Abstract
This paper, presented at the Open CourseWare Consortium Global Conference in Ljubljana in April 2014, discusses the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), an international project that aims to facilitate the discovery of educational resources through the use of embedded metadata that can be used by search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex) to refine the search services they offer. LRMI has extended the schema.org metadata vocabulary with terms that are specifically relevant to aiding the discovery of learning resources. In order to understand LRMI metadata it is necessary to first introduce schema.org metadata. LRMI was later funded to assist a number of services providing open educational resources in modifying their display interfaces so that they included relevant embedded metadata. In addition to synthesizing the lessons learned from these implementations, the current phase of the LRMI project is engaging with potential users, including search providers and learning resource developers, with the aim of extending the uptake and implementation of the specification.

Also available: video and slides of presentation from conference web site.

Preview
[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Paper_34-LMRI1.pdf]

Open Scotland is a one day summit facilitated by Jisc Cetis in collaboration with SQA, Jisc RSC Scotland and the ALT Scotland SIG. The event will provide an opportunity for key stakeholders to critically reflect on the national and global impact and opportunities of open education, provide a forum to identify shared strategic interests and work towards a more integrated Scottish approach to openness in education.

[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Benefits-of-Open.pdf]

Outlines a novel approach taken by Jisc and Cetis to synthesise and disseminate the technical outputs and findings of three years of HEFCE funded UKOER Programmes. Rather than employing a consultant to produce a final synthesis report, the authors decided to undertake the task themselves by participating in a three-day book sprint facilitated by Adam Hyde of BookSprints.net. Over the course of the three days the authors wrote and edited a complete draft of a 21,000 word book titled “Technology for Open Educational Resources: Into the Wild – Reflections of three years of the UKOER programmes”.

While the authors all had considerable experience of the technical issues and challenges surfaced by the UKOER programmes, and had blogged extensively about these topics, it was a challenge to write a large coherent volume of text in such a short period. By employing the book
sprint methodology and the BookType open source book authoring platform the editorial team were able to rise to this challenge. Although BookType allows authors to restrict access to their works in progress, the team decide to produce the OER technical synthesis book as an open draft. This meant that colleagues who were not participating in the book sprint were able to monitor progress, and read and comment on the draft as it grew.

Book sprints are essentially short intense facilitated writing retreats, which bring together a group of four to twelve people along with a facilitator to produce a book in three to five days.The model involves little or no pre-production, and the aim is to have a published book (in ebook and print-on-demand formats) by the end of the sprint. Book sprints are not primarily an exercise in collating content from existing sources, the majority of the text is original material written during the sprint, however in the case of “Into the Wild”, some material was incorporated from relevant blog posts. Although the book sprint methodology was originally designed for producing open source software manuals, particularly FLOSS Manuals, the technique has now been adopted by other non-technical domains, including academic disciplines. For example, a group of Finnish high school teachers recently wrote a maths textbook during three-day book sprint (Harmon, 2012).

We believe that the facilitated book sprint approach and the open source BookType software will be of relevance to colleagues who are interested in developing books for or about open educational resources, particularly where they have the necessary background knowledge and access to content that can be adapted and reused, but lack the time or support to marshal these resources into a coherent, professional product.

In this paper we outline and reflect on our experience of employing the book sprint methodology and explore its applicability to the creation of open educational resources.

Preview
[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/OER13_booksprints.pdf]

This paper reflects on Cetis’ involvement with the Learning Registry and Jisc’s Learning Registry Node Experiment at Mimas (The JLeRN Experiment), and their application to UKOER initiatives. Initially funded by the US Departments of Education and Defense, the Learning Registry (LR) is an open source network for storing and distributing metadata and curriculum, activity and social usage data about learning resources across diverse educational systems.

The LR’s innovative technical methodology applies a new approach to the perennial problems of describing and managing OERs. Rather than mandating specific standards, the LR is metadata agnostic; it ingests all kinds of resource descriptions and data into a document-oriented, schema-free database. Described as “social networking for metadata”, the LR should make it possible to mine networks to build useful services based on the context in which educational resources are used, and the conversations users have around them.

Since its inception, there has been sustained interest in the LR from a number of innovative technologists and developers within the UKOER community. Part of Cetis’ and JLeRN’s brief was to engage this group to explore the applicability of the LR approach to UKOER initiatives, and to scope the type of services that could usefully be built on top of an open LR node. As a result, a small number of projects and developers have engaged with JLeRN and the LR and have established the technical feasibility of implementing the LR architecture and ingesting and extracting data, and have also demonstrated a range of innovative services that can be built on top of an LR node. However, the network effect currently remains unproven, as there are only a handful of nodes in existence.

In exploring the benefits and drawbacks of the LR approach, JLeRN and CETIS surfaced a number of issues. These include managing expectations of the LR’s promise in light of its early stage of development; examining the technical skills and capacity available in the sector; identifying the benefits of adopting the LR versus other technologies (e.g. basic schema-free noSQL databases, RDF triple stores); and exploring the value of the LR approach to subject areas with clearly defined curricula and learning outcomes.

The problem of sharing the educational context and value of resources is one that the sector has struggled with for many years. The LR may not conclusively solve this messy problem, but by taking a new approach to the challenge, it certainly merits further attention.

This paper reports and reflects on the innovative technical approaches adopted by UKOER projects to resource description, search engine optimisation and resource discovery. The HEFCE UKOER programmes ran for three years from 2009 to 2012 and funded a large number and variety of projects focused on releasing open educational resources (OERs) and embedding open practice. The Cetis Innovation Support Centre was tasked by JISC with providing strategic advice, technical support and direction throughout the programme. One constant across the diverse UKOER projects was their desire to ensure the resources they released could be discovered by people who might benefit from them; if no one can find an OER no one will use it. This paper will focus on three specific approaches with potential to achieve this aim: search engine optimisation, embedding metadata in the form of schema.org microdata, and sharing “paradata” information about how resources are used.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of resources in search engine results in order to make the resource more discoverable. Discoverability also relates to the ability to find resources in appropriate places, for example, in curated collections, institutional repositories and through web services. In terms of open educational resources, SEO interventions can be made at the level of the individual OER, e.g. as described by projects such as OpenSpires and SCOOTER; or at the collection management level, e.g. Triton’s use of WordPress to optimise SEO.

While SEO focuses on human readable, textual descriptions of resources, presented in a structured or semi-structured format; an alternative approach to resource description is structured, machine-readable metadata. The two can be combined in approaches such as microformats, RDFa, and microdata which bridge the gap between human-oriented resource description and machine readable metadata. This paper will report on activities undertaken throughout the UKOER programmes to identify what metadata is really required for OERs, challenges in formalising metadata to describe educational characteristics of OERs, and efforts to address some of these issues through the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI).

It has long been acknowledged that publisher-created resource descriptions and formal metadata records are not the only useful sources of information about learning resources, particularly OERs. Often more useful, contextually sensitive and extensive information can be created by users, both incidentally as they interact with resources, and through the conscious actions of reviewing, tagging, discussing and recommending OERs. “Paradata” offers a new approach to gathering, surfacing and sharing this information, which may offer potential solutions to some of the more intractable problems around describing the educational characteristics of resources. We will report briefly on the activities of the Learning Registry and other projects that are exploring the use of “paradata”.

We hope this paper will highlight the importance of effective resource description to the discoverability of OERs, explore innovative approaches to old problems and provide pointers to where future efforts might be directed to maximise the benefits of open educational resources.

Preview:
[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/OER13_resourcediscovery.pdf]

Between 2009 and 2012 the Higher Education Funding Council funded a series of programmes to encourage higher education institutions in the UK to release existing educational content as Open Educational Resources. The HEFCE funded UK OER Programme was run and managed by the JISC and the Higher Education Academy. The JISC CETIS “OER Technology Support Project” provided support for technical innovation across this programme. This book synthesises and reflects on the approaches taken and lessons learnt across the Programme and by the Support Project.

This book is not intended as a beginners guide or a technical manual, instead it is an expert synthesis of the key technical issues arising from a national publicly-funded programme. It is intended for people working with technology to support the creation, management, dissemination and tracking of open educational resources, and particularly those who design digital infrastructure and services at institutional and national level.

Availability

Published by University of Bolton, Deane Road, Bolton, BL3 5AB

ISBN: 978-0-907311-35-5 (print on demand: book (£3.36) printed by Lulu; or free pdf to print yourself)
ISBN: 978-0-907311-36-2 (ebook, Kindle: free download; or from Amazon (77p))
ISBN: 978-0-907311-37-9 (ebook, ePub: free download)
ISBN: 978-0-907311-38-6 (ebook, pdf: free download)
(All prices are the minimum for the distribution channel)

Licence and source

Into the wild – Technology for open educational resources by Amber Thomas, Lorna M. Campbell, Phil Barker and Martin Hawksey (Eds) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

You are free to share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) to remix (to adapt the work) and to make commercial use of the work under the proviso that you attribute the origin of the work (if possible please include the title, the names of the editors / authors and a link to this page).

To help you re-use this work editable formats are available. We originally wrote the book using the BookType, an online collaborative authoring and publishing platform. Booktype will allow you to clone our source, contact Phil Barker if you would like to do so. There is also a Word .docx file that we used for the final published versions.

Errors and bugs?

There are some minor bugs in some versions: bullet points don’t display well on the kindle version, reference links are erratic on the ePub version (more for some readers than others), the images on the print pdf have white lines on them. We hope none of these are serious problems for you. If you do find a serious problem please contact Phil Barker.

Abstract: In areas where competence can be greater or lesser, a level of competence defines a reference point that someone may have, or may not yet have, attained. Levels may be specific to an area or, often, generic, in which case they are assessed for specific areas of ability. Levels must first be defined in frameworks, and then competence concepts can be assigned levels following those frameworks. The eCOTOOL competence model offers information structures both for defining levels and for assigning them. This is intended to contribute to effective interoperability specifications. Examples of defined levels stretch back in history to craft guilds, and today they come in many forms. Examples are here presented, which the eCOTOOL model covers well. The eCOTOOL competence model offers a good way of understanding what a level of competence is.

Keywords: level, ability, skill, competence, framework, level definition, level assignment, information model.

This paper was presented at the 5th European Conference: “Competence Modelling for European HR and Policies: Bridging Business, Education, and Training” (COME-HR) – Brussels, Belgium 2011.

Published in International Open Forum Proceedings. 24th ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 Plenary and WG meetings, International Open Forum. Shanghai, China: Ministry of Education Information Technology Standards Committee China e-Learning Technology Standardization Committee (CELTSC), pp. 180-194.

Abstract: A desire to customise and personalise learning experiences, combined with the rise of a number of new tool integration technologies has led to a move away from monolithic Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs, also known as Learning Management Systems ‘LMSs’) towards more open and Distributed Learning Environments (DLEs). The various DLE architectures can have very different properties, however, and choosing between them can be difficult.

The Open Group’s ArchiMate standard may help in that regard. It was designed to facilitate communication about architectures between all stakeholders in an organisation. It is a visual language that aims to help conversations about IT systems, business processes, organisational structure and strategy. This paper will present a number of DLE patterns that illustrate the range of possible architectures. Both the potential of these patterns as well as the utility of the ArchiMate language in explicating them will be evaluated.

Keywords：Enterprise Architecture; VLE; DLE; LMS; learning technology

[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/archiDLE.pdf]

Summary: Position papers and discussion explored the relationship between relatively informal and formal specs/standards activities and how a more effective system might work.

YSJ DigiRep is a newly established digital archive at York St. John. Established to help manage learning resources and research outputs from a diverse range of subjects across the institution, YSJ DigiRep has now come to the end of its project funding. This case study examines its context, seeks to identify why it has integrated so successfully into institutional processes, and highlight potential tensions as it transitions to being an institutional service. The study draws on an ecologically influenced approach developed by the Repositories Research Team.

Summary: Leap2A is a specification for information portability and interoperability between electronic portfolio tools and related systems. It has been developed through close collaboration between e-portfolio system developers, to ensure immediate applicability and relative ease of implementation. It covers learner-owned or learner-focused artefacts, information and reflections that people are likely to want to use themselves or present to others, in the context of educational, personal, professional or career development, including personal abilities, achievements, activities, plans and resources. The development projects are supported by the JISC, and managed through JISC CETIS.

An online publication for those involved in strategic planning, deployment, and implementation of IT systems in educational institutions. It takes a socio-technical perspective and the structure of the materials is based on the life-cycle model based on Enid Mumford’s work. The sections consider why you might want to move in this direction, your state of readiness, approaches you might take, and the technological options available. The authors provide information and insights from the extensive experience they collectively bring from senior management, through to strategic and technical development in education.

Summary: A listing of tools, projects and resources relevant to assessment