Plugged-in for OER

As mentioned in this recent post I’ve been experimenting with WordPress for presenting OER and have been testing a pre-release version of a WordPress plug-in, developed by the Triton project at the University of Oxford to facilitate a dynamic collection of OER in a WordPress blog.

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)

Metadata and Me

I’ve been invited to speak on Friday at an event in York – The Metadata Forum – Metadata For Complex Objects and will be focussing on our ukoer project Unicycle which utilised a fairly lightweight Application Profile based on programme recommendations from CETIS – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/03/30/metadata-guidelines-for-the-oer-programme/

N.B. Worth reviewing these in the context of CETIS’ updated recommendations for phase 2 – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2010/12/03/oer-2-technical-requirements/ (Resource description)

I’ll also be considering questions of interoperability and a few ideas we are exploring in the context of our ACErep project around the possibility of building value added services on centralised repositories of harvested data.

Slides reviewed below:

Slide 3 – Lightening bio

I’ve included this as my (lack of) professional background in the area strikes me as relevant for good or ill – I’ve only been working with repositories/metadata since October 2007 and everything I have learned has been on the job, so to speak.  I am not a qualified librarian or professional cataloguer (shambrarian at best) and I think this has had both benefits and drawbacks; I am *ahem* unrestricted by formal theory and have also needed to find my way through a great deal of esoteric jargon often to gain some fairly basic understanding   –  ultimately, I think this has necessarily resulted in a pragmatic approach and a willingness to take advice!

Slide 4 – Context – Repository Projects at Leeds Met

Repository projects at Leeds Met, in chronological order, are the Repository Start-up itself, Streamline, PERSoNA, Unicycle, Bibliosight – all funded by JISC – and  our current ACErep project which is funded by HEFCE.

Our repository platform is intraLibrary which uses IEEE LOM metadata.

(click for larger image)

Slide 5 – UKOER project – Unicycle

• Funded under JISC ukoer (phase 1)
• Develop process by which staff able to contribute to and draw upon a central repository of OER
• Very granular approach to OER
• “Resources” rather than “Courseware”
• Simple Application Profile – ukoer guidelines
• Mediated deposit
• Leeds Met repository, Jorum Open and other suitable outlets

Slide 6 – An Application Profile for UKOER

• Discussion coordinated by CETIS  http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/03/30/metadata-guidelines-for-the-oer-programme/
• Keep it simple
• Mandatory fields
• Recommended fields
• Individual projects should think about their own metadata requirements
• Interoperability

Slide 7 – Mandatory metadata

• Programme tag – ukoer
• Author / owner / contributor
• Date
• URL
• Title
• Technical Information

(Licence info soon became mandatory!)

Slide 7 – Recommended metadata

• Language
• Subject classifications
• Keywords
• Tags
• Comments
• Description

Slide 9 – Example ukoer record

http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/view_record.php?identifier=2076&SearchGroup=Open+Educational+Resources

Slide 10 – Interoperability?

• Leeds Met – intraLibrary (IEEE LOM)
• JorumOpen – DSpace (Dublin Core)
• Harvest ukoer projects by RSS (link only)
• Bulk upload of IMS Content Package (Resource + imsmanifest.xml)
• Virtual Maths resource in JorumOpen
• Little point in metadata not supported by Jorum (or is there?)

Slide 11 – ALPS CETL repository project (ACErep)

• Search across multiple platforms for ALPS resources
• Download resource from any of the platforms into the working arena of their choice
• Adapt existing resource to suit local use
• Deposit original/adapted resource into one or more of the repositories maintained by CETL partners

Slide 12 – ALPS CETL repository project (ACErep)

• Different software uses different metadata standards/Application Profiles
• ALPS may require different metadata than UKOER
• Explicit priority from user group: resources presented in context of specific learning/assessment outcomes
• Can Jorum accommodate this?

Slide 13 – The solution – Xpert?

• http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/
• Distributed repository of e-learning resources
• Harvest by RSS and OAI-PMH
• APIs available – Xpert Labs
• http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/labs/

Slide 14 – Harvest OAI-PMH/search using Xpert API

Slide 15 – Possible scenario for SWORD deposit

Slide 16 – SWORD and metadata

• intraLibrary accepts IMSCP by SWORD
• JorumOpen (DSpace) accepts METS by SWORD
• Digirep – no SWORD yet (expect IMSCP)
• LUDOS – no SWORD yet (expect METS)
• Need to package metadata as IMSCP and METS

Xpert vs Jorum?

Xpert – http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/ – at Nottingham University is a “distributed repository of e-learning resources” and contains metadata and resources for almost 70,000 learning objects from over 3000 providers. Recently the project has released some interesting tools in the form of Xpert labs including APIs to return CC licensed OER in a variety of data formats and a basic SDK (Software Development Kit).  There is also a code snippet to add Xpert search to your site like this – http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/repository/xpert.html.

As a manager of an OER repository I am chiefly interested in assembling and preserving a collection of high quality assessment, learning and teaching material from my institution that can be discovered and reused effectively by teachers/lecturers in UK HE (and globally) and have been able to work with @Xpert_project to ensure that an OAI-PMH feed from our repository is harvested by the service – this took a little bit of code-tinkering (thanks to @patlockley) as our metadata incorporates multiple <dc:identifier> fields the first of which holds the OAI ID with the second holding the location URL – the end result from Xpert is a nice record of our ukoer including a properly formatted description, the URL for the CC license and, as I’ve just noticed,  related resources – for instance, the search below returns 4 component parts of a SCORM package that I added yesterday (that, in its complete state, would not run in our VLE – a SCORM 1.2 LMS – as the large number of JavaScript variables exceeds what is possible under version 1.2  resulting in an error after slide 6 – it plays fine in intraLibrary though). I also used this opportunity to experiment with intraLibrary’s “linked resources” functionality which Xpert can display from the XML return:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/scoreresults.php?keywords=leedsmet&search_all.x=69&search_all.y=18&search_all=all&ukoer=on

What is missing, however, is any indication that this resource emanates from Leeds Met – think I’ll need to add a <dc:publisher> field to fix this – currently we only provide <dc:creator> which Xpert maps to author; this also means that our institution does not appear in Advanced Search under Institution…

It’s probably too much to ask Pat to add the link URLs using <lom:identifier></lom:identifier> as I hope to do from Open Search (and Xpert labs does include an API specifically to return related objects using the base url http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/related/ adding a list of comma separated keywords, then a number of results you’d like to return to the end of this URL e.g. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/related/ukoer,5.)

As these are SCORM packages, though, I would like to add a link to download the package itself which could then be imported into a VLE…once again this is functionality that we are yet to incorporate into Open Search and they currently just play directly in the browser or they can be linked directly from Blackboard using our PowerLink but the necessary URL to download the package is in the SRU and OAI-PMH returns:

<package:packageType>scorm</package:packageType>
<package:packageTypeVersion>1.2</package:packageTypeVersion>
<package:packageDownloadLocator>http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/IntraLibrary?command=open-package-download&learning_object_key=i06n105033t.zip</package:packageDownloadLocator>

These resources then, made live yesterday afternoon, are already available from Xpert; they will also,  eventually, find their way into Jorum Open but this requires further intervention from me – we’re not using the Jorum RSS harvest for technical reasons but I don’t *think* that facility could perform a daily update harvest in the same way as OAI-PMH. I’m still working on the workflow for regularly packaging my IMSCPs and publishing them as a .zip for the kindly folk at Jorum to harvest from Open Search (there has, in any case, not been much new added since the end of the Unicycle project – http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/view_record.php?identifier=2845&SearchGroup=Open+Educational+Resources).  When our processes are fully embedded in institutional practice I anticipate putting up an archive say every month; of course this will have the “advantage” of preserving the full IMSCP in JorumOpen rather than just the metadata and the link which is all that is harvested by Xpert but I don’t think this is a particular concern for *me* as I am responsible for my own preservation via our own formal repository platform (this building on the discussion from my last post.)

Xpert grew out of JISC Rapid Innovation funding last year which perhaps goes some way to explaining the (arguably) more agile development compared to Jorum (who I really don’t wish to be disparaging towards – I think the @jorumteam have done a fantastic job in the past 12 months and the national service is really taking shape; they obviously have a more formal remit than Xpert and have responded very positively to a wide array of stakeholders as evidenced in their recently published Road-map – they have also been very helpful to me and Unicycle on a personal/project level and this post is more about bigging-up the small guy than doing down the big-guy!)

JorumOpen currently holds an impressive 10 and a half thousand  OERs catalogued as HE – still a fraction of the size of Xpert (is sheer size actually likely to become an issue when searching for suitable OERs in either service?)  In addition, a large proportion of these records (how many?) are likely to be metadata/link only as they have been harvested by RSS which presents potential issues for preservation (see last post)…in any case, all credit to Xpert who have developed a responsive service that goes a long way to it’s stated aim of “delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources” and providing real value to the (global) HE community to boot!

JIF10 at Royal Holloway

I’m not sure I was fully aware of the memory until I wandered past the Earth Sciences Building at Royal Holloway last Wednesday that it was in that very building that I first experienced the internet in 1994. I was a feckless undergraduate with little interest in technology having recently grown out of side-scrolling shoot ’em ups on my Commodore Amiga.  I had a scientist friend, however, a Geologist, who seemed excited by it and took us into the lab to surf the nascent world wide web.  I have no idea what spec of machinery we would have been using at that time.  Or browser.  Would it have been Mosaic back then or did Netscape come on the scene fairly quickly?  Anyway, I don’t think I was terribly impressed and soon wandered off for a game of pool and did not, so far as I recall, re-visit cyberspace for the rest of my university career.  At some point in the intervening years, of course, along with several billion others, I did venture back onto the Web (it’s got much better) until I found myself back at RHUL with JISC for their Innovation Forum 2010; on the down-side I no longer have much time for pool.

I arrived bright and early on Wednesday morning to set up my exhibition stand and was particularly looking forward to speaking with Alison Pope who had invited me to look at Equella which Royal Holloway have recently implemented to manage the full range of digital resources including OA research and learning objects – a set of use-cases not too dissimilar to Leeds Met.  It is interesting that, like intraLibrary, Equella was originally designed as a Learning Object repository and, like intraLibrary, this heritage is evident in Equella being an authenticated system (does this, perhaps, reflect how quickly the zeitgeist has now shifted towards open educational content not just OA research?)  We get round the issue, of course, with our Open Search interface utilising SRU, whereas both RHUL and Oxford Brookes automatically log visitors into Equella as guest-users.

I had several conversations throughout the conference around the nature of “blended” repositories like ours; although institutional repositories increasingly store different types of resources and may have an implicit remit to manage the full range of digital material, it’s still far from the norm, I think, for them to be explicitly tailored to multiple collection types and browsing OpenDoar, under “content”, the majority still list “Articles; References; Conferences; Theses; Books” though some do include “Learning Objects”, “Multimedia” or “Special” (how many of these are aspirational rather than fully operational services?)  To my knowledge, in addition to ourselves and Royal Holloway, Oxford Brookes are developing a blended repository with their RADAR project (also using Equella after shelving intraLibrary).  Coventry have also implemented Equella for their CURVE project though I think currently for research material only.

(N.B.  The EPrints crowd are coming at the OER from the other direction with Edshare and HumBox, bespoke implementations of the de facto OA research platform.)

The first session I attended was Thunderbolt and Lightning, an Open-Mic session run by the inimitable @dfflanders to share the “big thunderbolts” in institutions today (all sessions from JIF10 are summarised on Cloudworks and there is a Twitter archive at http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/jif10).  The great thing about JISC events is the different styles of discussion that are encouraged and while, personally, I find the lightening talk format exhausting (and that’s just listening) it’s certainly an effective way to rapidly share a lot of information and generate (preliminary) discussion.  Lightening talks included Rufus Pollack from the Open Knowldge Foundation and Cambridge University on open data and content, Steve Hitchcock from Southampton on why it’s still too hard for people to put things in repositories and Sarah Porter on the fact that we need a collaborative university network, not a competitive one.  For a live blog of the session see http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/3408.

I missed the first afternoon session as I was having a guided tour of Equella after which I had half an hour to kill so took a trip down memory lane back to Kingswood, the halls of residence where I stayed in my first year before rejoining my fellow delegates for a panel discussion “The Impact of Open: transformational possibilities for education and research”.  The session was chaired by Craig Wentworth (JISC Programme Director – Organisation and User Technologies) and the panel were Rufus Pollock, Ross Gardler, Helen Beetham, Sal Cooke and Hugh Look.  See http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/4183 for a blog-post from the session.

The evening was given over to dinner and (for some) dancing – an opportunity for social and professional relationships to be cemented before rest and another packed schedule on day 2…which began with a search for bacon and eggs, as hapless JISC folk (one or two a little green around the gills – possibly correlated with those that had been dancing but this is just a hypothesis) finding themselves in a breakfast hubbub of Italian teenagers before being herded downstairs by events staff to our own more sedate dining environment.

I had intended to visit as many of the project showcases and demos, some of which I was already aware of and some which were new to me.  In the end, however, my day was rather more tangential and I never got round to seeing all sorts of interesting stuff that I shall at some point try to follow up online, in particular, One Share (University of Southampton) and Xpert (University of Nottingham) which though I missed the demo, I have, in fact, liaised with already in the context of RSS aggregation for ukoer (see http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/12/09/oer-rss-and-jorumopen/).  I was also able to speak with Pat Lockley from the project who told me that Xpert can now harvest OAI-PMH as well as RSS – after a little bit of hacking this week on Pat’s part, all Unicycle material has now been harvested from the Leeds Met repository into Xpert (will try to blog this in more detail at some point).

I did manage to make it to the MIMAS stand and speak with Amanda Hill of the Names Project and to man named Vic about the Intute repository search demonstrator which I was interested to learn will be developed further (last I heard development was suspended.)  Having not been to the site for quite a while, it was gratifying to see that searching for “ukoer” returns 146 results from just 3 repositories and 144 of them are from Leeds Met (though there are in fact 279 resources in our repository tagged ukoer so I’m not sure what’s happened to the other 135 – perhaps we haven’t been harvested for a while?).  The other small issue from my perspective is that research results are not always displayed properly which is an artifact of the fact that intraLibrary is based on IEEE LOM and I’ve used multiple description fields to accommodate ISSN/published/refereed.

I really hope the Names project continues to make progress and I would urge the community to get behind this project which has developed a prototype to tackle the thorny problem of name disambiguation – an issue in all sorts of online domains, especially repositories.  There is a blog of the session that I missed at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/4243 and you can see the prototype and search for names (harvested from Scopus I think) at http://names.mimas.ac.uk/

In the afternoon there’s a rather jolly Dragon’s Den style session where 3 presenters pitch their innovative ideas to a panel of JISC Dragons who opt, 3 to 1, for Mark “bearded Dave” Stiles’ (call me Dave) Cameron inspired Big Education idea, the audience, however, disagree (this is a democracy after all) and it’s a land slide for Yorick Wilks’ possibly-cuddly-artificially-intelligent research companion to help the academic drudge sift through the crushing weight of online information.  Dave the Librarian’s idea (something about libraries being an interchange where learning and teaching takes place) gets limited support from either the dragons or the audience – all seemingly persuaded by the ConDems that libraries aren’t really necessary at all in the broadband age – and he is dismissed by one of the dragons (clearly relishing her role) because libraries are just “glorified coffee shops”… ‘we just need a virtual library”…”people only go to libraries because the wifi is free.”

The final keynote is delivered by Professor John Potter on the subject of leadership and which causes one or two heckles to rise – personally I’m inclined to agree with @ambrouk who found sentiments like “give your people a sense of purpose”, and “people copy what they see” somewhat patronising and argued on her blog that, rather, the world of HE is a “world of intelligent people who don’t need leading, they just need managing, as in, given the time, space and mandate to do things.”

That is certainly true of many of the colleagues I engaged with over two enjoyable days – people, in fact, that “work” as they play, sharing information and ideas.  Innovating.

Really (not so) Simple Syndication

In theory RSS is simple, Really Simple, but the way that the technology is implemented by our underlying repository software (intraLibrary) and issues around how we have needed to integrate that software within our repository infrastructure in order to ensure appropriate Open Access has meant that, in reality, it has been anything but.

Broadly speaking, the issues are two fold:

• The fields exposed by the intralibrary RSS feed are limited to “Title” and “Description”.

• The URL exposed by the feed points to the public URL generated by intraLibrary (which would simply be the resource itself, either a file or URL i.e. without the context of the metadata record) whereas I need it to point to the Open Search metadata page.

I have been aware of these issues for some time but finding a resolution has been elevated in priority recently due to two separate, though similar, use-cases being explored by JorumOpen and the Xpert project at Nottingham University, that effectively seek to extend RSS from simply being a notification system to potentially also being used to harvest repository content (some are of the view that this not an appropriate use of the technology and that there are established technologies more suitable, specifically OAI-PMH and SWORD – see Intrallects’s Charles Duncan’s contribution to the discussion on Lorna Cambell’s blog).  The full discussion on Lorna’s post is certainly worth reading and also includes several contributions from Xpert’s Julian Tenney and Pat Lockley.

By now I have had an extended correspondence with Pat, initially prompted when I submitted the generic intraLibrary feed to be harvested by Xpert.  Preliminary feedback was that when Xpert tried to harvest our feed, it appeared that a randomly generated “key” was added to the URL, meaning they were seeing these urls as new resources, whereas they were actually duplicates (this was a consequence of the manner in which intraLibrary generates a publicURL each time a record is returned with a new machine generated “key” each time.)

As I described in a recent post, a little bit of Twitter serendipity and specifically input from Owen Stevens, subsequently led me to use Yahoo Pipes to redirect to the Open Search metadata page instead of the publicURL; Yahoo pipes also allows a pipe to be rendered as RSS and it occurred to me that this new feed could be resubmitted to Xpert for harvest.  Sure enough Pat confirmed that this new feed rendered from the pipe could indeed be harvested and that each URL was definitely unique (generated, of course, from resource unique IDs by http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index.php – see https://repositorynews.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/leeds-met-repository-open-search-version-2-0/ for more info).  However, Pat also emphasised that it would be nice to find a generic way of harvesting without the pipe but for the time being I’m not sure we are in a position to implement such a solution; the work that we have done at Leeds Met on the Open Search interface and my personal obsession with redirecting RSS feeds is quite distinct from Intrallect’s primary commercial interest and so unlikely to be *officially* supported by the company (Note: As always Intrallect have been very supportive to me and certainly have proactively supported the development of our infrastructure throughout, it’s just that this isn’t a priority for them in the same way.)

As Owen has pointed out, all the Pipe does is take the ID which is part of the item’s GUID in the original RSS, and constructs a link to the metadata page which is put back into the RSS feed. You could obviously do this programatically (which might be a solution to Pat’s requirement of harvesting without the Pipe?) – it was just easier to throw together something quickly using Pipes and we simply don’t have the resources to explore another (programmatic) solution in detail.

Owen has also suggested that, as intraLibrary supports OAI-PMH, this would be the ‘supported’ mechanism for harvesting which really brings us full circle back to Charles’ argument referred to earlier in this post.

Note: On Lorna’s blog, Julian argues back at Charles that “OAI-PMH/SWORD etc are big technical barriers for many people who have resources to expose and that anyone can make a feed”; though in a subsequent comment, Pat does acknowledge that “it might be logical that if we are making a second RSS for harvesting we might use some other technology instead.”

All of which doesn’t get me very much further with my other RSS issue which is  the limited metadata with just <title> and <description> exposed by RSS and it was this that seemed to be more of an issue for harvest by JorumOpen with feedback from Gareth Waller confirming that the feed from intraLibrary “does not represent the metadata for the individual items (or the top level feed) in DC format (except of course date)” and in order for our feed to be processed with the code Gareth has implemented in JorumOpen , the feed would “need to contain DC metadata for each of the items and, more importantly, licence information”.  The feed from the Pipe, of course, still comprises just <title> and <description> and so would not be suitable for registering our OER content in JorumOpen.  (N.B. The limited metadata, of course, will surely also affect the quality of metadata harvested and searchable via Xpert?)

What would really make my life easier I think is for JorumOpen and Xpert to harvest my metadata using OAI-PMH (go on , you know you want to!) but for the time being I am just happy to have found a method to generate RSS feed that point to my static URLs at http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index.php!