Tracking OERs: Counting Resources

This page is one of several describing technical approaches to tracking the use of OERs. Monitoring the number of resources that are released by an OER provider need be no more complicated than counting them. It is, of course possible to do this through the OER provider's record keeping, though for large and distributed efforts this might be a non-trivial task. For the UKOER programme, where deposit in Jorum Open is a condition of funding this is simplified since one can count what is in the repository at any given time. In principle the same applies whereever there is a defined service or set of services through which all the OERs that one wishes to count are released. It is necessary to give some thought to the requirements for this monitoring in order to deduce the details of how to do this. For example:


 * If the service through which one is publishing the resources contains OERs from a range of providers (as does Jorum Open), then it will be necessary to label the resource with some tag to identify its source. Following the metadata guidelines for UKOER it is required that resources provided through that programme be tagged with the keyword UKOER in the metadata, which allows one to count all the resources in Jorum Open returned by a search for this tag and thus quantify the output of the programme. Projects wishing to do similar counting through a (number of) shared hosting and dissemination service(s) may need their own tag (in some cases it may be enough to record the owner or contributor of the resource, but not if an individual or organisation is contributing to multiple projects).


 * One of the reasons why a provider may wish to monitor the number of resources released over time is to help understand the relationships between OER release and the processes of teaching and learning: for example, do resources tend to be released at particular times of the academic year, what is the effect of funding or other initiatives, is there an initial burst of enthusiasm at the start of the project followed by a steady trickle or does the rate of release increase as the processes of releasing get embedded in more people's practice? In order to answer such questions it is necessary to have a time-dimension to the monitoring, either by continual on-going logging of results or by recording the time of release in the metadata of the resource. The metadata guidelines for UKOER suggest that the date of the resource is recorded, though leave it up to the project to decide whether this is the date of original creation or the date of release as an OER (or both).


 * It may be questionable whether individual resources should all be counted as equivalent regardless of whether they are a single image or an entire course packaged into a single file. For example the UKOER programme requires that projects release material equivalent to a certain number credits. Recording information in the metadata about the duration or typical learning time of a resource may be of some limited value in some cases (e.g. where the resources are all videos of lectures) for monitoring this, but there is unlikely to be any universal technical solution to this question.


 * Care may be required where resources can be modified by a third party and republished as to whether the republished resource is counted in the same way as the original. This may happen if, for example, one is counting the number of resources with a specific tag and that tag is not removed from the modified resource.

Simple counting of the results that match some search criterion may be possible using the host service's regular search interface, however some of the more specific monitoring approaches would probably require access to the metadata records (e.g. by OAI-PMH) and some software written for that analysis.