Advances in Open Systems for Learning Resources

A CETIS workshop at the Repository Fringe 2011, Edinburgh, Friday 5th August

Encouraged by recent initiatives promoting the release of openly licensed educational resources there have been considerable developments in the innovative use of repositories, content management systems and web based tools to manage and share materials for teaching and learning. At this event developers and implementers of open repositories, content management systems and other tools presented and discussed recent updates to their systems and their application to learning resources.

The speakers lined up for this event covered a diverse range of topics that relate to "open systems". These include open source repository system software, repositories of openly licensed content, open access repositories, open standards and open APIs.

Summaries

 * Sheila MacNeill's storify blog post. Summary from the twitter stream during the event.
 * Nicola Osborne's live blog from the workshop. Detailed notes--I recommend this is read alongside any of the presentations linked to below.
 * Photos of the presentations from Nicola and more photos from Sheila.

Welcome and introduction Phil Barker, CETIS
[[media:RfCetis Open systems for learning resources.png|Outline of topics]] and timetable for the day.

Warm-up: Repositories and learning resources - John Robertson, CETIS
Group discussion and feedback to consider the differences between an OER collection (of any type(s) of material) and a collection of high stakes summative question items (and answers/ rubrics).

Summarised on John's Jisc CETIS blog

Community Engagement in Teaching and Learning repositories: ePrints, HumBox and OER - Patrick McSweeny, University of Southampton
The Mechanisms and Impact of Encouraging Community Engagement in Teaching Repositories paper and presentation in the Southampton ePrints repository

Highlights, reactions & comments from Twitter
 * Peter Douglas: HumBox is a community repository not an institutional repository. 1400 resources in HumBox (consisting of multiple files)
 * Terry McAndrew: Pat McSweeny mentions benefits of a good subject community to boost repository content
 * Phil Barker: Patrick McSweeny "there's more to web2 than sticking a comment box on your repository"
 * JohnRobertson: teaching materials motivations: showcase your course; back up & manage your content; promote use of rich content;
 * Peter Douglas: Used character sheets to understand who their users are
 * Peter Douglas: Nice to hear our CDLOR work being reflected back to us after all these years. Not much changes
 * Lorna M. Campbell: McSweeney: If you enable people they will come, building the repository isn't enough
 * Peter Douglas: HumBox looking very interesting - user has their own page with a focus on materials of interest to them
 * Nicola Osborne: Couldn't agree more with Pat's comments about power of community and community evangelists for your repository/project
 * Phil Barker: Humbox provides academics with information about when their learning materials are commented on or used
 * Sheila MacNeill: User comments made lots of people adapt their content
 * Peter Douglas: Over 50% of users modify or augment the materials discovered in HumBox
 * JohnRobertson: 66% of users who used others' content adapted their own teaching a result

Hydra Fedora and learning materials at the University of Hull. Chris Awre
Hydra, Fedora and learning objects at the University of Hull presentation in University of Hull's repository.

Highlights, reactions & comments from Twitter
 * JohnRobertson: Hydra & learning materials at Hull. Managing l&t stuff at scale began with #Ukoer
 * Phil Barker: Hull repository used for digitised (old) books, data and exam papers along with more usual stuff.
 * Sheila MacNeill: Fedora digital object model http://t.co/Z9MqcLw
 * JohnRobertson: why Hull chose Fedora. Reviewing digital object models & single flexible platform for very diverse content types
 * Peter Douglas: Muradora was making Fedora act like a DC registry with files attached
 * Peter Douglas: Hydra: Unfunded project to work towards a reusable framework for digital repositories Focus on object-specific behaviours; Different interfaces for books, images, Learning Objects, etc
 * Phil Barker: One theme of @clawre's presentation is flexibility of fedora and how this is helpful for learning materials
 * JohnRobertson: A key part of Hydra infrastructure is the ability to layer Blacklight over Fedora

The Learning Registry Initiative, Dan Rehak, ADL
The Learning Registry: Social Networking for Metadata on Google docs.

Highlights, reactions & comments from Twitter
 * Sheila MacNeill: Use case showing complexity of sharing/ use of NASA material
 * Peter Douglas: Social Metadata Timeline leads to knowledge amplification
 * Sheila MacNeill: Metadata timeline this is what they mean by paradata
 * JohnRobertson: in the long run information about the use of content will be more valuable than hand crafted description of it
 * Lorna M. Campbell: There is no global on / off switch for #learningreg unless you turn off the internet
 * Sheila MacNeill: Learning registry stack http://t.co/Bffofd2
 * Sheila MacNeill: Transport network for #learningreg http://t.co/FyNBbhv
 * Peter Douglas: So glad @sheilmcn is taking pictures of this stuff. A picture speaks a thousand tweets or something like that.
 * JohnRobertson: publish, sword, OAI-pmh (limited set), obtain (by id / url), harvest, slice(fixed views), distribute
 * Lorna M. Campbell: #learingreg will not built a query API because they're really hard to build. Use something like elastic search instead.
 * Phil Barker: Back end of learning registry is couchDb a NoSQL json docstore also used by BBC and large hadron collider
 * Lorna M. Campbell @patlockley's #learingreg plugin being shown
 * JohnRobertson slide of some of those collaborating in the #learningreg http://t.co/S2tCe9i

Getting Bioscience Open Educational resources into 'Academic Orbit'. Tales from the OeRBITAL launchpad - Terry McAndrew, University of Leeds
presentation coming soon.

Highlights, reactions & comments from Twitter
 * JohnRobertson: @terrymc getting us to discuss the best oer we've ever seen
 * Lorna M. Campbell: Top oers: Virtual Dutch timeline, boil a jelly baby vid, landmap, hitting silly putty with a hammer vid
 * JohnRobertson: many of our best #oer from YouTube or flickr (boiling jelly baby) [also some 'services' (remote telescope)]
 * Phil Barker: "Big oer is difficultto fit into existing courses." Say academics, but are they the main stakeholder, asks Terry
 * Pablo de Castro: OeRBITAL Project wiki identifies individual against related topics,
 * Phil Barker: RT @chr1staylor OeRBITAL Community Portal: http://bit.ly/o5pB0h
 * JohnRobertson:a key aspect of their #ukoer 2 work has been to capture the stories around discovery & use of oer

Intralibrary and Item Banking - Charles Duncan, Intrallect Ltd.
[[Media:RfCETISIntralibraryplus.ppt | Intralibrary and Item Banking‎]] (Powerpoint file)

Highlights, reactions & comments from Twitter
 * Sheila MacNeill: General principles of interoperability and integration - nice summary
 * Phil Barker: Charles distinguishing between interoperability and integration. No one want systems that are neither.
 * Peter Douglas: Aiming towards high integration and high interoperability
 * Phil Barker: Interoperability gives you loose coupling, integration gives you higher interactivity.
 * Sheila MacNeill: Charles now taking us through one of their assessment item workflows
 * Peter Douglas: Live demonstration of question builder integration with intralibraryplus
 * Peter Douglas: As usual, Charles goes off script in his intralibraryplus demo and edits a question he has not done before #coverseyes
 * Peter Douglas: Charles successfully creates and saves hotspot question
 * Peter Douglas: Now showing a question being played directly from intralibraryplus in MathAssessEngine

WordPress for hosting and describing educational content - Phil Barker, CETIS
Presentation and notes from Nicola Osborne

Highlights, reactions & comments from Twitter
 * Lorna M. Campbell: @philbarker explaining Bayesian filtering
 * JohnRobertson: @philbarker outlining requirements specification of platform for static collection of OER in Delores project->wordpress
 * Lorna M. Campbell: @philbarker good web presence boils down to being findable in google to a simple extent
 * Peter Douglas: CETIS looking at using Wordpress to disseminate resources, papers etc
 * Peter Douglas: @philbarker emphasis of wordpress is on post about the resource and not the resource itself. This can be a restriction
 * JohnRobertson: wordpress meets most requirements but issues around metadata; Delores using custom fields with plugin under development

OpenMed and WordPres - Ross Ward, University of Edinburgh
Ross gave a live demo of OpenMed and discussed ad lib


 * Peter Douglas: Ross from @tweelearning (LTS, Uni of Edin) talking about OpenMed; another use of Wordpress
 * Peter Douglas: Editor view made as simple as possible in #openmed
 * Peter Douglas: Curriculum is a focal point for resource discovery
 * Phil Barker: Openmed.co.uk have used wordpress pages to describe their curriculm topics (Im stealing that idea)
 * Phil Barker:	Search within category in openmed. I'm stealing that too.
 * John Robertson: many functions both Delores & OpenMed need are built into wordpress & maintained by community; as is google visibility

Many thanks to all who came, and especially those who tweeted and so contributed to this record of the event.