Describing OERs

This section discusses aspects of resource description for Open Educational Resources (OERs). It includes or links to advice about metadata, OER self-description, providing licence information, and the requirements for the UKOER programmes.

much of content will come from OER_Description (which should be set up to redirect here when done.

Introduction
In describing any resource (OER or other) it should be remembered that:
 * 1) a given resource may need descriptive information for people to process and/or for machines to process
 * 2) descriptive information about the resource may be contained in the resources itself as readable text and/or in metadata records associated with or embedded in the resource

There are any number of pieces of descriptive information which might be useful to have about an OER but for the purposes of UKOER we deliberately chose a relatively small set of required information - OER 2 Technical Requirements.

In brief the programme requirements are: and the recommendations are:
 * Programme tag; Project tag; Title; Author / owner / contributor; Date; URL; Licence information.
 * Language; Subject classifications; Keywords; Additional Tags; Comments; Descriptions

The relationship between metadata and description
In these posts Phil provides an overview of some of the issues in description and how they relate to metadata


 * What is metadata and resource description?
 * About metadata and resource description Part 1
 * About metadata and resource description Part 2

Metadata standards and describing OERs in the pilot programme
~context and see section for more detials

What standards were used?


 * The use of Dublin Core metadata in the UKOER programme
 * The use of IEEE LOM in the UKOER programme
 * The use of IMS QTI in the UKOER programme

Metadata and resource discovery services
bigger question -how are people going to find and use what you share?
 * Comparing metadata requirements in a wider context of OER work
 * OER metadata for different aggregators
 * OER metadata and 2nd Tuesday discussion of information needs
 * OER metadata - final thoughts and outstanding issues

for more information on Sharing metadata with resource discovery services see [sections]

OER and self description

 * What information might you include in the resource itself?
 * OER resources and self-description

License information for OERs
See: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/OER_licence

Search Engine Optimisation for OERs
See: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/OER_SEO

Examples of descriptive practice from UKOER Pilot
Examples of descriptive practice from projects
 * Institutional Strand projects
 * Dublin Core U-Now RSS feed
 * Mapping of UK LOM core to DC Terms (Open Exeter)
 * OpenSpires / Steeple consideration of metadata and mapping to multiple export formats
 * Unicycle's exploration of metadata
 * Initial considerations
 * metadata for OERs within discussion of OpenSearch implementation


 * Subject Strand projects
 * A work example of thinking about resource description from the Engineering Subject Centre Project Resource description for Engineering OERs