Category Archives: oer

CETIS Conference: OER Technical Roundtable

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Only four days to go until the CETIS Conference and we’re already starting to draw up a list of issues to explore at the OER Technical Roundtable. The aim of this session is to give OER Projects techies and other interested folk an opportunity to come together to discuss technical issues that they have anticipated, encountered and possibly even resolved.

Issues we expect to turn up include:

  • Metadata, resource description and tagging.
  • Version control – Does it really matter? If so, what can be done about it?
  • Tracking – What? How? Why?
  • Working with different repositories.
  • Aggregating and linking resources distributed across multiple services and applications.
  • Using and managing feeds.
  • Bulk upload.
  • Encoding license information.

The Steeple Project have already raised some additional issues:

  • Subject classification – mapping between proprietary subject classification codes and JACS.
  • Approaches to describing “levels of difficulty” and “intended use”.
  • Consistent CC license description in audio, video and feed metadata.

We want to know what works for you and what doesn’t? What technical problems have you banging your head on the desk in frustration? Or have you discovered an elegant technical solution to a thorny problem that you’re willing to share?

Members of JISC, CETIS and other community experts will be on hand to offer advice and explore potential solutions.

We would welcome more suggestions of issues you’ve encountered so please add your comments here and we’ll add these to the list of topics to discuss.

Conference tag #cetis09
Session tag #cetis09oer

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!

Metadata Guidelines for the OER Programme

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Following the HEFCE / JISC / Academy OER Programme Community Briefing day at the end of January I blogged about the programme’s technical and metadata requirements. The successful OER projects haven’t even been announced yet and we’re already receiving enquiries asking for clarification on the resource description requirements briefly outlined.

In line with the innovative pilot nature of the OER Programme JISC have decided to take a new approach to metadata. Rather than mandating a formal application profile based on a single open standard we are instead identifying the type of information that projects must record for the resources they create without mandating how this should be done. Hopefully this will give projects considerably greater flexibility as to how they describe their resources and ultimately we hope that this will result in richer descriptions that are of value to end users. However we do recognise that this freer approach is likely to have some impact on interoperability. We hope to learn a lot from this pilot regarding what works and what doesn’t and where the balance between formal and informal metadata lies.

We can’t provide definitive answers to all the questions that are likely to arise but here are some draft guidelines as a starting point.

Mandatory Metadata

All mandated metadata relates to the resource being described and not to the description of the resource.

Programme tag ukoer
All resources produced as a result of the HEFCE/Academy/JISC OER Programme must be tagged ukoer. Many applications provide a mechanism for adding such tags, however we need to consider how this tag may also be accommodated within LOM and DC metadata.

Title
The title of the resource being described.

Author / owner / contributor (from user profile)
Most systems, be they 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. This is not as straightforward as it sounds as there are likely to be multiple copies of resources in multiple locations.

Technical Information
Includes file format, file size and other relevant information. Many applications will generate this information automatically.

Recommended Metadata

Language
The language of the resource.

Subject classifications
JISC will not mandate the use of specific subject classifications for the OER Programme. However projects are recommended to use subject classifications that are already being used by their subject and domain communities. JACS is one such example of a subject classification that is widely used in the UK F/HE community. It is not recommended that projects attempt to create new subject classification vocabularies. Further guidance on working with vocabularies will be provided.

Keywords
May be selected from controlled vocabularies or may be free text.

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.

Description
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.

These guidelines are likely to change and develop as the OER Programme progresses and we learn more about issues specifically relating to the description of open educational resources in distributed environments. If you have any comments on these draft guidelines please feel free to comment here or va the CETIS Metadata SIG list at cetis-metadata@jiscmail.ac.uk.

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!

The creative potential of openness

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“Our assumption is that we need high degrees of control. We’re frightened by openness and we tend to underestimate the amount of creative potential it can unlock.”

This assertion was made on the Radio 4 In Business programme by James Boyle, Professor of Law at Duke University, North Carolina and Chair of the Creative Commons Board. The theme of this week’s edition, titled Free for All, was open business models and copyright regimes. The programme, which also includes an extensive interview with Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame, provided a good general overview in non-technical terms to many of the key issues relating to business models based on open source software and the provision of “free” content and services. Details of the programme are available from the In Business home page and the podcast can be downloaded here.

Open world

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During the recent meeting of the JISC eLearning Team, the JISC eLearning Consultants and the CETIS Management Team discussion inevitably turned, as it does, to the forthcoming JISC OER call and the issue of open educational resources more generally. At one stage someone began a question with:

So in this open world…

Open World happens to be the title of the collected poems of one of my favourite writers Kenneth White founder of the Institute of Geopoetics. Openness is a theme that recurs throughout his work.

A High Blue Day in Scalpay

This is the summit of contemplation
and no art can touch it
blue, so blue, the far out archipelago
and the sea shimmering, shimmering
no art can touch it, the mind can only
try to become attuned to it
to become quiet, and space itself out, to
become open and still, unworlded
knowing itself in the diamond country, in
the ultimate unlettered light.

And here is a high blue day on Scalpay (actually this is taken from Carriegreich on the other side of Kyles Scalpay.)

End of the jetty

Challenges of managing teaching and learning resources

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Learning resources have not been served well by the Open Access Institutional Repositories debate, a problem that has been recognised and discussed by the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group however there are still significant issues that need to be address. This was one of the topics discussed at a recent meeting of the JISC eLearning Team, the JISC eLearning Consultants and the CETIS Management Team. Rather than focusing on a single specific technology, i.e. repositories, we should attempt to address the wider aim i.e. improved learning resource management across the sector. Repositories will have a role to play in achieving this aim, as will other technologies and solutions. The ultimate goals should be to improve teaching and learning practice.

In order to address the issue of resource management effectively we need to understand more about current working practices. It’s also important to identify institutional drivers for prioritising resource management. The JISC OER Programme is likely to have considerable impact in this area and the centrifugal force of this initiative is already apparent. There are many “Big Issues” to resolve in terms of improving the management of and opening access to educational resources. These include issues relating to policy e.g. what is the relationship between institutions, teachers, learners and the resources they create; practice e.g. how do teachers and learners create, use and interact with resources on a daily basis; and technology e.g. how can we manage large distributed collections of open educational resources, tracking, identifiers, rich metadata etc.

These are big challenges however there areas where discrete interventions could have a significant impact:

  • A landscape study of academics working practices and how they interact with educational content.
  • Widget and toolbar technologies along the lines of SWORD and FeedForward. Developing a range of tailored tools and widgets to help facilitate content creation and management workflows.
  • Search engine optimisation for teaching and learning materials.
  • Technologies to draw together distributed rich metadata to add value to existing content. E.g. drawing together comments and recommendations from applications such as flickr, youtube delicious etc.
  • Tracking technologies to monitor how open educational resources are used.

These and other related issues will continue to be debated into the new year so watch this space!

Open Educational Resources Discussion at CETIS08

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Here, somewhat belatedly, is a summary of the discussions that followed the presentations at the Open Educational Resources session at CETIS 08.

Much of the discussion focused on technical issues such as infrastructure, the role of standards (or not), granularity of resources, metadata and tagging.

There appeared to be considerable support for the idea of enabling projects to make use of existing services and applications such as flickr, youtube, slideshare, etc while at the same time mandating deposit in JorumOpen. However this did lead some participants to question the role of standards in this programme and in the sector more widely. If we say that content can be released in any format and hosted by multiple applications does this mean that we are implicitly stating that open educational standards such as IMS Content Packaging are no longer relevant? Of course this is not the case at all, the real goal here is interoperability and standards still play an important role in facilitating interoperability. However there is no point in mandating the use of standards where they are inappropriate e.g. IMS CP for video of lectures. Andy Powell also made the valid point that:

…the Flickrs of this world are not devoid of standards – e.g. support for RSS “ its just that they aren’t necessarily the same standards that we have recommended for the last few years.

The role of JorumOpen was also explored and John Casey for the Jorum team gave a brief potted history of the Jorum service. John explained that, typically of the education sector more generally, Jorum has been very risk averse in the past, however JorumOpen will see a significant shift towards a more user centric approach based on Creative Commons licensing.

Despite being at pains to avoid the œM word issues relating to metadata occupied a large part of the discussion. It was generally agreed that the programme should take a light weight approach to metadata and that the focus should be on tagging rather than on the creation of formal structured metadata records. There was some support for a minimal set of tags but much less agreement as to what these should be: title, author date, institution, course, subject?? Also is it meaningful to mandate a single set of programme level tags when resources will be scattered across multiple applications such as youtube, slideshare, etc, each of while have their own tagging and metadata conventions?

This also led to a very interesting discussion on the nature of attribution, reputation and digital and academic identity. Pat Parslow, following the discussions remotely via the wonderful eFoundations live-blog suggested:

Contributing materials, and formulating correct tags/metadata helps build your Digital Identity and thus reputation. Should be a major interest for academics, surely?

Heather Williamson of JISC noted some initial findings from the current RePRODUCE programme that suggest that building online presence is an important driver for people to share resources. My colleague John Robertson has already written an excellent blog post on open educational resources, metadata and self description which I highly recommend.

Throughout these discussions David Kernohan and Amber Thomas of JISC reminded us that this programme has two goals: changing attitudes and practice and getting content out into the open. The real aim of the JISC OER programme is to change the culture around content sharing and as such it should be viewed as a œmilestone on a journey.

Patrick McAndrew of the Open Universitys OpenLearn project agreed and cautioned against letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. Fear of œnot doing it right shouldnt be a barrier preventing people from opening access to their content. We can all learn as we go along.

As Andy Powell has already pointed out in his blog post on the CETIS 08 Conference the OER session generated

…a good level of debate that could have gone on significantly longer than the time allowed.

In order to enable these discussions to continue we would like to invite colleagues to use the CETIS Educational Content SIG mailing list, cetis-ecsig@jiscmail.ac.uk as a forum to raise issues, comments and questions relating to the JISC OER call specifically and open educational content issues more generally.

And last but not least here’s the wordle generated from the session’s tweets.

cetis08oer wordle

Open Educational Resources Presentations at CETIS08

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The Open Educational Resources session at CETIS08 was a little different from the other conference session in that it aimed to provided participants with some background to the forthcoming JISC / HEFCE OER programme while at the same time giving them an opportunity to comment and provide input. Further information on this call is available from the JISC press release.

(This post summarises the presentations given at this session, Ill cover the discussion in a separate blog post.)

Overview of JISC Open Educational Content Programme
– David Kernohan, JISC

The session opened with a presentation by David outlining the rationale behind this call which is both timely, the OER movement is making real progress worldwide, and opportunistic, the money just happens to be available right now. David also pointed out that HEI business models have changed significantly in recent years as a result of the information explosion. Institutions are no longer the sole repositories of information and knowledge. Information is now ubiquitously availably through multiple channels, not least the Internet. However there is a difference between accessing information and developing learning and understanding and this is where HEIs still have a key role to play.

David acknowledged that there are still considerable barriers to reusing educational content not least of which is IPR. However JISC are not intending to use this call to fund and develop a license structure, rather it is intended to support institutions to develop a process for licensing- whether that be CC or any other type of licence that enables open access to content. Buying licenses is not a sustainable model, changing practice is.

Clearly there is still a risk that institutions and individuals will balk at the idea of “giving away” resources with potential value during a time of recession. However they need to realise that the potential value of new students and enhanced institutional and individual reputation is potentially of greater value than that of the content. This point was neatly illustrated by Patrick McAndrews impromptu presentation which included real evidence of the benefit to the OU of the Hewlett funded Open Learn project.

So while the immediate aim of this call is the online release of existing UK HE learning content licensed for worldwide open use and repurposing the real goal of this programme is to help institutions develop processes and policies that result in sustainable open access to content.

(As this programme is currently at the policy in development stage Davids presentation will not be circulated until the call is released. )

Technical Infrastructure for Open Educational Content
– Amber Thomas, JISC

Next up was Amber who outlined the technical infrastructure approach that JISC are proposing for the OER Programme. Rather than mandating the use of Institutional Repositories and specific licenses, standards and application profiles a more lightweight approach to technical infrastructure is being explored. Content may be released anywhere, in any format, under any appropriately open license however the onus will be on the individual projects to ensure that their content is discoverable, accessible, reusable, attributable, copyright cleared, openly available and supported by stable URIs and a minimum set of tags.

To balance this œanything goes approach there will also be a centralised aggregation of content in JorumOpen. However at this stage it is yet to be decided whether this means all content must be deposited in JorumOpen or linked there. This aggregation of content will enable JISC and HEFCE to showcase the outputs of the programme and will hopefully also provide the potential to build rich services on the aggregated resources

This is a relatively new approach to programme infrastructure and there is still much to be discussed and decided, in particular what constitutes the minimal technical requirements for tagging and persistent identifiers.

The trick here is to balance openness with consistency. The programme will attempt to stitch together an infrastructure based on existing workflows, commonly used tools and the services that can be built around them. Its not just about the content but the role of content in social networks and its not about forcing change but about supporting those that already want to change.

Open Educational Resources “ Opportunities and Challenges for HE
– Li Yuan, CETIS

The final scheduled presentation of the session was from CETIS own Li who presented a summary of her whitepaper Open Educational Resources “ Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education. Im not going to go into the detail of Lis presentation her as her whitepaper has already been extensively blogged about and her slides area available on the OER session wiki page.

We were also lucky to have two additional and unscheduled presentations from Peter Douglas on the forthcoming JISC commissioned study on business cases for sharing e-learning materials being undertaken by Intrallect and Lou McGill and from Patrick McAndrew on Open University’s OpenLearn project.

Good intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials
– Peter Douglas, Intrallect

This study, which will be reporting shortly, focuses on the business case for sharing e-learning materials, sustainability and levels of openness. The study reports that many projects that started in or around 2002 had very similar aims to the current OER programme but ultimately haven’t been very successful. Understandably it has been difficult to learn why these initiatives failed as institutions are unwilling to publicise their lack of success. Traditionally institutional business models and IPR policies are developed by enterprise/knowledge transfer departments, which are often driven by rather more commercial ideology than academic departments. However it appear that many institutions are currently in the process of transitioning these business models. The impact of this transition remains to be seen.

OU OpenLearn and OLNet
– Patrick McAndrew, Open University

OpenLearn has had considerable impact on the Open University, this is measurable in terms of bringing students into the institution. An estimated 7000 registrations are a direct result of OpenLearn and it is 5th on the list of reasons why people come to the OU. OpenLearn is aimed at primarily at learners rather than other educators, content is the attractor, but the push is for education.

The OU has also set up a range of low-level partnerships based on OpenLearn, this was not a predicted outcome of the project, its a whole new approach to collaboration. Initially the OU found it was surprisingly hard to convince people that Openlearn materials were actually free and somewhat surprisingly there has been little demand for OpenLearn content from the JISC RePRODUCE projects.

OER is about giving permission in advance for things that otherwise have to be negotiated and therefore might never happen. Its about “you act openly, we act openly, let’s collaborate”. However things take time, open collaboration really scales up the time element, its impossible to realistically measure impact over a one year period in any sensible way.

The OU and Carnegie Mellon University have now received additional funding from the Hewlett Foundation for OLNet – a network to support sharing methodologies and evidence on the effectiveness of OERs. This next wave is about impact, evidence and effectiveness.