John’s JISC CETIS blog

What skills do teachers and learners need to find, evaluate and use Open Educational Resources?

What role could libraries have in supporting the creation, management, and use of Open Educational Resources?

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative “popularized the idea of “core metadata” for simple and generic resource descriptions” and its initial 15 descriptive elements became an international standard and a component of the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The Dublin Core community has subsequently developed in two directions – one developing application profiles to [...]

“Learning Object Metadata (LOM) is a data model, usually encoded in XML, used to describe a learning object and similar digital resources used to support learning. The purpose of learning object metadata is to support the reusability of learning objects, to aid discoverability, and to facilitate their interoperability, usually in the context of online learning [...]

IMS Content Packaging “describes data structures that can be used to exchange data between systems that wish to import, export, aggregate, and disaggregate packages of content.” http://www.imsglobal.org/content/packaging/ .
There are a number of projects in the programme which have identified themselves as using IMS Content Packaging, they are:

Unicycle

http://unicycle-leedsmet.ning.com/

Open Exeter

http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/oer/

OpenStaffs

http://www.staffs.ac.uk/about_us/projects/openstaffs/index.jsp

OLE Dutch History

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dutch/OER/

FETLAR

http://www.fetlar.bham.ac.uk/

Open Educational Resources Pilot

http://www.engsc.ac.uk/an/oer-project/oer-project.asp

CORE-materials

http://core.materials.ac.uk/

OOER

http://www.medev.ac.uk/oer/

Simulation-OER

http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/simshare/index.html

UK Centre [...]

IMS Question & Test Interoperability Specification http://www.imsglobal.org/question/ is a standard used to support the interoperability and exchange of digital assessment items (questions, answers, and data). Based on the technical conversations we’ve been having with projects, here’s a brief overview of the use of IMS QTI in the UKOER programme based on the data we have.
Eight [...]

I’m a librarian by training but my professional experience is mostly in repository and e-learning related stuff. As a result I’m fascinated by the intersection of the e-learning, repository, and library communities, particularly when it comes to managing learning materials as the three groups often have different perspectives on how to describe and manage stuff. [...]

Following on from part 1 which reviewed Jorum’s requirements for RSS-based deposit, this section synthesises the comments and feedback emerging in response to it.
Community views
In response to the requirements and position papers a number of feeds where submitted for testing and there has been some thoughtful reflection on the issues in the blogs and by [...]

Over the past few months CETIS and Jorum have been discussing approaches to bulk deposit to support the projects in the UKOER programme as they deposit or represent their OERs in Jorum. Based on feedback from projects gathered through our technical reviews of projects, we’ve investigated approaches which might work for the programme.
One option we [...]

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to join a conversation between JISC and MIT OEIT (http://oeit.mit.edu/) to exchange information about current initiatives and possible collaborations. The general themes of the conversation were openness and sustainability. There was an agreed sense that, currently, “Open is the new educational tech” (Vijay). The areas of strategic [...]