Presentation given at OCWC 2011 Boston. Phil Barker, John Robertson, Lorna Campbell

1. How do I aggregate OERs? Let me count the ways... Phil Barker1, R. John Robertson2, and Lorna M. Campbell2 Presentation at OCWC 2011, Boston , MA, May 6th 2011 1 Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University 2 Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement, University of Strathclyde Derivative image of Elizabeth Barrett Browning based on image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning.jpg Licence: Public Domain / PD-ART Wikimedia Image derived from image from LSUS Library http://www.jamessmithnoelcollection.org/index.html (scholarly use with attribution permitted) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Individual Images in this presentation may have different licences. Please note many of the images are screenshots and the websites in question should be consulted for usage rights 1

3. What is an OER and where do you find them?

4. What are the approaches to aggregating, curating, or gathering OER?

5. Reflections on current practiceImage: Google Maps Screenshot 2

7. participating in standards bodies

8. providing community forums for sharing experience about educational technologies and interoperability standards

9. providing strategic advice to JISC and supporting JISC development programmesImage: screenshot of jisc.cetis.ac.uk 3

11. Other OER work in the UK and globally as well as other related technical developmentsImage: jisc.ac.uk/oer screenshot 4

15. an open licence

16. debatablehttp://creativecommons.org/ 7

22. A word or two on aggregation Aggregating Gathering Curating Collecting Collating Discovery services rather than complex/ compound object formats Image: screenshot elements from http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters 13

23. Approaches to gathering OER what can you do to gather stuff together? 14

24. Approaches to gathering OER Manual index Shared tag Google CSE API search OAI-PMH RSS 15

26. make a list

27. Lets assume publicly, so

28. Website

29. Blog

30. Wiki Image: screenshot 16

32. Easy to set up

33. Easy to maintain a static set of resources

34. Specialised, quality-assured collection

35. Can be individual or communal

36. [Often used in conjunction with other approaches]

37. Cons

38. Ongoing effort required to add resources to list

39. Maintaining currency of list requires increasing ongoing effort

40. Destination site17

42. References to resources can be permanent (~delicious), transitory (twitter), or both. Image: screenshot http://www.delicious.com/kavu6 18

44. Tools ‘free’

45. Easy to use for any user community

46. Somewhat ubiquitous

47. Cons

48. Reliant on community effort at scale

49. Reliant on 3rd party services and ToS

50. Public tools and tags may be spammed19

53. Familiarity of Google

54. Embeddable

55. Little to set up for developers

56. Cons

57. Only works for OER if they can be identified through a particular search term or url pattern

58. But sometimes it (inexplicably?) doesn’t work even then.21

60. allows the development of 3rd party interfaces and apps Image: screenshot http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/ukoer/jorum/search.php 22

62. Customisable access to widely used content rich environments through API allow development of local custom interfaces

63. Services often responsive to API bug reports / fixes

64. Programming expertise/ overhead required is relatively low

65. Cons

66. Relies on real time search / access to services

67. Custom interface required (each api is different)

68. Services differ in what they support and what information they hold

69. Reliant on 3rd party services and spec which change frequently and without warning23

71. Harvesters of OAI-PMH can used it to build their a search index from multiple repositories24

73. Very widely implemented in repositories as a mechanism to push metadata

74. Requires a baseline metadata standard (DC) [shared standard vs barrier to implement]

75. Cons

76. Not many services based on harvesting. Not straight forward to set up a harvester.

77. Community highly focused on scholarly communications

78. Most services have a specific community/ focus and many also aggregate RSS/Atom

79. Harvesting endpoints (base url) hard to find

80. Well documented issues in maintaining a harvest25

82. Many tools available to aggregate or work with feeds Image: screenshots http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/ and http://www.steeple.org.uk/wiki/Main_Page 26

84. Fairly ubiquitous

85. ‘mainstream’ technology

86. Some interesting examples of use (Xpert, DiscoverEd, UKOER phase 2 Collection Strand)

87. Many tools to consume rss feeds easy to use for any user community; many tools come with rss out of box

88. Cons

89. Hard to manage

90. Can be hard for providers to customise feed output or build one if not there

91. Feed format rarely standard

92. Common aggregation tools ignore non-standard elements

93. Frequent misuse of feed elements

94. Coverage often limited to X most recent27

95. An aside on sources of stuff Make it easy to find points of access for your stuff 28

97. It can be even harder for developers of discovery tools to find information about technical services or endpoints that facilitate aggregation

99. please provide clear easy-to-find information about how and where metadata about those resources can be found and interacted with.29

101. Repositories

102. Wordpress

103. Plugins (to blogs and wikis to return dynamic results alongside static ones)

104. Data wrangling moving upstream (xpert) centralised providers emerging

105. Patterns

106. Localised manual human curation for specific communities feeding automated suggestions as part of bigger systems

107. Ongoing use of existing systems -> plenty of support for OAI-PMH but few general purpose services.30

109. Multiple technical approaches for discovery services (RSS, OAI-PMH, ...)

110. Emerging tools for distributed zipped content (SCORM? or IMS CC?)

111. Multiple technical approaches for providers (repository + cms layer, blog or wiki + plugins)31

113. Localised community based solutions as a niche in the wider web scale

114. tension with too many destination sites 32

115. Questions phil.barker@hw.ac.uk robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk lmc@strath.ac.uk http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/topic/oer 33