HEA/JISC Open Educational Resources Rapid Innovation Projects May 2012 HEA/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme May 2012 Update on OER Rapid Innovation Projects

Bebop Bebop is developing BuddyPress as an institutional academic profile management tool which collects and displays a person’s Open Educational Resources.BuddyPress The project has two parts: 1) We are developing BuddyPress to consume OERs using third-party feeds and APIs into academics’ profiles and, 2) investigating the possibility of BuddyPress becoming an application which produces data for re-publishing on other institutional websites and to third- party web services. The main outcome of this work will be a plugin or set of plugins that can be used with BuddyPress to extend an individual’s profile to re-present resources that are held on disparate websites such as YouTube, Slideshare, Jorum, etc. The plugins will be open source and made available via the official WordPress.org plugin repository. Finally, working with the CUNY Commons In A Box project, we will extend our user testing to that related project and seek advice from their staff, who are core contributors to BuddyPress. It is our intention that the work of this project, complements the overall CUNY project.Commons In A Box

Building a GeoKnowledge Community at Mimas by utilising existing technologies (DSpace and services these being Landmap and Jorum. The project is in two parts: 1) Open-up 8 courses in the Landmap Learning Zone through Creative Commons BY-NC-SA and redesigning the Learning Zone area of the Landmap website, linking through to the ELOGeo repository at Jorum. 2) Transfer the hosting of the ELOGeo repository to Jorum from University of Nottingham ensuring the sustainability of the ELOGeo project outputs. Technical solutions will be sought in developing a specific community repository site within Jorum which will be transferable to other communities that may have a similar requirement in the future. Breaking down Barriers

Linked data approach to OERs This project extends MIT’s Exhibit tool to allow users to construct bundles of OERs and other online content around playback of online video. This project takes a linked data approach to aggregation of OERS and other online content in order to improve the ‘usefulness’ of online resources for education. The outcome will be an open-source application which uses linked data approaches to present a collection of pedagogically related resources, framed within a narrative created by either the teacher or the students. The ‘collections’ or ‘narratives’ created using the tool will be organised around playback of rich media, such as audio or video, and will be both flexible and scaleable. By allowing for the integration of different types of online content and the users’ own text annotations, the tool has the potential to enable easier integration of OERs and Open Data in course content by teachers; to facilitate critiques of resources by students, and to support supply and reuse of educational content by both. By supporting sharing of online resources, the tool can enhance the visibility of quality content, whilst facilitating knowledge accumulation and ‘personalization’ of learning. Although the tool itself will reference, rather than store, the content collection, the resulting presentation generated by users will be available for them to view online, or download for use in other environments, such as institutional VLEs, personal online spaces, or for archiving in repositories.

Portfolio Commons In this project we aim to enable the users of the UAL e-portfolio system (based on Mahara) to be able to select content from their portfolio and deposit it directly into the UAL learning resource repository (based on EdShare) and Jorum. Will do this by using SWORD protocol – which involves some customisation of EdShare and Jorum. SWORD is a more mature offering than it was before – but the tricky bit is getting it installed in Mahara and getting the two target repositories to accept our SWORD content and hopefully ‘display’ to users. Benefits of this include: Making deposit in the repositories a lot less of a hassle for users Giving the users a list of ‘published’ items with URLs that they can reference in the future Helping us learn more about SWORD and identifying other applications for its use (with WordPress and Drupal for instance) as well as thinking about other ways to link our various systems together

Red Feather The RedFeather project aims to fill a niche in e-learning where teachers want to share their resources without the use of a full-scale repository platform. While it is possible for these users to simply upload resources to webspace, doing so will provide them with none of the added value they would gain from a repository. RedFeather is an extremely lightweight repository-like solution that fosters best practice for OER, it can be dropped into any website with PHP, and enables appropriate metadata to be assigned to resources, creates views in multiple formats (including HTML with in-browser previews, RSS, RDF and JSON), and provides instant tools to submit to Xpert and Jorum, or migrate to full repository platforms via SWORD.

Sharing Paradata across Widget stores Can different web app stores share usage data such as reviews, ratings, and stats on how often an app has been downloaded or embedded? Thats the question being investigated by the SPAWS project. To answer it we are building on the Learning Registry and Activity Streams to connect together several web app stores that are aimed at sharing web widgets and gadgets for educators. So, each time a user visits a store and writes a review about a particular widget/gadget, or rates it, or embeds it, that information can potentially be syndicated to other stores in the network.Learning RegistryActivity Streams The initial stores taking part in the project are ones developed by the Edukapp, ROLE and ITEC projects; potentially other stores will be involved too. The reason that these projects are interested in this idea is that the number of useful educational web apps is quite limited, and so its quite likely that each store will hold many of the same widgets as the others. Therefore, sharing comments and ratings and so on makes sense, as these add value for users, and are potentially lost by having multiple stores serving relatively small niches.

Synote Mobile Synote Mobile provides users with the ability to access, search, manage and exploit video and audio OER whilst on the move. Synote Mobile meets the need to make web-based video and audio Open Educational Resources easier to access, search, manage, and exploit. The recordings can be viewed and repurposed with annotations and tags. Many UK students carry mobile devices capable of replaying video, but lack the interactive apps that encourage learning, Synote Mobile provides a collaborative experience with additional personalisation.Open Educational Resources