The Technical Requirements for the JISC / HEA OER 3 Programme remain unchanged from those established for UKOER 2. These requirements can be referred to here: OER 2 Technical Requirements. However, many projects now have considerable experience and we would anticipate that they would engage with some of the technical challenges currently ongoing in the resource sharing and description domains.

We still don’t mandate content standards, however given the number of projects in this phase that are releasing ebooks we would anticipate seeing a number of projects using ePub. We would be interested in:

1. Your experiences of putting dynamic content into ePub format (e.g. animations, videos)
2. Your investigations of workflows to create/ publish multiple ebook formats at once, and of content management systems that support this.

Points to reflect on:

• Resources should be self described, i.e. should have something like a title page (at the front) or credits page (at the back) that clearly state information such as author, origin, licence, title. For some purposes (e.g. search engine optimisation) this is preferable to encoded metadata hidden away in the file (e.g. EXIF metadata emdedded in an image) or as a detached record on a repository page or separate XML file. Note such a human readable title or credits page could be marked up as machine-readable metadata using RDFa/ microformats/ microdata see schema.org.
• Feeds. We also encourage projects to disseminate metadata through, e.g. RSS, ATOM or OAI-PMH. “The RSS / ATOM feed should list and describe the resources produced by the project, and should itself be easy to find.“ It would be useful to provide descriptions of all the OERs released by a project in this way, not just the most recent. Projects should consider how this can be achieved even if they release large numbers of OERs.
• For auditing and showcasing reasons it is really useful to be able to identify the resources that have been released through the projects in this programme. The required project tag is an element in this, but platforms that allow the creation of collections can also be used.
• Activity data and paradata. Projects should consider what ‘secondary’ information they have access to about the use of / or interest in their resources, and how they can capture and share such information.
• Tracking OER use and reuse. We don’t understand why projects aren’t worrying more about this.