How do I aggregate oers

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

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Overview

• Some context• What is an OER and

where do you find them?

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

• Reflections on current practice

2Image: Google Maps Screenshot

Context: JISC CETIS• JISC CETIS is a JISC

Innovation Support Centre. We provide advice to the UK Higher and Post-16 Education sectors on the development and use of educational technology and standards through: – participating in standards bodies – providing community forums for

sharing experience about educational technologies and interoperability standards

– providing strategic advice to JISC and supporting JISC development programmes

3Image: screenshot of jisc.cetis.ac.uk

Context: UK OER and more

• UKOER programme: Phase 2 of the HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resources (OER) programme runs between August 2010 and August 2011 (£5 million funding)

• Other OER work in the UK and globally as well as other related technical developments

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Image: jisc.ac.uk/oer screenshot

What is an OER?

• From this

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Image: screenshot MIT OCW http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/civil-and-environmental-engineering/1-018j-ecology-i-the-earth-system-fall-2009/

What is an OER?

• To this

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Image: screenshothttp://www.flickr.com/photos/core-materials/4599222126/

What is an OER?

• The distinguishing feature of an OER is...– an open licence– debatable

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http://creativecommons.org/

Where do you find OER?

• Repositories

8Image: screenshot http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index_oer.php

Where do you find OER?

• Web 2.0 sites

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Image: screenshot http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?

Where do you find OER?

• Blogging Platforms

10 Image: screenshot http://politicsinspires.org/2011/04/justice-and-gadhafis-fight-to-the-death/

Where do you find OER?

• Open VLEs

11 Image: screenshot http://www.porth.ac.uk/en/

Where do you find OER?

• Websites / Content Management Systems

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Image: screenshot

http://openspace.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/ipr-educational-environments/unit-one-introduction-ipr-and-copyright-educators/session-1-int

A word or two on aggregation

• Aggregating

• Gathering

• Curating

• Collecting

• Collating

• Discovery services rather than complex/ compound object formats

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Image: screenshot elements from http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters

Approaches to gathering OER

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what can you do to gather stuff together?

Approaches to gathering OER

• Manual index

• Shared tag

• Google CSE

• API search

• OAI-PMH

• RSS

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Manual indexing and recommendation

• What are we talking about?– make a list

• Lets assume publicly, so– Website– Blog– Wiki

16 Image: screenshot

Manual indexing and recommendation

• Pros– Easy to set up– Easy to maintain a

static set of resources– Specialised, quality-

assured collection– Can be individual or

communal– [Often used in

conjunction with other approaches]

• Cons– Ongoing effort required

to add resources to list– Maintaining currency of

list requires increasing ongoing effort

– Destination site

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Shared tags

• Curate things manually (collaboratively or individually) but have systems to support automated sharing or discovery through tags – References to resources

can be permanent (~delicious), transitory (twitter), or both.

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Image: screenshot http://www.delicious.com/kavu6

Shared tags

• Pros– Tools ‘free’– Easy to use for any

user community– Somewhat ubiquitous

• Cons– Reliant on community

effort at scale– Reliant on 3rd party

services and ToS– Public tools and tags

may be spammed

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Google Custom Search Engine

• Google is the primary search index of online materials though it can be hard to find materials from specifically defined communities (such as OER). Google Custom Search Engines offer search over a discrete definable set of resources/ sites and can be embedded in local sites

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Image: screenshot http://www.google.com/cse?cx=000712673767491597728%3A53hsndgps4q&ie=UTF-8&q=sustainability&sa=Search&hl=en&siteurl=www.google.co.uk%2Fcse%2Fhome%3Fcx%3D000712673767491597728%3A53hsndgps4q%26hl%3Den

Google Custom Search Engine

• Pros– Familiarity of Google– Embeddable– Little to set up for

developers

• Cons– Only works for OER if

they can be identified through a particular search term or url pattern

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

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Using APIs

• Many hosts of high-value content (such as web 2.0 services) support interaction with their data/ services/ content via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

• allows the development of 3rd party interfaces and apps

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Image: screenshot http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/ukoer/jorum/search.php

Using APIs

• Pros– Customisable access to

widely used content rich environments through API allow development of local custom interfaces

– Services often responsive to API bug reports / fixes

– Programming expertise/ overhead required is relatively low

• Cons– Relies on real time search

/ access to services– Custom interface required

(each api is different)– Services differ in what

they support and what information they hold

– Reliant on 3rd party services and spec which change frequently and without warning

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OAI-PMH

• OAI-PMH is a protocol for harvesting metadata. The ability to share data in this way is widely implemented in repository software

• Harvesters of OAI-PMH can used it to build their a search index from multiple repositories

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OAI-PMH

• Pros– Very widely implemented

in repositories as a mechanism to push metadata

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

• Cons– Not many services based on

harvesting. Not straight forward to set up a harvester.

– Community highly focused on scholarly communications

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

– Harvesting endpoints (base url) hard to find

– Well documented issues in maintaining a harvest

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RSS and Atom

• RSS or Atom pretty ubiquitously supported in some form by most content management systems, repositories, and other web-based platforms

• Many tools available to aggregate or work with feeds

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Image: screenshots http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/ and

http://www.steeple.org.uk/wiki/Main_Page

RSS and Atom

• Pros– Fairly ubiquitous– ‘mainstream’ technology– Some interesting

examples of use (Xpert, DiscoverEd, UKOER phase 2 Collection Strand)

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

• Cons– Hard to manage– Can be hard for providers

to customise feed output or build one if not there

– Feed format rarely standard

– Common aggregation tools ignore non-standard elements

– Frequent misuse of feed elements

– Coverage often limited to X most recent

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An aside on sources of stuff

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Make it easy to find points of access for your stuff

An aside on sources of stuff

• As someone building a discovery service it can be difficult to find where relevant stuff is held

• It can be even harder for developers of discovery tools to find information about technical services or endpoints that facilitate aggregation– (e.g. feed location &

coverage, OAI-PMH endpoints, SRU targets)

CETIS advice: • if you build a service that

hosts OERs and you wish to facilitate the inclusion of these in a third-party aggregation and discovery tools,

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

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Current practice

• UKOER– Repositories – Wordpress– Plugins (to blogs and

wikis to return dynamic results alongside static ones)

– Data wrangling moving upstream (xpert) centralised providers emerging

• Patterns– Localised manual human

curation for specific communities feeding automated suggestions as part of bigger systems

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

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Trends

•Technical– Multiple technical

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

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

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

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Trends

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• Technical Style– Localised

community based solutions as a niche in the wider web scale

– tension with too many destination sites

Questions

• phil.barker@hw.ac.uk

• robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk

• lmc@strath.ac.uk

• http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/topic/oer

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