• Redesigned institutional website
• Implementation of Symplectic Elements
• Implementation of EBSCO Discovery Tool (see http://leedsmetlibrary.wordpress.com/ for more info.)
• Implementation of Easydeposit SWORD client for OER (blogpost coming soon!)

This is a quick schematic of how the developing infrastructure might look (a bit big to fit in my WordPress theme so click on image for full size):

Developer @patlockley describes the overall functionality of the plug-in here and also covers some of the limitations posed by the broader OER infrastructure here emphasising that “no standard API exists across repositories so as to facilitate a single approach to aggregation for an aggregation creator” - as well as a seperate post here considering limitations of the WordPress platform itself used in this context and associated technical considerations.

In summary the plug-in searches Xpert, Merlot and OER Commons (via their API) as well as Wikipedia, Wikibooks and Wikiversity for openly licensed material; Mendeley for journals and with options to add RSS feeds for blogs and podcasts.

Here I’ll briefly describe my experiences of using the plug-in – fairly candid in the hope that it will be useful feedback to Pat and Triton albeit with the initial caveat that any issues I’ve encountered are just as likely to be associated with my limited experience of WordPress and my shambrarian status (I simply haven’t had time to hone the search terms as carefully as I would like) as with the plug-in itself (which of course is pre-release.)

Once installed, famously straightforward in WordPress even prior to release (via FTP), you get a new “Dynamic Collection” tab in the dashboard where I can add a new collection…pretty much at random, I chose an undergraduate course from Leeds Met – Civil Engineering - around which to build my dynamic collection – it’s then just a matter of adding title and search terms, updating the feeds from the three source repositories and publishing:

This admittedly unsophisticated search returned 9 results:

Obviously the plug-in is only as effective as the keyword data / api / source repository(ies) that it is using and the fifth link here actually points at an entirely different resource (in Jorum) with no relevance to Civil Engineering, presumably due to an error at some point along it’s, er, conjugation - as the plug-in does not search Jorum directly this must have come via Xpert which does harvest Jorum. While experimenting with the plug-in I’ve also had instances where links have returned 404s or been otherwise broken so one requirement I think would be the option to remove links from the collection that are incorrect, broken…or simply less relevant; to allow the WordPress administrator fuller control of the collection.

In order to add a blog or podcast under the Settings tab, the plug-in has installed several new tabs (I don’t think the Feed management / Collection statistics / Collection tabs are yet fully functional in the version I am testing):

Under the Dynamic Collection Options there are fields to add rss feeds from blogs or podcasts:

I’ve experienced a few teething troubles adding blogs not least because I don’t know much about Civil Engineering! As I understand, it should search blog title and description for the dynamic collection keywords…I added a feed from http://www.civilengineering.co.uk/feed/ which returned this single (most recent) post - http://www.civilengineering.co.uk/2010/09/civil-engineering-issues/ (the blog, in fact, only appears to comprise 2 posts so presumably would update should any new posts be added?)

I’m very optimistic about the potential of this approach to allow WordPressing course leaders, perhaps with support from learning technologists, to quickly and easily assemble a dynamic collection of OER for their students and look forward to the formal release of the finished product* – in the meantime, in true Blue Peter stylee, here are a number of collections that Pat made earlier to give a sense of what should be possible:

http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/political-theory/

http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/comparative-government/

http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/international-relations/

http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/european-politics-and-society/

* The only caveat from my perspective is that my own institution does not formally support the use of WordPress, nevertheless, there is certainly a requirement, explicitly identified by senior stakeholders,  to develop tools to cross-search Open Educational Resources and, in this context, I think we can learn a lot from the Triton project.

N.B. Such a mechanism, however implemented via the proliferation of OER repositories and their APIs, also put me in mind of this post from Suzanne Hardy (@glittrgirl) of MEDEV and the PORSCHE project - Branding, repositories, OER and awareness raising: some thoughts on embedding OERs

See also: Delores OER – WordPress for hosting and describing learning resources (University of Bath and Heriot-Watt)

The plug-in isn’t yet publicly available – I’m hoping that I can have a go fairly soon *waves at Pat*…I’m no WordPress developer and am just finding my way round a test install of the platform, experimenting by pulling in different feeds from various sources (our own repository, Jorum, HumBox) using a plug-in called FeedWordPress - http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/. It’s dead easy to syndicate one (or multiple) feeds to a designated posts page but what I can’t figure out is how I might push different feeds to different pages so I could, say, have one page that auto-publishes from the Leeds Met repository, one from Jorum, one from Humbox etc.

Below: Syndicated posts from Jorum (HE – Architecture, Building and Planning) to a “Jorum” page…but how can I push separate HumBox and Leeds Met feeds to the respective pages?

To recap, under the ukoer programme, it was mandated that all resources released by an institutional project must also be made available from the national repository service Jorum. The method used by most phase 1 projects was harvest of metadata only by RSS, however, in our case, we were unable to produce an RSS feed in the necessary format and in lieu of OAI-PMH which was not supported by Jorum, the requirement was fulfilled by a full IMSCP transfer – I simply uploaded a zip file of all resources that the JORUM tech folk were able to ingest directly into DSpace. At the time this was seen as the ideal solution for Jorum which, as a “repository”, should seek to preserve actual files rather than just URIs pointing to resources elsewhere. However, it meant that our files were duplicated in both repositories and that our repository would inevitably be eclipsed by Jorum in search engine results. I’ve explored these implications elsewhere and they have also cropped up as part of the ACErep project and I have become convinced that a better solution for us would be for metadata only to be harvested (or possibly deposited by SWORD*) including a URI in our institutional repository.

(Our OAI-PMH is already harvested by the Xpert repository at Nottingham University)

As ukoer folk will be aware, the management of Jorum is currently undergoing substantive restructuring; hitherto a joint project between EDINA and MIMAS, from 1st August 2011, the service will be managed exclusively by MIMAS and will liaise more closely with the NDLR – http://www.ndlr.ie/ – in Ireland (also based on DSpace) and utilising a common, Open Source code-base.

One of the likely early developments from this is that Jorum will soon support OAI-PMH – the protocol is already supported by the NDLR running on a more current version of DSpace – allowing us, I hope, to revisit how our resources (metadata only) are ingested into Jorum. In addition, MIMAS will be putting further development efforts into enhancing the Jorum API which has already been identified as a pre-requisite for both our ACErep project and the PORSCHE project at Newcastle University.

* SWORD deposit (metadata only) into Jorum in tandem with file deposit into a local repository should be technically possible I think and would potentially have the benefit of records being available immediately from the API rather than the inevitable delay associated with harvest (Xpert harvests overnight).

This evolving national infrastructure is obviously essential to advocacy around Open Educational Resources; the development, release, use and reuse of OER at an institutional level and will necessarily underpin developing institutional infrastructures. For example, in conjunction with promotional activities here at Leeds Met and technical developments from Intrallect – notably a desktop SWORD client (beta) that can capture core ukoer metadata and deposit to our intraLibrary installation – I hope that we can close the ukoer circle such that teaching staff can source their own OER from Jorum, Xpert or other institutional or subject source – reuse and/or repurpose under the terms of Creative Commons and redeposit back into our local repository and thence automatically to Jorum / Xpert / other syndicated OER services (e.g. Learning Registry) via OAI-PMH and / or SWORD.

I think I’m right in saying that it’s still atypical to manage both types of resource with a single repository platform and there are certainly considerations why it may not necessarily be desirable – both from a technical and political perspective.

The main repositories that have been developed as part of the ukoer programme are modifications to DSpace (Jorum) and EPrints (HumBox, EdShare), the two main open source repository software platforms that were both initially developed to manage research. In contrast, we have worked with intraLibrary, a commercial learning object repository, to manage both OER and research and while this certainly hasn’t been without it’s problems, I’m naturally interested in potential benefits from this approach both in terms of “reward & recognition” for OER by something analogous to peer-review perhaps (a theme that was explored as part of the Unicycle project) and also in terms of work-flow, possibly mediated via a CRIS-type system such as Symplectic Elements or Atira Pure…

intraLibrary has a workflow to link related resources which I can easily use to link a research paper with associated OER, so in the example below I can link…

Coates, C., Smith, S. (2010) Promoting the concept of competency maps to enhance the student learning experience. Assessment, Teaching and Learning Journal (Leeds Met), 10 (Winter), pp.21-25.

…to the three ALPS Common Competency Maps in the OER collection (see Linked Resources at the bottom of the record):

ALPS Common Competency Map – Communication

ALPS Common Competency Map – Ethical Practice

ALPS Common Competency Map – Team Working

These records, in turn, comprise links back to the research paper (and associated conference paper):

With such an approach, is there perhaps an opportunity to tie research and OER more closely together at an institutional level (if this isn’t politically naive!) and contribute to research led teaching?

The next stage might be to develop a common workflow for research and OER…

Workflow, in fact, has long been a bug-bear of mine and, for both types of resource, essentially remains fully mediated by me and administrative colleagues. In all likelihood, however, as are many institutions, we will soon be implementing a CRIS that will make it easier to collate institutional research outputs by harvesting research data from external bibliometric sources, as well as allowing records to be added manually, and integrating with the repository such that academic staff are able to attach an appropriate full-text to a record and upload it along with metadata into the repository directly from a “user-friendly interface” (TM).

At a recent demo of one of these types of system I confirmed that it could transfer a range of file-types to a repository (utilising SWORD) as well as allowing various licences to be configured including (I think) Creative Commons so there seems no fundamental reason why such a system could not be used to support the workflow for both OA research and OER.

Of course I will need to get my hands on one of these systems before I can properly investigate exactly what is achievable…watch this space.

Nick Sheppard at DevCSI’s OER Hack Day from UKOLN on Vimeo.

What I have:

A (slightly unwieldy) set of files comprising:

• (an earlier version) of the SWORD client available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sword-app/ (an Executable Jar and related files)
• a Visual Basic Script
• a Windows Batch file

How it works:

The VB script was written by Boyd Duffy at Keele University and, as a non-developer, I know only that I need to edit  sword_deposit.vbs with my SWORD DEPOSIT_TARGET. It’s then simply* a matter of dragging and dropping a file (or multiple files) onto the VBS icon for them to be uploaded into the repository (workflow can obviously be configured in the repository itself, to be published immediately**, for example, or, more likely, go into a workflow where metadata can be added according to a particular Application Profile).

** I think Keele use it as a quick and dirty method for image files to be transferred from desktop to repository from where they can be immediately accessed via a VLE PowerLink.

Here is a screen capture that I did a while ago: http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/repository/video/SWORD_drop_from_desktop/

* Re simple – I can, in fact, only make it work from a Leeds Met IP!  Perhaps something to do with PROXY_HOST / wireless?

What I need:

METADATA of course!

The current tool is of limited use as it just pushes a file into the repository. In fact, it will quite happily push a Content Package – a Zip comprising a file and some metadata as XML – either an IMSMANIFEST (which I would need for intraLibrary) or METS for DSpace (i.e. Jorum.)

Though I don’t have the skills myself, I’m hoping someone can tell me how we might develop a desktop app to integrate a way of capturing the metadata associated with a resource, converting it into an IMSMANIFEST and/or METS, zipping the whole lot up and pushing it to a repository (or multiple repositories) via SWORD …

If we were to use our current ukoer AP we would need to capture:

• Title
• Description
• (Uncontrolled) Keyword(s)
• Author / owner / contributor
• Date
• Type of resource
• Technical format
• Licence information
• Subject classification (HEA and JACS)

Click link below for an example IMSCP:

http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/IntraLibrary?command=open-package-download&learning_object_key=i3605n162666t.zip

Or link below for METS (with cut-down metadata); this package has been successfully deposited in Jorum (dev) via SWORD:

http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/IntraLibrary?command=open-preview&learning_object_key=i3128n92902t

N.B. A practical issue with this approach might be including such an application on an institutional staff build and I have heard rumours that it might be possible to achieve similar drag and drop functionality with a web-based app using HTML5 – browser support still inconsistent though I think.

One of the issues that arose and that has certainly been mentioned elsewhere, was that they would want additional metadata, about module and level for example. I emphasised that Unicycle – indeed all of the first phase of ukoer – were pilot projects and, as discussed on this blog during the project, a lightweight Application Profile in line with CETIS guidelines for the ukoer programme was used to ensure interoperability with Jorum. From an institutional or faculty perspective, I don’t think it would be technically difficult to, say, have a separate collection for FBL with any additional metadata that could be presented through a faculty specific portal; the resources could go in two collections so they would also sit in the main OER collection with a cut-down application profile from where they would be harvested by Jorum / Xpert etc. Workflows notwithstanding…I’ll get to that…

At risk of stating the bleeding obvious, I’m becoming increasingly determined that local, institutional OER infrastructures need to develop much more closely with the national infrastructure which needs to be able to manage whatever metadata we throw at it. My ideal scenario is pretty straightforward really, at least in principle, if not practice:

• We can manage OER in our repository with whatever metadata our users require; this would include everything currently in the Application Profile but may also include, for example, module/level or additional subject specific taxonomies
• The national service will harvest (all) metadata from our repository by OAI-PMH and ensure that it is *all* searchable from an open API allowing the development of bespoke / subject specific web-sites
• This approach will have the benefit of digital assets being preserved in one location (our own institutional repository) while providing several points of access (our repository interface, Jorum interface/widget, Xpert, multiple APIs)
• Our institutional repository and bespoke web-sites (using either our own API or that of the national service) will “piggyback” on Jorum’s Google pagerank thereby improving discoverability

I am aware that this particular scenario is perhaps oriented around my own requirements, nevertheless, it is based on well established repository technology and would be extensible to other institutional (OER) repositories.

Exposing OER content from @LeedsMetRepo to be reliably harvested by Jorum or Xpert is only part of the picture, however.  My workflows, to be frank, are somewhat esoteric, mediated by me and one or two colleagues, not scalable and unlikely to pass the repository-manager-hit-by-a-bus test. There are several tools that I am interested in exploring in this context outlined below:

MEDEV open educational resources good practice risk assessment toolkit (development version)

This is a hybrid of several tools that began life as part of the OOER project under phase 1 of ukoer and allows you to upload a resource, add metadata via a web-form, apply an appropriate licence, run your resource through the MEDEV open educational resources risk assessment toolkit (beta) and (this is the good though yet to be implemented bit)  syndicate the metadata (only?) to several locations including Jorum / Xpert (and a local repository?)

Sign up to have a go and help with testing at www.medev.ac.uk/oer/signup

SWORD / EasyDeposit

I must confess I have a minor obsession with SWORD and there is no doubt that it offers enormous potential for simplifying repository workflow. As part of the development work on ACErep and with a little help from its developer @stuartlewis, we have now tested EasyDeposit – http://easydeposit.swordapp.org/ – and successfully posted a METS package to the Jorum development server. We should also be able to configure the client to deposit to @LeedsMetRepo (though this will require us to write an IMS content packager for EasyDeposit – see here for more info)

Of course, I’m inclined to think that the best solution for us is to have the digital asset in @LeedsMetRepo with just a metadata record in Jorum…as outlined above, harvest may be the way to go but may it also be worth exploring a SWORD client that simultaneously pushes the full content package into @LeedsMetRepo and metadata only into Jorum?

Xerte

Another issue, I think, is the difficulty folk have actually creating high-quality interactive OERs and the need for an institutionally-supported easy-to-use authoring tool which is where Xerte – http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/ - might come in – “a server-based suite of tools for content authors. Elearning materials can be authored quickly and easily using browser-based tools, with no programming required. Xerte Online Toolkits is aimed at content authors, who will assemble content using simple wizards. Content authors can easily collaborate on projects. Xerte Online Toolkits can be extended by developers using Xerte.”

I’ve already approached our Info Technology service to enquire about having Xerte installed at Leeds Met and I hope to have a test implementation at some point in the not-too-distant future.

VLE integration

Would more sophisticated VLE integration help OER really take off? We currently have a “PowerLink” in BlackBoard which just comprises a simple search box for keyword or simple-string searching i.e. it’s not terribly useful unless you already know what it there. As well as much more sophisticated search of local and national repositories it would be great to be able to deposit back into a repository from a VLE as explored by the MrCute for Moodle projects (1 and 2) - http://www.learningobjectivity.com/mrcute/.  I don’t know of any comparable work with BlackBoard…or whether the MrCute code could be implemented in that (commercial) environment.

The developmental overheads for all of these tools are considerable – there are no quick fixes I’m afraid. I was quite interested in some discussion at the JISC conference last week – session recording here – that there is evidence that open release acts to improve the quality of institutional teaching resources and ultimately what we should be aiming for is to promote institutional release via our repository and associated tools alongside discovery using aggregations like Jorum/Xpert

The problem(s):

intraLibrary RSS feeds point to resource “in the wild” rather than the record on Open Search. Like this:

http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/IntraLibrary-RSS?rss_feed_id=6a6176612e7574696c2e52616e646f6d4031393166376364&rss_2.0.xml

Owen helped me put together a simple pipe that took this feed and used regex to replace an identifier from the record and redirect to the Open Search URL (which is built from this identifier. Like this:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=3586ad8141869b6978d8dbef538ac01f

So far so good…however, when I originally defined my Application Profile for research in intraLibrary I used multiple instances of <lom:description> with the first holdong ISSN (frustratingly missing from intraLibraries Bib extensions) and the Abstract held in a second instance of <lom:description> meaning it isn’t exposed in an RSS feed.

So…I thought that if I used an SRU query instead as a pipe input there would be a lot more data to play with in Pipes and hopefully I would be able to build a better RSS feed – including author and abstract.

After some initial problems with Pipes taking an SRU input, Owen responded to my plea for help with this pipe that extracts title and abstract from the SRU by defining the path through the XML to the relevant fields and mapping them to title and description:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=2054b55b81b5b96236b6870b03bef85c

However, I still need to figure out how to link the title to the respective record on Open Search. There is a link in the XML but this is no good as, once again, it points to the resource in the wild rather than the record on Open Search…somehow I need to use the identifier to build a link to the respective record on Open Search.

<lom:entry>oai:com.intralibrary.leedsmet:3352</lom:entry>

http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/view_record.php?identifier=3352&SearchGroup=research

And frankly now I’m a bit stumped again – the regex function from the first pipe presumably needs to be in there somewhere…first vague attempt (doesn’t actually return any output – but this is a brain dump!):

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=00bc8c1cd13fc852d2fb8d0da7defdd4

However, due to the way I initially mapped intraLibrary LOM, the abstract is held in a second instance of the description field so my RSS feeds are just title (I’ve got ISSN in the first which I hide)…sure there must be a way to produce an RSS feed from an SRU query including this field using Yahoo Pipes…this is the SRU query:

http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/IntraLibrary-SRU?recordSchema=lom&operation=searchRetrieve&version=1.1&maximumRecords=10&startRecord=1&query=rec.collectionIdentifier=Carnegie&x-info-2-auth1.0-authenticationToken=research

Anybody help?