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

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]

Executive Summary

The key opportunity for institutions is to take the concepts developed by the MOOC experiment to date and use them to improve the quality of their face-to-face and online provision, and to open up access to higher education. Most importantly, the understanding gained should be used to inform diversification strategies including the development of new business models and pedagogic approaches that take full advantage of digital technologies.

The critical discourse emerging around MOOCs is providing an opportunity for institutions to develop a more strategic approach to online learning. This includes enhancing existing classroom teaching practices, promoting institutional reputation and developing new revenue models. There are indications that some MOOCs are becoming more focussed on corporate training, which suggests that they may not pose a immediate threat to the existing pedagogical, revenue or business models of higher education institutions (HEIs). The number of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) will continue to grow with the development of credit bearing courses likely to be a trend.

The findings from this report are summarised in three sections: key themes that have emerged from the MOOC experiment, opportunities that institutions should consider exploring, and longer-term strategic considerations and likelihood that this will happen for institutions.
Three key themes emerge from the MOOC experiment:
i. Openness – new approaches to online learning, including models for scalable provision that may generate revenues, and promote open learning, which goes beyond institutional boundaries through the use of online communities. [Increasing impact & long term, likely for most institutions]
ii. Revenue models – different revenue models taking the established ideas from technology start-ups, such as applying the concepts of freemium and premium offers into online learning, providing institutions with new ways of thinking about marketing and income generation. [High impact & medium term, more likely for institutions looking for new revenue streams]
iii. Service Disaggregation – experimentation with business models that include unbundling and re-bundling of courses and delivery related services, such as offering paid for assessment and/or teaching and support, on top of free online course content. This may have a wider impact across institutions in the future through better deployment of existing resources to add value to customers where there is greatest benefit and to reduce costs through outsourcing (unbundling is already happening independently of MOOCs). [High impact & short term, likely for most institutions]

Institutions should consider exploring a set of opportunities that have been brought to the attention of mainstream education by MOOCs, and experiment with new approaches for developing technology-enabled changes in teaching and learning to improve opportunities for individual learners. These include:
i. Technology options – new platforms and services with different functions, terms and conditions for experimenting with the development of MOOCs and open online provision in institutions, including opening up an existing VLE, partnering with a commercial MOOC platform; or using an ad hoc collection of tools and services that are suitable for innovative experimentation. [Low impact & short term, likely for most institutions]
ii. Pedagogic opportunities – for educators to experiment and evaluate different online learning approaches by developing and using MOOCs that challenge the established roles of learner and teacher and offer more flexible forms of learning and assessment that include community as well as content-based models of learning. For some, experimentation will be at the level of the individual lecturer and for others it may be departmental or large-scale cross-institutional change projects. [Medium impact & medium term, likely for some types of institutions]
iii. Learner choices – developing new and affordable ways for learners to access courses and materials with the possibility of study for credits that are affordable and flexible. A starting point that is not based on existing courses can be a less constraining way of exploring new approaches. [High impact & short term, likely for some institutions]

Institutions are operating in an environment of increased marketisation and global competition, increasing student demand, reduced central government funding and affordability issues for students. Institutions will have to make strategic choices about how they respond to the changing contexts in which they operate; depending on the starting point these will have short, medium and long-term implications:
i. Mission, purpose and values – taking full account of the significant wider changes in HEIs’ business environments that may require institutions to review how they interpret their mission, purpose and values when developing their strategic response. [Variable impact & long term, likely for most institutions]
ii. Strategic directions – using the new opportunities presented by rethinking MOOCs as a useful motivation for institutions to examine their current provision and think about ways in which they can change and diversify. However, failure to recognise the scale of this challenge may well derail any new strategic directions. For institutions with little experience of open and online provision, options for rapid development may be limited to forming partnerships with external organisations with the required capabilities. [High impact & long term, likely for most institutions]
iii. Capability building requirements – reviewing existing in-house capabilities including: technical infrastructure, academic and support staff working practices. If starting from a low base, these will require significant commitment to change and develop, in order to support new business models for online provision. [Variable impact & short term, likely for most institutions]
iv. Business model components – there is an opportunity for institutions to examine their current provision and think about ways in which they can change and diversify to develop new sustainable business models for open online provision that take as their starting point the needs of the learner rather than the interests of the institution. [High impact & medium term, likely for some institutions]

Preview
[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Beyond-MOOCs-Sustainable-Online-Learning-in-Institutions.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]

This report sets out to help decision makers in higher education institutions gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and trends towards greater openness in higher education and to think about the implications for their institutions. The phenomena of MOOCs are described, placing them in the wider context of open education, online learning and the changes that are currently taking place in higher education at a time of globalisation of education and constrained budgets. The report is written from a UK higher education perspective, but is largely informed by the developments in MOOCs from the USA and Canada. A literature review was undertaken focussing on the extensive reporting of MOOCs through blogs, press releases as well as openly available reports. This identified current debates about new course provision, the impact of changes in funding and the implications for greater openness in higher education. The theory of disruptive innovation is used to help form the questions of policy and strategy that higher education institutions need to address.

Preview
[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/MOOCs-and-Open-Education.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.

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]

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]

Higher education institutions around the world have been using the Internet and other digital technologies to develop and distribute teaching and learning for decades. Recently, Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained increased attention for their potential and promise to obviate demographic, economic, and geographic educational boundaries and to promote life-long learning and personalised learning. The rapid growth of OER provides new opportunities for teaching and learning, at the same time, they challenge established views about teaching and learning practices in higher education.
This briefing provides the background to the current development of and future trends around OER aimed at adding to our understanding, stimulating ongoing debate among the JISC community and developing a research agenda. The briefing is structured in three sections:

• Discussion on the conceptual and contextual issues of Open Educational Resources.
• A review of current OER initiatives: their scale, approaches, main issues and challenges.
• Discussion on trends emerging in Open Educational Resources, with respect to future research and activities.

[pdf http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/OER_Briefing_Paper_CETIS.pdf]