Category Archives: ukoer

What I didn’t tweet from #OpenN11

cetis, ukoer

For various reasons I didn’t get around to tweeting from the Open Nottingham 2011 seminar last Thursday, but that just gives me the excuse to record my impressions of it here, perhaps not in 140 chars per thought but certainly without much by way of discursive narrative.

Lack of travel options meant that I arrived late and missed the first couple of presentations.

Prof. Wyn Morgan (Director of Learning and Teaching, University of Nottingham): Nottingham started its OER initiative in 2006-7, it launched U-Now about the same time as the OU’s OpenLearn, and well before HEFCE funding. Before that they were “hiding behind passwords and VLEs”. Motivations included: corporate social respinsibility, widening participation, marketing/promotion, sharing materials with over-seas campuses, and cost savings.

Wayne Mackintosh (WikiEducator, OERU). Like many Wayne went into education in order to share knowledge: OER aligns with core values of those in HE. He compared the model of OERU to the University of London external examinations ca. 1850: decoupling learning from accreditation. While the open content is there, open curriculum development is something that needs working on.

Steve Stapleton, (Open Learning Support Officer The University of Nottingham): case studies on re-use. One case study showed that reuse is at micro-level, routine, not distinguished from other stuff on web, hence difficult to see what is being used. The other involved students remixing OERs for the next year of students to use: an example of open licensing enabling pedagogy.

Greg DeKoenigsberg (founder and first chairman of the Fedora Project Board at RedHat, now CTO of ISKME): What I learnt from open source. “People are the way we filter information” but we are interested in “tiny niche domains, the micro communities” which leads to the question “How do I find people like me?” Argued that the driver for open content may be the same as the driver for open source software: it allows you to stop competing on “non-differentiated value” and focus on what you do that is different.

Andy Lane (Director of OpenLearn, Open University): SCORE. Mentioned an interesting idea in passing, ‘born open’: after 5 years open content is becoming mainstream at the OU; they no longer think of releasing existing content as open, rather they are developing open content.

Rob Pearce (HE Academy Engineering Subject Centre) spoke about simple tags (date-of-birth codes) that can be used to track resources by providing text within the resource that can be searched-for on Google.

Nathan Yergler gave his last presentation as CTO of Creative Commons. Key points: discovery on the web works best when it aligns with the the structure of the web, and the structure of the web is the links. Nathan suggested that the most important link for online learning is Attribution. The next step for discovery (he says) is the use of structured data to support search, e.g. RDFa in creative commons licences, and we need to develop practice of linking, attribution and annotation to support this.

Finally, in response to a question from Amber Thomas “what could we do to mess this up?” Nathan answered “check-box openness” that is stuff that was open just because it is a grant requirement, but with no real commitment. Which aligns nicely with an observation from Wyn’s presentation, that although there is support from the top for Open Nottingham, there is no mandate. Individuals get involved if they think it is worthwhile, which many of them do.

Many thanks to those who presented and organised this seminar.

Self description and licences

cetis, ukoer,

One of the things that I noticed when I was looking for sources of UKOERs was that when I got to a resource there was often no indication on it that it was open: no UKOER tag, no CC-license information or logo. There may have been some indication of this somewhere on the way, e.g. on a repository’s information page about that resource, but that’s no good if someone arrives from a Google search, a direct link to the resource, or once someone has downloaded the file and put it on their own VLE.

Naomi Korn, has written a very useful briefing paper on embedding metadata about creative commons licences into digital resources as part of the OER IPR Support project starter pack. All the advice in that is worth following, but please, also make sure that licence and attribution information is visible on the resource as well. John has written about this in general terms in his excellent post on OERs, metadata, and self-description where he points out that this type of self description “is just good practice” which is complemented not supplanted by technical metadata.

So, OER resources, when viewed on their own, as if someone had found them through Google or a direct link, should display enough information about authorship, provenance, etc. for the viewer to know that they are open without needing an application to extract the metadata. The cut and paste legal text and technical code generated by the licence selection form on the Creative Commons website is good for this. (Incidentally, for HTML resources this code also includes technical markup so that the displayed text works as encoded metadata, which has been exploited recently by the OpenAttribute browser addon. I know the OpenAttribute team are working on embedding tools for licence selection and code generation into web content management systems and blogs).

Images, videos and sounds present their own specific problem for including human-readable licence text. Following practice from the publishing industry would suggest that small amounts of text discreetly tucked away on the bottom or side of an image can be enough to help. That example was generate by the Xpert attribution tool from an image of a bridge found on flickr. The Xpert tool will also does useful work for sounds and videos; but for sounds it is also possible to follow the example of the BBC podcasts and provide spoken information at the beginning or end of the audio, and for videos of course one can have scrolling credits at the end.

UKOER Sources

cetis, ukoer,

I have been compiling a directory of how people can get at the resources released by the UKOER pilot phase projects: that is the websites for human users and the “interoperability end points” for machines–ie the RSS and ATOM feed URLs, SRU targets, OAI-PMH base URLs and API documentation. This wasn’t nearly as easy as it should have been: I would have hoped that just listing the main URL for each project would have been enough for anyone to get at the resources they wanted or the interoperability end point in a click or two, but that often wasn’t the case.

So here are some questions I would like OER providers to answer by way of self assessment, which will hopefully simplify this in the future.

Does your project website have a very prominent link to where the OERs you have released may be found?

The technical requirements for phase 1 for delivery platforms said:

Projects are free to use any system or application as long as it is capable of delivering content freely on the open web. … In addition projects should use platforms that are capable of generating RSS/Atom feeds, particularly for collections of resources

So: what RSS feeds do you provide for collections of resources and where do you describe these? Have you thought about how many items you have in each feed and how well described they are?

Are your RSS feed URLs and other interoperability endpoints easy to find?

Do your interoperability end points work? I mean, have you tested them? Have you spoken to people who might use them?

While you’re thinking about interoperability end points: have you ever thought of your URI scheme as one? If for example you have a coherent scheme that puts all your OERs under a base URI, and better, provides URIs with some easily identifiable pattern for those OERs that form some coherent collection, then building simple applications such as Google Custom Search Engines becomes a whole lot easier. A good example is how MIT OCW is arranged: all most of the URIs have a pattern http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/[department]/[courseName]/[resourceType]/[filename].[ext] (the exceptions are things like video recordings where the actual media file is held elsewhere).

WordPress development needed

delores, ukoer,

The static collection, Delores Selections is hosted on a WordPress installation. The rationale for this was that we could write a description of each resource as a WordPress post and WP plus existing plugins would give us lots of goodness such as a good web presence, category views, RSS feeds, simple search of the whole collection, widgets bring in stuff from other sources, and (if we want them) some DC metadata, OAI-PMH data provision and RDFa. Well nearly.

The problem is that most of the metadata that is exposed through those channels refers to the blog post not the resource, which is not what we want. Want we want is for, e.g., the RSS feed to convey information about the resource: the author, publication date, URL, etc of the resource; what we get is author, pubdate, URL of the wordpress post.

We’re half way to a solution. We’re using the WordPress custom fields to record the author, pub date, CC-licence URI, other rights, source and URI of the resource, and Santy has adapted a the carrington theme so that this information is displayed in the posts. But we don’t have it in the RSS or other ways of exposing the metadata.

So what we are proposing is to work on/comission plugins that will do this. RSS has to be first. The RSS custom fields plugin seems to be a good starting point–hopefully it wouldn’t be too difficult to adapt this to display our feeds in a more standard way than it does at the moment. And then on to PMH, Dublin Core and RDFa…

Now, I am convinced that what we are doing is not just of interest to the Delores project. I think that there is scope for using WordPress for building catalogues of all sorts of materials. For example, with colleagues at CETIS I’m considering whether we could use it to present the publications that come out of CETIS: upload the publication, describe and classify it in a WordPress blog post include a preview and there you have it, a lightweight WordPress publication repository. We’ve also been in touch with the TRITON project to see if there is any commonality between our plugin requirements than theirs.

One problem with extending this to other uses outside Delores is that they might not want to use our theme, they might have one of their own that they like better. So, we should explore whether it is possible to develop a plug-in or widget that would display the custom fields in the relevant blog post instead of using a theme for this. Also, the specific custom fields required may be vary from case to case, so we would have to make sure the plugins had some flexibility to cope with this: possibly no big deal, certainly we would be up for this if it meant that the plugins were more sustainable beyond the end of this project.

A collection by any other name

delores, ukoer

We decided we needed to move to something a little more user-friendly than the default names of “static” and “dynamic” for the names of the two collections that the Delores project is building. So we are thinking of:

Delores Selections (resources for Design Engineering selected by experts)
and
Delores Extensions (helping you go further with Design Engineering)

Delores Selections is being built here, but there’s not much content yet.

JISC CETIS OER Technical Mini Projects Call

cetis, ukoer

JISC has provided CETIS with funding to commission a series of OER Technical Mini Projects to explore specific technical issues that have been identified by the community during CETIS events such as #cetisrow and #cetiswmd and which have arisen from the JISC / HEA OER Programmes.

Mini project grants will be awarded as a fixed fee of £10,000 payable on receipt of agreed deliverables. Funding is not restricted to UK Higher and Further Education Institutions. This call is open to all OER Technical Interest Group members, including those outwith the UK. Membership of the OER TIG is defined as those members of oer-discuss@jiscmail.ac.uk who engage with the JISC CETIS technical discussions.

The CETIS OER Mini Projects are building on rapid innovation funding models already employed by the JISC. In addition to exploring specific technical issues these Mini Projects will aim to make effective use of technical expertise, build capacity, create focussed pre-defined outputs, and accelerate sharing of knowledge and practice. Open innovation is encouraged: projects are expected to build on existing knowledge and share their work openly.

It is expected that three projects will be funded in the first instance. If this model proves successful, additional funding may be made available for further projects.

Technical Mini Project Topics
Project 1: Analysis of Learning Resource Metadata Records

The aim of this mini project is to identify those descriptive characteristics of learning resources that are frequently recorded / associated with learning resources and that collection managers deem to be important.

The project will undertake a semantic analysis of a large corpus of educational metadata records to identify what properties and characteristics of the resources are being described. Analysis of textual descriptions within these records will be of particular interest e.g. free text used to describe licence conditions, educational levels and approaches.

The data set selected for analysis must include multiple metadata formats (e.g. LOM and DC) and be drawn from at least ten collections. The data set should include metadata from a number of open educational resource collections but it is not necessary for all records to be from oer collections.

For further background information on this topic and for a list of potential metadata sources please see Lorna’s blog post on #cetiswmd activities

Funding: £10,000 payable on receipt of agreed deliverables.

Project 2: Search Log Analysis

Many sites hosting collections of educational materials keep logs of the search terms used by visitors to the site when searching for resources. The aim for this mini project is to develop a simple tool that facilitates the analysis of these logs to classify the search terms used with reference to the characteristics of a resource that may be described in the metadata. Such information should assist a collection manager in building their collection (e.g. by showing what resources were in demand) and in describing their resources in such a way that helps users find them.

The analysis tool should be shown to work with search logs from a number of sites (we have identified some who are willing to share their data) and should produce reports in a format that are readily understood, for example a breakdown of how many searches were for “subjects” and which were the most popular subjects searched for. It is expected that a degree of manual classification will be required, but we would expect that the system is capable of learning how to handle certain terms and that this learning would be shared between users: a user should not have to tell the system that “Biology” is a subject once they or any other user has done so. The analysis tool should be free to use or install without restriction and should be developed as Open Source Software.

Further information on the sort of data that is available and what it might mean is outlined in my blog post Metadata Requirements from the Analysis of Search Logs

Funding: £10,000 payable on receipt of agreed deliverables.

Project 3: Open Call

Proposals are invited for one short technical project or demonstrator in any area relevant to the management, distribution, discovery, use, reuse and tracking of open educational resources. Topics that applicants may wish to explore include, but are not restricted to: resource aggregations, presentation / visualisation of aggregations, embedded licences, “activity data”, sustainable approaches to RSS endpoint registries, common formats for sharing search logs, analysis of use of advanced search facilities, use of OAI ORE.

Funding: £10,000 payable on receipt of agreed deliverables.

Guidelines

Proposals must be no more than 1500 words long and must include the following information:

  1. The name of the mini project.
  2. The name and affiliation and full contact details of the person or team undertaking the work plus a statement of their experience in the relevant area.
  3. A brief analysis of the issues the project will be addressing.
  4. The aims and objectives of the project.
  5. An outline of the project methodology and the technical approaches the project will explore.
  6. Identification of proposed outputs and deliverables.

Proposals are not required to include a budget breakdown, as projects will be awarded a fixed fee on completion.

All projects must be completed within six months of date of approval.

Submission Dates

In order to encourage open working practices project proposals must be submitted to the oer-discuss mailing list at oer-discuss@jicmail.ac.uk by 17.00 on Friday 8th April. List members will then have until the 17th of April to discuss the proposals and to provide constructive comments. Proposals will be selected by a panel of JISC and CETIS representatives who will take into consideration comments put forward by OER TIG members. Successful bidders will be notified by the 21st of April and projects are expected to start in May and end by 31st October 2011.

Successful bidders will be required to disseminate all project outputs under a relevant open licence, such as CC-BY. Projects must post regular short progress updates and all deliverables including a final report to the oer-discuss list and to JISC CETIS.

We encourage all list members to engage with the Mini Projects and to input comments suggestions and feedback through the list.

If you have any queries about this call please contact Phil Barker at phil.barker@hw.ac.uk

Metadata requirements from analysis of search logs

cetis, ukoer,

Many sites hosting collections of educational materials keep logs of the search terms used by visitors to the site who search for resources. Since it came up during the CETIS What Metadata (CETISWMD) event I have been think about what we could learn about metadata requirements from the analysis of these search logs. I’ve been helped by having some real search logs from Xpert to poke at with some Perl scripts (thanks Pat).

Essentially the idea is to classify the search terms used with reference to the characteristics of a resource that may be described in metadata. For example terms such as “biology” “English civil war” and “quantum mechanics” can readily be identified as relating to the subject of a resource; “beginners”, “101” and “college-level” relate to educational level; “power point”, “online tutorial” and “lecture” relate in some way to the type of the resource. We believe that knowing such information would assist a collection manager in building their collection (by showing what resources were in demand) and in describing their resources in such a way that helps users find them. It would also be useful to those who build standards for the description of learning resources to know which characteristics of a resource are worth describing in order to facilitate resource discovery. (I had an early run at doing this when OCWSearch published a list of top searches.)

Looking at the Xpert data has helped me identify some complications that will need to be dealt with. Some of the examples above show how a search phrase with more than one word can relate to a single concept, but in other cases, e.g. “biology 101” and “quantum mechanics for beginners” the search term relates to more than one characteristic of the resource. Some search terms may be ambiguous: “French” may relate to the subject of the resource or the language (or both); “Charles Darwin” may relate to the subject or the author of a resource. Some terms are initially opaque but on investigation turn out to be quite rich, for example 15.822 is the course code for an MIT OCW course, and so implies a publisher/source, a subject and an educational level. Also, in real data I see the same search term being used repeatedly in a short period of time: I guess an artifact of how someone paging through results is logged as a series of searches: should these be counted as a single search or multiple searches?

I think these are all tractable problems, though different people may want to deal with them in different ways. So I can imagine an application that would help someone do this analysis. In my mind it would import a search log and allow the user to go through search by search classifying the results with respect to the characteristic of the resource to which the search term relates. Tedious work, perhaps, but it wouldn’t take too long to classify enough search terms to get an adequate statistical snap-shot (you might want to randomise the order in which the terms are classified in order to help ensure the snapshot isn’t looking at a particularly unrepresentative period of the logs). The interface should help speed things up by allowing the user to classify by pressing a single key for most searches. There could be some computational support: the system would learn how to handle certain terms and that this learning would be shared between users. A user should not have to tell the system that “Biology” is a subject once they or any other user has done so. It may also be useful to distinguish between broad top-level subjects (like biology) and more specific terms like “mitosis”, or alternatively to know that specific terms like “mitosis” relate to the broader term “biology”: in other words the option to link to a thesaurus might be useful.

This still seems achievable and useful to me.

Some downside to OER?

cetis, ukoer

As part of my non-CETIS work I occasionally go out to evaluate teaching practice in Engineering for the HE Academy Engineering Subject Centre. This involves me going to some University and talking to an Engineering lecturer and some students about an approach they are using for teaching and learning. I especially enjoy this because it brings me close to the point of education and helps keeps me in touch with what is really happening in universities around the UK. During a recent evaluation the following observations came up which are incidental to what I was actually evaluating but relevant, I think, to UKOER. They concern a couple of points raised, one by the lecturer and one by the students, that reflect genuine problems people might have to OER release.

Part of the lecturer’s approach involves a sequence of giving students some problems to solve each week, and then providing online and face-to-face support for these problems. The online support is good stuff; it’s video screen captures of worked model solutions with pretty good production values. Something like the Khan academy but less rough. It would be great if the this were released as OER, however doing so would compromise the pedagogic strategy that the tutor has adopted. I don’t want to go into the specifics of why this lecturer has adopted this strategy but it in general it may be important that the students try the problems before they look at the support, and this is an interesting example of how OER release isn’t pedagogically neutral.

The point raised by the students concerned to reuse of OERs rather than their release. They really liked what their lecturer had done, and part of what they liked about it was that it was personal. This was important to them not just because it meant that there was an exact fit between the resources and their course but because they took it as showing that the lecturer had taken a deal of time and made a real effort in preparing their course. They were right in that, but they also went on to say that if the lecturer had taken resources from elsewhere, that they themselves could have found, they would have drawn the opposite inference. We may think that the students would be wrong in this, or that their expectations are unrealistic, but what’s important is that they felt that they would have been demotivated had the lecturer reused resources created elsewhere. I think this fits into a wider picture of how reuse of materials affects the relationship between teacher and student.

I’m not claiming that either of these observations are conclusive or in any way compelling arguments against the release of OER, and I will object to anyone claiming that a couple of data points is ever conclusive or compelling, but I did find them interesting.

Describing OERs in the static collection

delores, ukoer,

For the static collection part of the Delores project we will be creating WordPress posts that describe and preview OERs that have been selected from various well-known sources as being particularly useful for engineering design. This is a first cut at a specification for how we will write those descriptions.

About the Resources
The resources being described for Delores are likely to be fairly substantial pieces of content, i.e. between a lecture and a course worth of material rather than individual images. We believe that lecture-sized resources are probably going to be more reusable (especially by teachers), but describing resources at the course level has the advantage of covering more material for the time spent doing the resource description. One aim is clear: all the material covered should be directly relevant to engineering design, so while it makes sense to link to and describe an engineering design course at course level, it does not make sense to link to a general engineering course which has a few resources relevant to design.

The resource descriptions we need can be thought of as being in two parts: a blog post about the resource and some associated metadata about the resource. These are both entered through the WordPress admin interface

Resource Description
Title: the title of the WordPress post shall be the title of the resource, in sentence case. Taken from the resource.

Description: the body of the WordPress post shall be a description of the resource, which we expect to be 3 or 4 paragraphs long. This should refer to the origin of the resource (e.g. MIT open courseware, OU Open Learn), the date and the details of what is in the resources in terms of resource types, subjects covered, academic level (e.g. first-year, introductory, masters-level &c).

If the resource comprises a number of parts that may be of significant use in themselves then link to those parts when describing them (this includes parts of a course, e.g. problem sheets, lessons, and different formats of a resource). Conversely, where a resource is part of a course, book or similar collection it may be worth linking up to the larger aggregation as well as to the atomic elements.

Include a preview of the resource or embed the resource into the blog post. A preview can be a screenshot of the home page for the resource. Previews such as screenshots should link to the resource. Where a resource is hosted on a site such as YouTube, Scribd, SlideShare that faciliates embedding into webpages by providing copy and paste code then make use of this.

Since these are open resources it’s OK to copy large chunks of the description and images from the resource’s web page, but if you do this please put an acknowledgement in square brackets [] at the end of the post.

Subject: Use the WordPress category functionality to specify the topic of the resource. A hierarchical list of Engineering design topics has been adopted for use in the Delores project.

Other properties: [In development, could become another category tree] Use WordPress tags the resource with an indication of the type of resource / level of granularity, e.g. Courseware (= set of resources associated with a course), Online book, lecture recoding, video, audio, powerpoint slides, simulation.

Custom fields
We have used WordPress’s “custom field” functionality to add the following metadata as name/value pairs.

Identifier, URI: The url of the resource being described. Link directly to the resource not to a description of it in some catalogue. If the resource is found in multiple places, where possible link to the copy on the site of whoever released it/published it.

Author:Author name(s) as on the resource, seperated with semicolons. We’re not formatting these.

Licence: URI of the licence under which the resource is released. Will normally be a creative commons licence. Normally the URI will be a link on the resource.

Date: Date of last significant update of the resource. Use format [yyyy[-mm[-dd]]] e.g. 2011 or 2011-01 or 2011-01-29. Be as specific as you can. Watch out for instances where the release date as an OER or the last updated date for the web page differs significantly from the date of the resource.

Rights: human readable statement of copyright owner and any other significant rights, including the licence under which it is released.

Source: the URL for the home page of the collection or initiative through which the resource is released, e.g. http://ocw.mit.edu/ for MIT OCW.

Important advice on licensing

cetis, ukoer

It frequently comes to the attention of the CETIS-pedantry department that certain among the people with whom we interact, while they have much to say and write that is worth heeding, do not know when to use “licence” and when to use “license”. Those of you who prefer to use US English can stop reading now, unless you’re intrigued by the convolutions of the UK variant of the language: this won’t ever be an issue for you.

It’s quite simple: licence is a noun, it’s the thing; license is a verb, it’s what you do. But how to remember that? Well, hopefully you’ll see that advice is a noun but advise is a verb; similarly device (noun), devise (verb); practice (noun), practise (verb). Words ending –ise are normally verbs[*]. So license/licence sticks to the pattern of c for noun, s for verb.

Hope this helps.

[* OK, you may prefer –ize, which isn’t just for US usage in some cases–but that’s a different rant story]