Category Archives: oer

OER 2 Technical Requirements

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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

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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.

The #cetis10 Locate, Collate and Aggregate extravaganza

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Next week Phil, John and I will be running a session at the JISC CETIS conference with the snappy title Locate Collate and Aggregate. The aim of this session is to explore innovative technical approaches related to, but not confined to, the JISC / HEA OER 2 Programme which are applicable to finding, using and managing content for teaching and learning, including:

  • Building collections of OERs.
  • Drawing together information about learning resources
  • Building rich descriptions from disparate sources of information

We’ve got an eclectic bunch of contributors lined up including David Kay, Sero; Vic Lyte, MIMAS; James Burke, deBurca; Chris Taylor, oErbital; Rob Pearce, Engineering a Lo-Carbon Future; Pierre Far, OCW Search; Pat Lockley, Xpert and some bloke called Phil Barker. Our contributors will be presenting and leading short discussions on a diverse range of topics including cross-silo semantic search opportunities, using mainstream and niche search engines to discover OERs and automatic selection of resources for a UKOER collection.

We’ve also been promised the world premiere of the long awaited dogme masterpiece The Plight of Metadata by acclaimed repository manager and film maker Pat Lockley. Mr Lockley assures us that the film will be “awesome, despite the limited CGI budget.”

So who should attend this Locate, Collate and Aggregate extravaganza? Anyone interested in open content, innovative use and management of teaching and learning resources, techies, geeks, rss wranglers, data miners and even the odd repository manager.

And what do we want? We want ideas! Lots of them! We want ideas, comments and input to other peoples ideas. We’re also looking for ideas for JISC CETIS technical mini-projects we can potentially take forward to run in parallel with the OER 2 Programme.

We’re not quite sure what the outputs of this session will be but we’re aiming to go beyond the boundaries of JISC programmes and domain focussed initiatives and we’re hoping for cross pollination and propagation of innovation throughout the nation.

cetiswmd Activities

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Phil has already blogged a summary of last week’s memorably tagged What Metadata or cetiswmd meeting. During the latter part of the meeting we split up to discuss practical tasks and projects that the community could undertake with support from CETIS and JISC to explore the kind of issues that were raised at the meeting. We agreed to draft a rough outline of some of these potential activities and then feed them back to the community for comment and discussion. So if you have any thoughts or suggestions please let us know. CETIS are proposing to set up a task group or working group of some kind to develop this work and to provide a forum to explore technical issues relating to the resource description, management and discovery in the context of open educational resources.

I helped to facilitate the breakout group that focused on what we might be able to achieve by looking at existing metadata collections. Here’s an outline of the activity what we discussed.

Textual Analysis of Metadata Records

A large number of existing collections of metadata records were identified by participants including NDLR, JorumOpen, OU openlearn, US data.gov collections, all of which could be analysed to ascertain which fields are used most widely and how they are described. Clearly this metadata exists in a wide range of heterogeneous formats so the task is not as simple as comparing like with like. The “traditional” way to compare different metadata schema and records is through the use of cross-walks. However developing cross walks is a non-trivial task that in itself requires considerable time and resource.

An alternative approach was put forward by ADL’s Dan Rehak who suggested treating the metadata collections as text, stripping out fields and formatting and running the raw data through a semantic analysis tool such as Open Calais. Open Calais uses natural language processing, machine learning and other methods to analyse documents and find the entities within them. Calais claim to go “well beyond classic entity identification and return the facts and events hidden within your text as well.”

Applying data mining and semantic analysis techniques to a large corpus of educational metadata records would be an interesting exercise in itself but until we attempt such an analysis it’s hard to speculate what it might be possible to achieve with the output data. It would certainly be valuable to compare frequently occurring terms and relationships with an analysis of search web logs to see if the metadata records are actually describing the characteristics that users are searching for.

There was general agreement amongst participants that this would be an interesting and innovative project. Participants felt it would be advisable to start small with a comparison of two or three metadata collections, possibly those of JorumOpen, Xpert and the OU Openlearn before taking this forward further.

One thing I am slightly unsure about regarding this method is that Open Calais identifies the relationship between words but once we strip out the metadata encoding of our sample records this information will be lost. I don’t know enough about how these semantic analysis tools work to know whether this is a problem or if they are clever enough for this not to be an issue. I suppose the only way we’ll find out if the results are sensible or useful is to give it a try!

I’d also be very interested to hear how this approach compares with work being undertaken on a much larger scale by the Digging into Data Challenge projects and Mimas’ Bringing Meaning into Search initiative.

Other Activities

Phil has already summarised the other possible tasks and activities put forward by the other breakout groups which include:

  • Establishing a common format for sharing search logs.
  • Identify which fields are used on advanced forms and how many people use advanced search facilities.
  • Analysis of the relative proportion of users who search and browse for resources and how many people click onwards from the initial resources.
  • Further development of the search questionnaire used by David Davies. If sufficient responses could be gathered to the same questions this would facilitate meta analysis of the results.
  • Work with communities around specific repositories and find out what works and doesn’t work across individual platforms and installations.
  • Create a research question inventory on the CETIS wiki and invite people to put forward ideas.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions on any of the above ideas we’d love to hear from you!

Time travelling at RepoFringe10

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Last week I attended the Repository Fringe in Edinburgh. Unsurprisingly openness was one of the key themes of this year’s event and Tony Hirst kicked off with a typically inspiring keynote on content liberation. Tony suggested that although repositories play an important role in preserving institutional memory they are less good at presenting content as data. In addition, many document formats, such as pdf, lock data within them preventing other people from representing that data in useful and interesting ways. Charts and graphs presented as images are dead data. Open document formats help to liberate content and get the data flowing. And once data has been opened up it can be combined and reconnected in new and interesting ways. In addition to open data open queries enable us to see the assumptions that are embedded in queries and how results and reports have been generated. Tony went on the demonstrate some powerful information processing tools, based on Mendeley, yahoo pipes, tic tocs, YQL and rss that require little or no coding.

Tony also pointed out that most document stores have a structure comprised of how documents relate to each other, but we are not good at making use of that structure. He then demonstrated how Gephi can be used to visualise structures and data clusters across multiple data stores. This presents new ways of navigating the content and can be used to provide topic or facet based browsing on the cheap. Earlier this week Tony demonstrated exactly this kind of data visualisation by using Gephi, yahoo pipes and google custom search to analyse altc-2010 twitter streams.

Tony concluded by reinforcing the importance of Ranganathan’s five laws of library science:

  • First law: Books are for use
  • Second Law: Every reader his or her book
  • Third Law: Every book its reader
  • Fourth Law: Save the time of the reader
  • Fifth Law: The library is a growing organism

I am quite sure that I was the only person in the audience that had never come across these laws before but it seems they could apply equally usefully to educational resources, open or otherwise.

Herbert Van de Sompel presented another new and interesting way to access data online with Memento: Timetravel for the Web. Resources on the web change continually over time and Memento uses the http protocol to navigate these resources through time by linking current resources and archived resources. Memento used a “timegate” to redirect uri’s to a time specific version of a web page. The Memento tool suite includes the MementoFox plug-in that allows you to set a datetime to navigate the Web with. For MediaWiki servers there is the Memento plug-in that supports responding to datetime content negotiation requests issued by clients and for Wayback Archives a plugin that adds Memento Timegate and TimeBundle support. I’m a big fan of the internet archives and Memento looks like it could be an invaluable tool for browsing old web resources. Before Herbert had finished his presentation a large number of Fringe delegates had installed the MementoFox plug in and were enthusiastically browsing back backwards and forwards* in time. This despite that fact that, as Herbert informed us, the first journal paper on Memento had been rejected with the comment along the lines of “who would be interested in looking at old websites” ;)

Time travel of a different kind was in evidence during a round table discussion on teaching and learning resources which spiralled back in time into “what’s the definition of a learning object” territory. It became apparent that learning objects were being conflated with the specific standards often used to described and package them, specifically IEEE LOM and IMS Content Packaging. Open educational resources were put forward as a more useful and viable alternative to learning objects. I’m inclined to think that both learning objects and open educational resources can take any form and that the main distinction between the two is the presence of an open license for the latter. However the round table did give us an opportunity to talk to Patrick Sweeney of the University of Southampton about their repository usage stats which could potentially reveal some very useful information about how users search for teaching and learning resources. This is exactly the kind of data we hope to explore at the forthcoming CETIS What metadata is really useful? or CETISWMD event in October.

We also had the opportunity for another interesting conversation with Herbert Van de Sompel regarding the use of OAI ORE to aggregate open educational resources. This is something I’ve been curious about for a while, as there has been little exploration of the use of ORE in the context of educational materials. It seems to me that the resources produced by the JISC HEA OER Programmes, which are scattered all over the web and accompanied by highly variable metadata would provide an interesting usecase for OAI ORE. Herbert was able to point us towards one promising example of OAI ORE implementation in an educational context. Unlocking the Archive is a project based at the Jewish Women’s Archive which has developed an OAI-ORE presentation tool. As far as I can gather the aim of the project as to produce a powerpoint like web based tool which will allow users to aggregate any kind of content housed by the archive and view it using any standard web browser. The open source code developed by the project is available from drupal.org. We haven’t had an opportunity to investigate this project further but it certainly sounds like it’s worthy of further exploration in the context of the new OER2 Programme.

Of course the real high point of the entire two day event was Phil Baker’s pecha kucha (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide) presentation “An open and closed case for educational resources.” I may be biased, but I thought it was an excellent presentation and I was astonished that Phil could talk that fast! You can enjoy a video of the fast version of Phil’s session here and a rather more leisurely write up of the same on his blog.

All in all I found RepoFringe10 a very interesting and thought provoking event. I went to Repository Fringe last year and came away rather frustrated as I found that the event was trying so hard not to be a conference that the format actually got in the way of what could have been an opportunity for really interesting discussion. Not so this year, the event had a good balance of presentations, roundtable discussions, some very slick pecha kucha sessions and there was plenty of opportunity for networking and discussion. Well done guys!

* Okay you can’t really browse forward in time, I made that bit up ;)

CETIS OER Technical Support Project Final Report

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The CETIS OER Technical Support Project was funded by JISC from August 2009 – April 2010 to provide support to the JISC HEA Open Educational Resources Pilot Programme. The project’s Final Report is now available to download from the Publications page of the CETIS website.

Support provided to the programme included advising JISC on technical direction, setting technical guidelines for the programme, reviewing and advising on projects’ technical choices and liaising with other programme support elements, particularly JourmOpen. The project conducted technical review calls with all 29 projects and recorded the outcome of these interviews using the CETIS PROD directory. Over the duration of the programme CETIS facilitated a number of programme support events including a technical round table at the annual CETIS conference, and two 2nd Tuesday online seminars in addition to participating in all three JISC programme level events.

The outputs of the CETIS Technical Support Project have been synthesised and published in a series of posts on the CETIS blogs and pages on the CETIS wiki. These outputs were also disseminated through more formal channels including position papers, journal papers and presentations at a number of national and international conferences. The support project surfaced a number of technical issues worthy of further investigation these include; the use of RSS for depositing resources into repositories, technical approaches to aggregating resources and methods of tracking resources. These issues are now being taken forward through an additionally funded technical project.

Then and Now

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A position paper for the ADL Repositories and Registries Summit by Lorna M. Campbell, Phil Barker and R. John Robertson

Between 2002 and 2010 the UK Joint information Systems Committee (JISC)1 funded a wide range of development programmes with the aim of improving access within the UK Further and Higher Education (F/HE) sector to content produced by F/HE institutions and to establish policies and technical infrastructure to facilitate its discovery and use. The Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS)2 is a JISC innovation support centre that provides technical and strategic support and guidance to the JISC development programmes and F/HE sector. CETIS contributed to scoping the technical requirements of the programmes summarised here.

Programmes such as Exchange for Leaning (X4L, 2002 – 2006)3 focused on the creation of reusable learning resources and tools to facilitate their production and management while Re-purposing and Re-use of Digital University-level Content4 (RePRODUCE, 2008 – 2009) aimed to encourage the re-use of high quality externally produced materials and to facilitate the transfer of learning content between institutions. At the same time the Digital Repositories5 (2005 – 2007) and Repositories Preservation Programmes6 (2006 – 2009) focused on establishing technical infrastructure within institutions and across the sector.

These programmes were informed by a strategic and technical vision which was expressed through initiatives including the e-Learning Framework7, the e-Framework8, the Information Environment Technical Architecture9 and the Digital Repositories Roadmap10. The IE Architecture for example sought to “specify a set of standards and protocols intended to support the development and delivery of an integrated set of networked services that allowed the end-user to discover, access, use and publish digital and physical resources as part of their learning and research activities.”

These programmes and initiatives have met with varying degrees of success across the different sectors of the UK F/HE community. The rapid growth in the number of open access institutional repositories of scholarly works including both journal papers and e-theses may be attributed directly to the impact of JISC funding and policy. The number of open access institutional repositories has approximately doubled since 2007 to 17211 currently . Arguably there has been less success supporting and facilitating access to teaching and learning materials. Although the number of repositories of teaching and learning materials is growing slowly, few institutions have policies for managing these resources. Indeed one of the final conclusions of the Repositories and Preservation Programme Advisory Group, which advised the JISC repositories programmes, was that teaching and learning resources have not been served well by the debate about institutional repositories seeking to cover both open access to research outputs and management of teaching and learning materials as the issues relating to their use and management are fundamentally different12. The late Rachel Heery also commented that greater value may be derived from programmes that focus more on achieving strategic objectives (e.g. improving access to resources) and less on a specific technology to meet these objectives (e.g. repositories). In addition the findings of the RePRODUCE Programme13 suggested that projects had significantly underestimated the difficulty of finding high quality teaching and learning materials that were suitable for copyright clearance and reuse.

Rather than a radical shift in policy these conclusions should be regarded as reflecting a gradual development in policy, licensing and technology right across the web. This includes the advent of web 2.0, the appearance of media specific dissemination platforms such as slideshare, youtube, flickr, iTunesU, interaction through RESTful APIs, OpenID, OAuth and other web-wide technologies, increasing acceptance of Creative Commons licenses and the rise of the OER movement. As a result there has been a movement away from developing centralised education specific tools services and towards the integration of institutional systems with applications and services scattered across the web. Furthermore there has been growing awareness of the importance of the web itself as a technical architecture as opposed to a simple interface or delivery platform.

These developments are reflected in current JISC development programmes where the priority is less on using a particular technology (e.g. repositories) or implementing a particular standard but rather to get useful, useable content out to the UK F/HE community and beyond by what ever means possible. The JISC Higher Education Academy Open Educational Resources Pilot Programme14 (OER, 2009 – 2010) is a case in point. To illustrate how both strategic policy and technology have developed it is interesting to compare and contrast the 2002 X4L Programme and the current OER Pilot Programme

X4L Programme 2002 – 2006

The X4L programme aimed to explore the re-purposing of existing content suitable for use in learning. Part of this activity was to explore the process of integrating interoperable learning objects with VLEs. A small number of tools projects were funded to facilitate this task: an assessment management system (TOIA), a content packaging tool (Reload) and a learning object repository (Jorum). Projects were given a strong steer to use interoperability standards such as IMS QTI, IMS Content Packaging, ADL SCORM and IEEE LOM. A mandatory application profile of the IEEE LOM was developed for the programme and formal subject classification vocabularies identified including JACS and Dewey. Projects were strongly recommended to deposit their content in the Jorum repository and institutions were required to sign formal licence agreements before doing so. Access to content deposited content in Jorum was restricted to UK F/HE institutions only.

OER Pilot Programme 2009 – 2010

The aim of the OER Pilot Programme is to make a significant volume of existing teaching and learning resources freely available online and licensed in such a way to enable them to be reused worldwide. Projects may release any kind of content in any format and although projects are encouraged to use open standards where applicable proprietary formats are also acceptable. CETIS advised projects on the type of information they should record about their resources but not how to go about recording it. There is no programme specific metadata application profile and no formal metadata standard or vocabularies have been recommended. The only mandatory metadata that projects were directed to record was the programme tag #ukoer. Projects were given free rein to use any dissemination platform they chose provided that the content is freely available and under an open licence. In addition, projects must also represent their resources in JorumOpen either by linking or through direct deposit. All resources represented in JorumOpen are freely available worldwide and released under Creative Commons licences.

During the course of the OER Pilot Programme CETIS have interviewed all 29 projects to record their technical choices and the issues that have surfaced. This information has been recorded in the CETIS PROD15 system and has been synthesised in a series of blog posts16. CETIS is also undertaking additional exploratory work to investigate different methods of aggregating and tracking resources produced by the OER Programme. The contrast between the two programmes is marked and the success or otherwise of the technical approach adopted by the OER Pilot Programme remains to be seen. The programme concludes in April 2010 and a formal programme level synthesis and evaluation is already underway.

References
1. Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, CETIS, http://www.cetis.org.uk
2. Exchange for Learning Programme, X4L, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/x4l.aspx
3. Re-purposing and Re-use of Digital University-level Content Programme, RePRODUCE, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningcapital/reproduce.aspx
4. Digital Repositories Programme, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitalrepositories2005.aspx
5. Repositories Preservation Programmes http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres.aspx
6. E-Learning Framework, http://www.elframework.org/
7. E-Framework, http://www.e-framework.org/
8. JISC Information Environment Technical Architecture http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/informationenvironment/iearchitecture.aspx
9. Digital Repositories Roadmap, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/informationenvironment/reproadmaprev.aspx
10. The Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR, http://www.opendoar.org/
11.Exclude Teaching and Learning Materials from the Open Access Repositories Debate. Discuss, http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/lmc/2008/10/27/exclude-teaching-and-learning-materials-from-the-open-access-repositories-debate-discuss/
12. RePRODUCE Programme Summary Report, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elreproduce/jisc_programme_summary_report_reproduce.doc
13. JISC Academy Open Educational Resources Pilot Progamme, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer.aspx
14. CETIS PROD, monitoring projects, software and standards, http://prod.cetis.org.uk/query.php?theme=UKOER
15. John’s JISC CETIS Blog, http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/johnr/category/ukoer/
16. OER Synthesis and Evaluation Project, http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/

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!

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.