SlideShare for UKOER resources

Overview: What is the scope of the platform, are there any significant limitations? Important technical aspects include metadata, syndication feeds and API availability as they relate to the UK OER programme requirements. SlideShare's core service is as a host for presentations, e.g. PowerPoint slides. These can be simple slide stacks, or can be slidecasts or videocasts which include audio or video commentary to accompany the slides. Recently SlideShare has added support for more general text and graphics "documents".

SlideShare has the usual facilities for tagging, licensing and describing resources, and profile pages to allow contributors to be identified. There is an element of social networking, with users able to become "friends" to form "groups" in order to share resources.

Formats and Standards
Presentations can be usploaded as PowerPoint (ppt, pps, pot, pptx, potx, ppsx), OpenOffice (odp, pdf) or Apple Keynote (key, zip or pdf) formats.

For slidecasts the audio should be in mp3 format.

Documents & Spreadsheets can be in Microsoft Office (doc, docx, rtf, xls), OpenOffice (odt, ods, pdf) or iWork Pages. For other applications PDF can often be used.

The maximum file size that can be uploaded is 100MB.

API
SlideShare has a RESTful API which allows downloading slideshows by user, group or tag, upload and deletion of slideshows, retrieving and editing information about a slideshow, retrieval of information about a user (the tags they use, the groups they're in, the other users they are friends with), and search for slideshows etc.. There are third-party API client libraries in PHP, .Net (C#), JAVA, Python ColdFusion and Ruby.

Authentication is by passing the username and password for the account being accessed.

API calls are limited to 1000 per day per API_Key, so busy sites should cache the information the retrieve.

Feeds
Feeds from most pages give the most recent uploads to all of SlideShare, however from a user account or group page, RSS 2.0 feeds are available for all uploads from that user or group and for the just the presentations or just the documents uploaded by a user. No feeds are available for activity relating to individual resources.

The feeds do not validate.

Other metadata
Embedded metadata in uploaded files (e.g. XMP in PDFs) does not seem to be used.

Collections and Grouping
Users can form groups to pool their presentations, which might be useful for distributed OER projects.

There does not seem to be any way (other than tags) individual users to divide their uploads into collections.

Content export & embedding
Both presentations and documents are converted to a format which is displayed through a Flash player. A code snippet is provided for embedding this content into pages on third party sites. Depending on access options, the original file may be downloaded.

Visibility on Search Engines
Text from slides is available to search engines for indexing. Content is not especially highly ranked on search engines, though a search for "bridge presentation" (no quotes) gave a presentation hosted on slideshare as first or second result in Google and MSN/Bing, but not Yahoo.

Usage stats for resources
The number of views, comments, favourites and embeds is available for each resource, both on the resource's page and in the user's RSS feed.

UKOER
Are any UKOER projects using the service?

The CORE MATERIALS UKOER project has used the API to upload around 150 PDF files of lectures. The API does not seem to default to All Rights Reserved, even if a CC licence is specified by default in the profile. This means anyone using the API for bulk upload will need to manually set the licence for each resource.

Others
Are any other major OER initiatives using the service?

Notes and comments
Slideshare allows update of existing resources, which may be useful to some.

The metadata available through the RSS feed is rather disappointing, no keywords or license information and sparse information about the author or rights holder.

Lack of OAuth or similar for remote access by API is also disappointing.