Additional technical work for UKOER pilot programme

At the request of JISC, CETIS have undertaken some additional technical work related to the HE Academy/JISC OER Pilot Programme over and above that already undertaken through the CETIS OER Programme Support work and CETIS core work. Three areas have been identified as being relevant to the UKOER programme and well aligned with existing activities and interests in CETIS: the application of syndication feeds to repository ingest ("feed deposit"), aggregation across OER providers, and the tracking and analysis of OER use.

Feed Deposit
This investigated whether the need for repository services related to the Academy/JISC OER Pilot Programme (notably Jorum Open) to provide a mechanism for depositors to upload multiple resources at a time with minimal human intervention per resource could be met by the use of RSS (or other) feeds. The feed deposit approach is inspired by the way in which metadata and content is loaded onto user devices and applications in podcasting: in short, RSS and ATOM feeds are capable, in principle, of delivering the metadata required for deposit into a repository and in addition can provide either a pointer to the content or that content itself may be embedded into the feed.

Aggregation of OERs
This followed from interest in facilitating the provision of aggregations of resources representing the whole or a subset of the UKOER programme output (possibly along with resources from other sources). Aggregation here does not mean RSS aggregation: Steeple's Ensemble and Nottingham Uni's Xpert (to name just two examples) had already shown how that could be used in this context. So this work focussed on approaches namely aggregation of services, or more specifically cross-search. Three approaches were tried: A presentation based on this work was given by Lisa Rogers at the Open Educational Resources International Symposium (UKOER10), London, July 2010.
 * 1) A Google custom search of sites known to be relevant
 * 2) Querying and relevant services and aggregating the results through a Yahoo pipe
 * 3) Querying relevant services through their APIs and aggregating the results as a webpage.

Also in connexion with this a developer event on "OER Gathering" was organised as part of CETIS's ongoing core activities.

Tracking and analysis of OER use
Monitoring the release of resources through various channels, how those resources are used and reused and the comments and ratings associated with them, through technical means is highly relevant to evaluating the uptake of OERs. This type of monitoring is especially valuable where it can be related to the understanding and formative evaluation of business processes related to OERs or the desired outcome of a particular OER project. For example, it may be important to know how the rate of release of OERs relates to the academic year, or it might be useful to understand how decisions about the release of OERs (such as the choice of platform and resource description) affect the uptake of courses offered by an institution to potential students.

As part of our support for the UKOER programme CETIS had created a set of wiki pages summarizing possible options for tracking OER use. We planned in this work package to comission case studies and pilot studies from those UKOER projects who were either already using some of these tracking methods or were interested in trying to use one.