good number of projects used multiple platforms
• Repository = repository software  platform, rather than use of another platform as a repository
• There is an strong use of SlideShare and YouTube but relatively little use of iTunes.
• There’s a diverse number of CMS used to manage content, but in aggregate their use parallels the use of repositories.
• ALTO and Tiger added a CMS layer on top of a repository to improve their user interface.
• There’s a notable interest in wordpress (especially in Strand C) as a lightweight platform to collect and aggregate OER.
• One aspect of this interest in WordPress is for SEO reasons (Scooter)
• The edshare variant of eprints is the most popular repository- interestingly a number of projects have chosen to use hosted versions of edShare. One noted key influence in this choice is the success of the UKOER 1 Humbox project in community development – at least one project (DHOER) is depositing content into Humbox.
• Plugins for wordpress to support better metadata and licensing  are being explored and developed by Triton, DelOREs, and CSAPOER [tbc])