Technology Challenges from the UK Open Educational Resources Programmes

Phil Barker and Lorna M Campbell

What is Cetis?

• Centre for Education Technology, Interoperability

and Standards http://www.cetis.ac.uk/

• A national UK technology advisory centre

providing strategic, technical and pedagogical

advice on educational technology and standards

to funding bodies, standards agencies,

government, institutions and commercial

partners.

EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

Cetis and Jisc

• Cetis have a long association with Jisc, http:/jisc.ac.uk

• Formerly an F/HE quango, now a charity.

• Funded Cetis as a project 2001 – 2005 & an Innovation

Support Centre 2006 – 2013.

• Provided Jisc with strategic technical input and guidance.

• Represented the Jisc community on international standards

bodies.

• Supported the Jisc development programmes.

EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

UK Open Educational Resources Programmes (UKOER)

• Three 1-year programmes / phases 2009 – 2012.

• Funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), approx. €17,5M total.

• Managed by JISC and the HE Academy.

• 80+ large and small scale projects funded in English universities.• Institutional / individual / subject community.• Support projects (Cetis supported technical

innovation).

• Release of OERs and embedding open practice.

UKOER, year 1 (2009/10)

• How can institutions, individuals, consortia best release OER?

• What do creators want to do with it?

• Is it sustainable?

UKOER Phase 1E&S ReportOER Infokit

This slide based on a presentation by David Kernohan

Support: Cetis technical support; OER IPR Support; E&S wiki Social media: #ukoer @ukoer blogging

Resources: Jorumor search “ukoer”

UKOER, year 2 (2010/11)

• How can institutions, individuals, consortia best release OER?

• What do creators want to do with it?

• Is it sustainable?

UKOER Phase 1

E&S ReportOER Infokit

Support: Cetis technical support; OER IPR Support; E&S wiki Social media: #ukoer @ukoer blogging

Resources: Jorumor search “ukoer”

This slide based on a presentation by David Kernohan

• How can we best encourage discovery and use of OER?

• How can we extend and grow existing approaches to OER?

• What do users want to do with it?

• Is this sustainable?

UKOER Phase 2E&S ReportOER InfokitOER use case studiesOER use reportStudent use of OER lit review

UKOER, year 3 (2011/12)• How can institutions, individuals, consortia best release

OER?

• What do creators want to do with it?

• Is it sustainable?

UKOER Phase 1

E&S ReportOER Infokit

This slide based on a presentation by David Kernohan

• How can we best encourage discovery and use of OER?

• How can we extend and grow existing approaches to OER?

• What do users want to do with it?

• Is this sustainable?

UKOER Phase 2E&S ReportOER InfokitOER use case studiesOER use reportStudent use of OER lit review

E&S ReportOER Infokit

Into the Wild bookOER Historical Perspective

Terminology GuideStudent attitudes to OER

• How can we use OER and related practices to meet identified strategic and cultural needs?

• How can technology support these practices and use cases?

• What does everyone want to do with it?

• Is this sustainable?

UKOER Phase 3

Support: Cetis technical support; OER IPR Support; E&S wiki Social media: #ukoer @ukoer blogging

Resources: Jorumor search “ukoer”

HEFCE OER review—covers all 3 years of UKOER & OU Score project

Cetis Technical Guidelines

• Aim to facilitate innovation and learn from it.

• Minimal emphasis on requirements.

• Promote experimentation and sharing lessons learnt.

• UKOER 1 Technical Guidelineshttp://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/02/03/oer-programme-technical-requirements/

• UKOER 2 Technical Guidelines http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2010/12/03/oer-2-technical-requirements/

Example requirements

• Resources must be disseminated through Jorum national repository and one other openly accessible system (e.g. institutional repository or web site, YouTube, flickr, etc.)

• Projects must supply RSS or Atom feed listing resources.

• Projects may investigate other approaches that meet their needs (e.g. OAI-PMH).

Metadata

“The OER Programme will not mandate ... 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: this 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.”

OER 2 Technical Requirements http

://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2010/12/03/oer-2-technical-requirements/

Metadata

We did however mandate that resource descriptions should include:

• Title of resource

• Author/owner/contributor details (as applicable)

• Date

• Programme tag: UKOER

• Licence informationAnd we strongly suggested others be used if relevant.

SO HOW DID IT WORK OUT?

Technical Directions

1. Resource management2. Resource description3. Licensing and attribution4. SEO and discoverability5. Tracking OERs6. Paradata – activity data about learning

resources7. Accessibility

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Into the Wild presents a synthesis of the technical outputs of the UK OER Programmes.

• Ebook (ePub & kindle)• PDF• Print-on-demand

Available from:http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2012/601

Resource Management (publishing)• We did see a diverse range of platforms

used:• Jorum.• Institutional repositories.• Content management systems, e.g. Drupal.• Institutional websites, e.g. Oxford Podcasts

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open • WordPress.• YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, SlideShare.

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Resource Management (aggregation)• Those RSS / Atom feeds proved to be

problematic.

• Little use of OAI-PMH or other approaches.

• Issues with Jorum deposit.

• We struggled to produce an attractive “shop window” onto UKOER as a whole.

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Resource Description

• Smarter machine readable resource descriptions.• Important given value of traffic passing

through search engines.• People search for “things not strings.”• schema.org and Learning Resource

Metadata Initiative (LRMI) enable machine readable markup of resource description.

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Licensing and Attribution

• Embedded licence information.• Success! Starting to see more licence info

embedded in resources.• Smarter machine readable licences.

• Remix platforms tend not to deal well with licence information.

• More work needed. • Smarter machine readable licences may

help.

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SEO and Discoverability

• Growing awareness of importance of SEO.• “Playing ball with the search engine

giants.”• SEO is still a bit of a dark art.• Rather like trying to hit a moving target.

• OER recommender systems. • Users still complain that it’s hard to find

OERs.• Need smarter discovery services.

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Paradata: activity data for OER

• Paradata provides contextualised information about how a learning resource has been used.

• Many systems generate paradata but exposing and sharing it is problematic.

• Learning Registry demonstrates how paradata might be collected and exposed.

• SPAWS demonstrated simple but successful application. http://scottbw.wordpress.com/tag/oerri/

• Lots of potential but remains to be seen what can be done in reality.

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Tracking OERs

• Not a huge success.• Little engagement despite encouragement.• Some more mature UK OER projects

realised the benefits of tracking.

• Interesting work going on outwith UK OER using existing systems.• Tracking plays of embedded YouTube

videos.• Creative Commons work on tracking.

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Into the Wild presents a synthesis of the technical outputs of the UK OER Programmes.

• Ebook (ePub & kindle)• PDF• Print-on-demand

Available from:http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2012/601

Licence

This presentation

“Technology Challenges from the UK Open Educational Resources Programme”

by Phil Barker phil.barker@hw.ac.uk

and Lorna M Campbell lorna.m.campbell@icloud.com

of Cetis http://www.cetis.ac.uk is licensed under the

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/