JISC CETIS and UKOER3

JISC CETIS and UKOER3 Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk> JISC CETIS Learning Technology Adviser http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/

About JISC CETIS • JISC Innovation Support Centre: Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards • provide strategic technical advice to JISC, supporting its development programmes • representing JISC on international standardisationinitiatives • support various JISC Programmes

Highlights from CETIS OER phase 3 support • The technical guidelines & requirements will be similar to phases 1 and 2 • There will be some commentary on where we think projects haven’t engaged with these as we expected. • Look out for a blog post. • We will try to promote innovation around OER projects through informed engagement with new & upcoming initiatives. • Informed about degree of speculation/risk • That’s what I’ll be talking about here

‘Informed about risk’ • Hype Cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

Some Initiatives for OER projects to think about • Aggregating & showcasing • Microformats/microdata/schema.org/LRMI • Attribution and tracking • SWORD • Learning registry & paradata

Aggregation for the nation! • Want to showcase the output of UKOER, so that funders know how good it is • It’s remarkably difficult to find where the outputs of some individual phase 1 and 2 projects are. • Need some way of automatically pulling out the resources that come from the UKOER projects Suggest: • Project tag • RSS feed • Project “set” within a larger collection • Low risk, basic action.

Make it easy for people to find your resources • Make it easy for machines to find your resources

Learning Resource Metadata Initiative • A profile of schema.org microdata mark-up • Allows the human readable (self-)description of an html resource to be marked up as machine readable metadata. • For example ... imagine this presentation as a set of web pages. • It is obvious that the title, author, licence and some other resource description stuff should be displayed prominently in it.

JISC CETIS and UKOER3 Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk> JISC CETIS Learning Technology Adviser http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/

... • To some people it would be obvious that there should be machine readable metadata <head> <title>JISC CETIS and OER</title><link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" /><link rel="DCTERMS.author" href="http://people.pjjk.net/phil#id" />...

But Google, Yahoo, Bing (among others) don’t trust invisible metadata. • However, their computers would like some help in understanding what is displayed on a web page • So they promote schema.org, as a means of marking up the meaning of displayed text. • Microdata semantics.

Schema.org microdata semantics <body itemscopeitemtype=‘http://schema.org/WebPage’> <h1 itemprop=‘name’>JISC CETIS and UKOER 3</h1> <p itemprop=‘author’ itemscopeitemtype=‘http://schema.org/Person’> <span itemprop=‘name’>Phil Barker</span> <span itemprop=‘email’>phil.barker@hw.ac.uk</span> ...</p>

But is an OER more than a web page? • Is there anything that you would want to say about an OER that is education specific? • Learning resource metadata initiative: apply and extend schema.org to learning resources.

LRMI • Funded by Gates and Hewlett foundations • Backed by Google & Microsoft • Led by Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers • Focussing on identifying a small number of education specific properties of a learning resource • What is it • Who is it for • What is it for • What does it teach/assess • ... • http://www.lrmi.net/

Risk Assessment • Little effort involved assuming you can control the HTML mark-up generated by your CMS / repository. • Marking resource descriptions using schema.org microdata may help search engine optimisation. • Perhaps will help with some types of resource more than others • LRMI specific mark-up is more experimental, we would like to work with some first adopters.

Attribution and tracking • The copy&paste HTML licence information from Creative Commons comes with semantic mark up • Enables tools like OpenAttribute • http://openattribute.com/ • Building on that CaPRéT project has build an attribution tool • Also includes a tracking gif in copied text • http://capret.mitoeit.org/

Learning Registry • Trying to help people find the right resource by facilitating the exchange of value judgements about resources. • Technical protocols for the aggregation of “paradata” Paradata: annotations, comments, ratings, ‘sharings’ likes, tweets about, +1s, recommendations and warnings “Social networking for learning resources”

Infrastructure http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/othervoices/2011/03/22/thelearningregistry/ • Image from Dan Rehak “The Learning registry: social networking for metadata” http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/othervoices/2011/03/22/thelearningregistry/

Learning Registry • Development funded by US Dept of Education since 2010 • Community launched last week (~ public beta) • Defines API by which nodes interact and through which data can be put into the network • Current nodes are based on CouchDB running on Amazon • Jisc have announced experimental node

Jisc launches Twitter project Amber Thomas, Jisc programme manager, said: "This international collaboration will see us contributing the UK's expertise to the Learning Registry. We are working with Mimas and Jisc CETIS to support the registry's vision of gathering together the conversations, ratings, recommendations and usage data around digital content. Guardian government computing http://www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2011/nov/09/jisc-launches-twitter-project

Assessment • Speculative • People who are gathering or might use ‘paradata’ should think about whether they could help test the learning registry concept • Evaluate data format for paradata • Provide paradata • See whether learning registry has relevant paradata • Don’t bet the farm on it

SWORD • Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit • Based on ATOM Pub • SWORD 2 supports CRUD • Supported by a number of repository platforms and tools

SWORD Background • SWORD development project supported by JISC • JISC also funded miniprojects for SWORD v2 tools • Connexions, cnx.org • Right-click deposit • Intralibrary have demonstrated a SWORD-based ‘share’ app for mobile phones

Assessment • Fairly well established in some contexts. • May enable resource dissemination by helping workflow; especially where deposit is close to creation/repurposing. • Would require some effort if existing repository and tool implementations don’t align with OER context. • Explorative

Contacts CETIS Web site: http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/ OER work: http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/topic/OER Phil Barker: <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk> Lorna M. Campbell: <lmc@strath.ac.uk> R. John Robertson <robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk>

Licence and attribution This work is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA. By Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk>, JISC CETIS <http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk>

JISC CETIS and UKOER3