Searching for OERs Online: the challenge of usability
1. Searching for Open Educational Resources Online: the challenge of usability Isabelle Brent: C-SAP (Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics)
2. Open educational resources Background and description of project The contrast between describing an ideal methods resource and what is done in practice Quality and usability Conclusion and some suggestions for learning technologists Outline
3. Open Educational Resources Open educational resources (OERs) are defined by a report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as: "teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.” http://www.oerderves.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a-review-of-the-open-educational-resources-oer-movement_final.pdf
4.
5. 1 year, JISC funded project aimed at improving the discoverability of OER materials to support research methods teaching 2 phases: 1. Exploring how teaching staff search and use methods resources through: Survey of practices, focus groups with teaching staff and user testing 2. The creation of a social science methods website – methods@hud.ac.uk The project
6. Draws on the first phase of the project exploring online search practices and how academics describe their ideal resource Focuses on an apparent contradiction between descriptions of an ideal resource and what academics actually do when searching for resources Focus of Presentation
7. Three themes: High quality Fit for purpose Usability Describing the ideal resource
8. Despite the emphasis on quality and concern with vetted materials, how people describe their current search practices is very different. How People Currently Search For Resources
9. 9 Sites used most often to search for resources by survey respondents
10. When describing what is important during actual searches the following criteria were identified: Usability Relevance Transparency (Quality) What is valued when searching online?
11. The gulf between the ideal resource and actual practice reflects shifts in online behaviour The ‘vetted gateway’ model is indicative of an older model of educational searching New ways of searching break down barriers between academic and non-academic Transparency more important than quality in practice – people happy to make quality judgments if they have the indicators to do so Contrast between described ideal research and practice
12. Librarian controlled gateways or portals followed the example set by journals and books to ensure quality assurance Today people expect academic online searches to conform to other searches Non-academic sites like TripAdvisor and Amazon have increased the confidence that online users have in contributing and making quality judgments themselves Defining ‘Quality’
13. ‘Quality’ is of central importance to academic practice, however relying on top-down vetted materials is an outmoded concept Users are happy having access to a larger range of resources and make more quality judgments In order to make these judgments online searches need to be highly usable with results being easy to assess Conclusion
14. Look at what people actually do online – usability testing with academics important Recognise permeability between academic and non-academic searches (E.g. Google, Amazon) Develop systems that help academics judge resources by providing transparent indicators of quality (e.g. Amazon’s Review and star system, ‘customers also bought’, ‘you may be interested in’) 3Suggestions for Learning Technologists
Creative Commons is an organisation based on California devoted to increase the range of creative materials that others can legally share and adapt.There are six major licenses of the Creative Commons:Attribution (CC-BY)Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC)Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA)Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)
QualityQuality is defined as a resource restricted to materials of a certain levelA vetted set of materials was the most common suggestion for assuring qualitye.g. Intute, University Gateways, Librarian vetted materialsFit for PurposeParticularly important for teaching materials is the match between materials and need2 particular areas:1. Granularity2. Level of study resource is appropriate for Usability“Easy to navigate”, “able to find what you are looking for”The user-testing of OER repositories revealed a series of usability issues Results were not relevantHow to search not obvious Insufficient information was given about a resource before committing to downloading it
Additional sites mentioned by individual respondents included:YahooiTunes USubject gateways (e.g. Web of Science)University-based gatewaysMERLOTESRC methods hubSubject networks
UsabilityOf central importance in all the user-testingGoogle sets the standard for searching and all participants in the user-testing compared what they were being asked to do with GoogleRelevanceAll OER repositories that were included in the first user-testing were criticised for producing irrelevant results high up in the search resultsRelevance is a key criteria for judging the usefulness of a resource and users quickly dismiss a site that does not give relevant results.TransparencyPart of reason that Google is preferred is that users are able to form their own judgement quickly from the search results page. - e.g. url, pdf, dateIn comparison OER sites did not provide users with enough information before committing to download
Recognise permeability between academic and non-academic searches
