OER10 Day 2 Afternoon April 21, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , trackbackMinds are like parachutes; they work best when open” Helen Beetham, Lou McGill, Allison Littlejohn, Glasgow Caledonian University This workshop was run by Helen and Allison and was an opportunity for those that have been involved in developing open educational resources to share their experiences, consider some lessons learned and to also have a chance to look at the resources that will be used to evaluate the JISC OER Programme. The workshop was divided into six groups, legal, technical, educational, cultural, organisational and ethic and participants were asked to discuss:
- staff development tools to support open content design, management release and re-use
- organisational development tool: towards open content
- personal reflections with regarding priorities for open content
The workshop encouraged some lively debate and issues which had already appeared in the other presentations such as, integrating openenss into learning and teaching strategies, the limits imposed by IPR and managing multiple deposits arose.
This was our presentation and was well attended given that it was timetabled at the end of two very intensive days. The presentation was to highlight some of the project’s technical, policy and business processes and how these have been addressed in the design and implementation of our learning repository. Our observations encouraged some lively debate especially with respect to the simplified approach that we have moved to with respect to metadata. There was also interest in whether we were developing a sharing community and we explained how so far academic and professional service staff have been involved in the decision making process.
Resource description, discovery, and metadata for Open Educational ResourcesR. John Robertson (University of Strathclyde), Phil Barker (Heriot Watt University), Lorna Campbell (University of Strathclyde)- This presentation provided an overview of the UKOER projects and their approaches to describing their educational resources and identified some issues relating to description when individuals are deciding to share. There is a challenge to OER projects with respect to deciding what descriptive information is need. e.g. author, title, date, url, file format, file size rights etc. Describing resources requires time and money and there is tension between immediate users and requirements of the wider community. There is an argument that standards may be irrelevant as they exist in underlying systems and an export standard can be mapped. Some systems provide full text searching however still need keywords for audio, video and flash materials, keywords and tags are useful for aggregators. The presentation considered the arguments for and against Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web age (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) which may deal with paid inclusion.and description for specialised discovery tools Specialised discovery tools include – format based Vimeo, YouTube, Slideshare and Scribd, aggregators like DiscoverED and OERCommons and subject or domain repositories (Jorum), which often require domain specific terminology but may restrict fields of descriptive information – so there is tendancy to put everything in the available fields. SEO – too many high value terms may have a negative impact on the page rankings, it’s better to be highly ranked for fewer terms. with respect to how much metadata is needed, there is tension between how much needs to be created how much is used – but there are no clear answers for this – most projects within the OER programme are taking a light touch. Regarding dissemination the presentation went on to consider the pros and cons of RSS/ATOM and OAI-PMH. RSS (Really Simple Sindication) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. ATOM applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub or APP) is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources http://www.ntushare.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=586. OAI-PMH Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archives_Initiative_Protocol_for_Metadata_Harvesting is a protocol developed by the Open Archives Initiative. It is used to harvest (or collect) the metadata descriptions of the records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations. Most aggregators of learning resources are based exclusively around RSS/ATOM or support both RSS/ATOM and OAI-PMH. Existing OAI-PMH harvesters are firmly focused on the Scholarly Communications community. Both approaches have issues – need to have technology which supports OAI-PMH.
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