Making Resources Discoverable12th Feb 2010

Andy BegganBERLiN project

Background: OER @ Nottingham U-Now launched 2007 under the e-learning strategy

Led by Prof Chris Ennew, PVC for Internationalisation

A member of the Open Courseware Consortium

17,836 visitors last year Over 1900 downloads for

‘Anatomists cookbook’ BERLiN project 2009/10

200+ credits published to date

Filter rather than Search

Judicious Prioritisation

1. Things most people do, most often. 2. Things most people do, somewhat often.3. Things some people do, most often.4. Things some people do, somewhat often.5. Things few people do, most often.6. Things few people do, somewhat often.

“Eliminating stupid, unnecessary or infrequent choices”

Taken from:http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/26-the-myth-of-discoverability/

Where’s U-

Now?

WebCT & Equella

Externally discoverable Google Search – all items can be found

Content Links (Reciprocal) Code

Future developments Tag clouds Media types Pedagogic types JACS Biographical data Social networking? Increasing links?

Open Courseware Consortium Joined OCWC in 2007/8 Membership $500 p.a.

Mathematical institute, Oxford Peoples-uni.org The Open University The University of Nottingham

RSS submission DC metadata

Doubled visitors to U-Now

XPERT

XPERT

Benefits of using RSS Easy to create Easy to distribute Automatic updates

On demand from U-Now DC metadata extracted from Equella and the RSS feed is

automatically generated Not available in Jorum currently

Potential to filter and target resources Subject based RSS feeds School based RSS feeds OPML feeds (feed of RSS feeds)

Doesn’t tend to have DC relation tag (implicit)

Challenges of using RSS Copyright of RSS feeds Can be a manual production process Methods for dealing with deletion / moving? Multitude of namespaces

iTunes RSS, Media RSS, DCMI RSS Multiple ways of describing the same thing, to harvest each requires

a different approach In XPERT: 300 + feeds are harvested, 6 feeds aren’t valid XML, 20

feeds aren’t valid RSS

Standards compliance is weak

Raising awareness

Over to ;)