Abstract
This paper presents a summary and synthesis of ten Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) implementation projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and William and Flora Hewlett Foundations between 2012 and 2013. Funding was allocated to ten OER platforms, through Creative Commons, as part of the Gates funded LRMI project. Cetis were commissioned by Creative Commons to produce cases studies on each project, and to undertake a synthesis of their experiences and outputs.

This synthesis outlines the methodology undertaken, before presenting a brief introduction to each OER platform along with an overview of platform functionality, scope, and technologies deployed. All ten platforms adopted different approaches to implementing LRMI, which are examined in the context of metadata creation and curation workflows. A summary of the implementation projects’ interaction with the Learning registry is also included together with the outlook for sustainable LRMI implementation.

Since its establishment in 2011, the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) has aimed to make it easier to publish, discover, and deliver quality educational resources on the web. From 2011 to 2014 the initiative was co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) – the 501(c)(3) division of the Association of American Publishers, and Creative Commons, and funded in three phases by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In October 2014 the leadership and governance of LRMI passed to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, a long-established metadata community with expertise in metadata design, implementation and best practice.
lrmiImplementationSynthesis

The New Subject Coding System project was commissioned by HEDIIP (the Higher Education Data & Information Improvement Programme) to develop a replacement to JACS for classifying the subjects of courses offered in UK Higher Education. Cetis (assisted by Alan Paull Services Ltd) were engaged to undertake stage 1 of the project, which involved extensive stakeholder engagement examining the requirements and impact relating to a new subject coding scheme. The findings of this work are presented in this report.

The response of stakeholders to the consultation of stage 1 of the NSCS suggests that, provided a case for change can be stated clearly, it is desirable to introduce a new subject coding scheme. In order to progress that development, the report recommends that:

• both prototypes be developed further with an expectation to converge them into a single prototype, depending on further feedback;
• a new governance model be developed under the auspices of an existing sector organisation, with broad representation;
• a subject coding framework be developed alongside a specific core scheme.

Preview
[pdf http://www.hediip.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Stage_1_report_2014-11-13.pdf]

Link: Executive Summary (pdf)

Executive Summary
This report contains the findings of a study carried out by the Centre for Academic Practice & Learning Enhancement (CAPLE) and Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS), at the University of Strathclyde. The study focuses on the involvement of the Library as an organizational unit, and of individual librarians and other information science specialists, in open educational resources (OER) initiatives. This research study contributes to the current Open Educational Resources (OER) Programme [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer], an initiative by JISC and the HEA whose objective is to promote the creation, dissemination, access and use of OER. This programme represents a firm commitment by UK Higher Education (HE) institutions to the OER movement.

This study is based on a survey targeted to OER projects worldwide, partially based on preliminary work done by CETIS Research Fellow John Robertson (2010b). The current survey incorporates 15 questions, which make use of scaled, multiple choice, structured, and open questions. It was implemented online using SurveyGizmo, and responses were gathered during October and November 2011.

Disregarding partial, empty, duplicated, and problematic responses, the total number of usable participants was 57. However, as all of the survey questions were optional, the number of useful answers varied between different sections, questions and options. Nine of the participants (15.8%) only answered the first section providing some basic information about their OER Initiative and its objectives. These contributions were not excluded as they provide significant insights into the aims of current OER initiatives around the world.

The geographical distribution of survey participants is quite heterogeneous with contributions coming from all continents. The countries with most contributors are, in descending order, the United Kingdom, USA, Spain, South Africa, India, and Nigeria. The majority of contributions came from HE institutions (81.3%), with fewer contributions coming from research centres, publishers, international organizations, NGO, and even an e-learning private centre and a high school. The majority of respondents participate in UKOER and Open Course Ware projects.

The main objectives of these OER initiatives are: to implement a repository or a content management/publishing system for OER release (57.9%); to release existing institutional content as OER (56.1%); and, to raise awareness of OER and encourage the use of open educational content within the local academic community (52.6%).
The analysis of those survey questions regarding the involvement and roles of the library and librarians at OER initiatives shows a considerable heterogeneity of situations. Their involvement of librarians is significant: three out of four projects teams count on at least one librarian, and most of them are based on the institutional library. In half of the projects accounted for, the library is leading or a partner of the initiative. The main areas of library’s involvement are: description and classification, management, preservation, dissemination, and promotion of OER. In order to support these activities, librarians provided expertise in information science areas, especially: metadata standards, vocabularies, indexing and classification, information retrieval, information literacy, and repository technology and management. It was also found, however, that librarians needed to develop expertise in different areas, including SEO and IPR and licensing options, but mainly about e-learning and OER knowledge, technologies and standards.

OER initiatives participating in this study positively valued the libraries’ and librarians’ involvement. Most respondents considered the contributions made to be absolutely indispensable (36%) or very valuable (25%). However, a small, but significant percentage of projects felt that the involvement of libraries and librarians had no influence (11%) or that their impact had been insufficient (5%) to date.

The final conclusions of this study indicate that even if the library and/or librarians are well valued by projects where they are already engaged with, the participation of the library is still not widespread, and a significant lack of awareness exists both from OER initiatives with regards to library activities and from the libraries about the resources released by OER initiatives. However, most of the objectives of content-focused OER initiatives are strongly related to library and information science activities and skills and we consider that their involvement would be of great benefit to those projects not yet engaged with them.

We found a clear need to promote the role that libraries and librarians can play in OER initiatives, highlighting the expertise and competencies which libraries and librarians can offer. This active promotion is needed to build awareness among stakeholders about libraries and librarians potential contribution to the OER movement, but also, among libraries and librarians about their key role as OER advocates within and out-with their institutions.

We suggest that a further analysis of the practices of OER initiatives regarding their strategies for storing and dissemination of content, the creation and management of OER collections, and the OER lifecycle is required to effectively promote the role of libraries and information professionals. This analysis, together with an accurate identification of objectives and needs of OER initiatives, would allow for better development of best practice guidelines and recommendations, where librarians have an important role to play.

We conclude that libraries, libraries associations, and LIS education institutions should take on the development of the skills that librarians need to better support OER initiatives, designing and offering training programs and improving syllabus.

Preview
[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/OER-Libraries-Survey-Report.pdf]

The use of mobile devices for the consumption and use of Web content and services has grown steadily over the last few years and continues to do so, with analysts predicting that mobile will soon exceed the traditional desktop PC as the most common means users interact with the Web and other Internet services.

This report looks at the growth of mobile, the state of the Web and gives an overview of approaches to delivering content and services optimised for the mobile context. This includes approaches to Web design for responsive sites, leveraging access to device functions and capabilities and the use of Web technologies to build mobile applications.

Preview:
[pdf http://observatory.jisc.ac.uk/docs/delivering-web-to-mobile.pdf]

This report outlines some technology trends and issues of interest and relevance to CETIS. It should be seen as a set of un-processed perceptions rather than the product of a formal process; a great deal of ground is not scanned in this paper and it should be understood that no formal prioritisation process was undertaken. The CETIS Horizon Scan should be seen as a set of potentially-idiosyncratic “takes”, material on which discourse and disputation may occur to make possible futures more clear.

The trends identified are

1. Mobile as web first citizen
2. Devices: form factors proliferating, capabilities converging
3. Motion capture controllers for gestural interfaces
4. Cross-platform applications
5. Machine learning on the web
6. Educational informatics
7. Content management and application framework convergence
8. Development of better tools for using, embedding and discovering open licences
9. Public sector data
10. Mobile applications
11. eTextbooks

[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/JISC_CETIS_Informal_Horizon_Scan_2011.pdf]

This report is a summary of technology themes extracted from the major technology forecasting publications from business and other sectors that could conceivably be relevant to the UK higher education system. We do not attempt to make evaluative comments concerning these trends, and specifically we do not attempt to speculate on the importance of the technologies identified for education.

The work leading to publication comprised three stages: selection of sources, scanning these sources to extract specific emerging technologies and grouping these technologies into themes.

Around thirty “horizon scanning” publications describing emerging technologies predicted to be important to domains other than education, were suggested by members of JISC’s two Innovation Support Centres, CETIS and UKOLN. These are listed on the delicious website. These were read and technologies they identify summarised in a Google Doc. These technologies were then grouped into themes for discussion in this report.

For each theme, we provide a brief introductory definition, a short snapshot of relevant technologies and applications in business and the wider world, and its implications to an organisation’s IT and business strategies. We have used ‘Google Insights for Search’ to visualise the trend of interest on each theme or relevant technologies over time (2004 – present); this is for illustrative purposes only. The themes are presented in no particular order.

[word http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/LiteratureScan_Formatted.doc]

Summary: The CETIS OER Technical Support Project was funded by JISC to provide support to the JISC HEA Open Educational Resources Pilot programme. Additional support was provided to the programme through CETIS core. Support provided to the programme include advising JISC on the technical direction, setting technical guidelines for the programme, reviewing and advising on projects technical choices, liaising with other programme support elements, particularly JourmOpen. The project conducted technical review calls with all 29 projects and recorded the outcome of these interviews using the CETIS PROD directory. Over the duration of the programme CETIS facilitated a number of programme support events including a technical round table at the annual CETIS conference, and two 2nd Tuesday online seminars in addition to participating in all three JISC programme level events. All output of the CETIS Technical Support Project have been synthesised and published in a series of posts on the CETIS blogs and pages on the CETIS wiki. These outputs were also disseminated through more formal channels including position papers, journal papers and presentations at a number of national and international conferences. The support project surfaced a number of technical issues worthy of further investigation these include; the use of RSS for depositing resources into repositories, technical approaches to aggregating resources and methods of tracking resources. These issues are now being taken forward through an additionally funded project.

[word http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Cetis_oer_final_report_1_0-1.doc]

Summary: The transcoder project set out to develop and trial a cloud based service that can change one type of educational content package into another (i.e. transcode). Such a capability would help overcome the current proliferation of incompatible content packaging formats, which can be an obstacle to the dissemination and re-use of packaged learning content.

The aim was to both test the technical feasibility of such a transcoder, as well as explore the business case for deploying it as cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS). In that regard, both the initial set-up phase as well as potential future business models were explored. Possible further developments of the service were also considered.

The transcoder software was developed after a pattern established by a similar, advertising supported service for other kinds of file formats. The pattern is centred around a manual upload and download of packages, in order to facilitate maximal transcoding capacity without bottlenecks. The software itself was developed to be hosted on Amazon web services, for a variety of reasons that include flexibility of deployment, price and sustainability.

In the event, demand for the service turned out to be low, which may have something to do with limited usage of packaged content in the JISC community, exacerbated by limitations of the design of the transcoder’s interface, and possibly also the range of conversions that were developed and are currently available. As a consequence, the low start-up investment costs as well as the scalable exploitation costs of cloud computing offered clear advantages for this type of service. Also, at this, or even much higher levels of usage the ongoing costs required to keep the service going are low. Finally, feedback from stakeholders indicate that a few simple extensions to the software could make the service more useful.

[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/TranscoderFinalReport3.pdf]

This report outlines some technology trends and issues of interest and relevance to CETIS. It should be seen as a set of un-processed perceptions rather than the product of a formal process; a great deal of ground is not scanned in this paper and it should be understood that no formal prioritisation process was undertaken. We hope it will stimulate discussion and recognise that this kind of material is by its nature contestable.

The trends identified are:

1. Current Trends and the Here-and-Now
1. Linked Data and the Low -fibre Semantic Web
2. Learning Platform Architectures
3. Competence and learning outcomes
4. Mobile Platforms Converging
5. Augmented Reality Going Mobile and Mainstream
6. Sharepoint
7. e-Textbooks
8. Image Analysis and Semantic Query
9. Rising interest in “Business Intelligence”
2. Almost here
1. HTML 5 and next-gen browsers
2. Open Data and the need for a new information literacy
3. More Speculative Developments and Interesting Outliers
1. Non-relational Databases
2. Real-time services
3. Declarative Workflow
4. Dynamical Modelling of the Enterprise

[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/JISC_CETIS_Informal_Horizon_Scan_2010.pdf]

The Digital Repositories Programme Support Project (DRPSP) and the Repository Research Team (RRT) were two phases of a project that supported the JISC’s repository related programmes from 2005 to 2009. The project comprised staff from two JISC services (now Innovation Support Centres): two from UKOLN and 0.5 FTE (rising to 1 for the final year) at CETIS; it was initially managed by Rachel Heery of UKOLN, and in its final year by Lorna Campbell and Phil Barker of CETIS.

In its original DRPSP phase the project focussed primarily on support for individual projects in the JISC programme, provided by team members engaging with projects through several thematic clusters. This allowed the team to become familiar with project activities, giving them a detailed overview of the programme as a whole and enabling them to provide advice to projects about relevant related work. During this period, DRSP ran a number of support workshops aimed at increasing the sector’s understanding of issues such as describing and managing complex/aggregate objects, using UML, writing scenarios and use cases and developing service usage models for the eFramework. The team also played a significant role in incubating a number of high profile technical developments, most notably the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) and the Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) protocol.

When the duration of the project was extended to support the 2007-2009 Repository and Preservation Programme, its remit was also changed to focus on providing JISC with strategic support by contributing to the understanding of what the programme achieved and what barriers had been faced; contributing to and reporting on relevant interoperability initiatives; exploring relevant new developments in understanding and promoting the interoperability of repositories. This was in part due to the changing requirements of the JISC and the projects funded, and in part due to the establishing of the Repository Support Project, which took over the remit for direct project support and institutional advocacy. To reflect the change in emphasis the project name was changed to the Repository Research Team (RRT).

During this phase the project undertook work aimed at modelling and understanding the repository environment. For example, the project investigated the use of metaphors drawn from the biological science of ecology to represent repository and service interaction; considering the strengths and limitations of different approaches to articulating or modelling relationships between repositories and other services and factors in the information environment. The RRT also supported the planned synthesis and evaluation of the Repository and Preservation Programme by innovative use of a blogging platform which they used to post information about relevant evidence found by trawling project outputs. These posts were tagged by evaluation or synthesis theme, effectively creating a public annotated index of project outputs.

Despite the challenges of managing such a long running cross service support project we believe that funding dedicated staff in existing services and innovation support centres and bringing them together to form a coherent project is generally a good model for programme support. This enables the support team to leverage the resources and expertise of the host service or centre. In addition the services and innovation support centres are also in a good position to synthesise issues arising from the programme, relate them to broader strategic issues and feed them back to JISC.

[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Rrt_finalreport_1p0.pdf]

This report looks at some of the key technology trends and issues we perceive as being of interest and relevance to CETIS. It forms a logical bridge between the question, from the point of view of CETIS staff, “what are the issues at hand” and “what should we do about them”. A great deal of ground is not scanned in this paper and it should be understood that no formal prioritisation process was undertaken.

[word http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Public_March_2009_Horizon_Scan.doc]

A summary of a report made to CETIS Board in March 2009 on standards bodies in the educational technology arena. The bodies covered are IMS Global Learning Consortium, Centre for European Normalisation (CEN), British Standard Institute (BSI) Committee IST/43, the Education Schools and Children’s Services Information Standards Board (ISB), HR-XML, International Standards Organisation (ISO) – IEC JTC1 SC36, Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF), IEEE LTSC, Learning Education and Training Systems Interoperability (LETSI), Suppliers Association for Learning Technology Interoperability in Schools (LETSI), W3C, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).

It is an update relative to the October 2008 Review. The reader is assumed to be broadly familiar with the work of the various specifications/standards bodies mentioned; this is not a primer.

[word http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EdTechStdsRev-March09.doc]

This report details the findings of a scoping study carried out for the JISC to investigate a potential metadata application profile for learning materials. The objective of the study was to synthesize and analyse the advice that is currently available to managers of repositories containing educational materials who need to define a metadata element set to describe those materials. The hope was that this would help define the scope of a potential Learning Materials Application Profile. There was no intention to produce an application profile as part of this work, nor was the work limited to any particular metadata schema.

[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/lmapscopingreport.pdf]

This report is a summary of a report made to CETIS Board in October 2008. It is in the form of an update on changes since the previous (March 2008) Board meeting. The reader is assumed to be broadly familiar with the work of the various specifications/standards bodies mentioned; this is not a primer.

The bodies reviewed are: IMS Global Learning Consortium, the Centre for European Normalisation (CEN), British Standards Institute (BSI) – Committee IST/43, Education Schools and Children’s Services Information Standards Board (ISB), HR-XML, International Standards Organisation (ISO) – IEC JTC1 SC36, Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF), IEEE LTSC, Learning Education and Training Systems Interoperability (LETSI), Suppliers Association for Learning Technology Interoperability in Schools (SALTIS), and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).

[word http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EdTechStdsRev-October08.doc]

A report detailing how the use of ecological metaphors can help us understand better the interactions that take place between digital repositories and related services.

This work began in response to a perceived need to express something of how and why digital repositories and services interact. As a community of implementers and developers we have well understood technical models and architectures that provide conceptual mechanisms to promote interoperability. Articulating the details and challenges of actual interactions that occur, however, is not so widely understood and knowledge about them is not often shared. This is, in part at least, because we tend to share in the abstract through architectures and use cases and in these we focus on the technical. Articulating interactions or connections requires an engagement with and presentation of specific local details. Beginning to consider why particular interactions succeed or fail over time requires us to factor in more than the technical.

[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Introductoryecologyreport.pdf]

This report is a summary of a report made to CETIS Board in March 2008. The bodies covered are IMS Global Learning Consortium, Centre for European Normalisation (CEN), British Standard Institute (BSI) Committee IST/43, the Education Schools and Children’s Services Information Standards Board (ISB), HR-XML, International Standards Organisation (ISO) – IEC JTC1 SC36, Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF), IEEE LTSC, Learning Education and Training Systems Interoperability (LETSI), Suppliers Association for Learning Technology Interoperability in Schools (LETSI), Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).

The reader is assumed to be broadly familiar with the work of the various specifications/standards bodies mentioned; this is not a primer.