Making OER more Open

A view from the trenches

Pierre Far, PhD

@pierrefar
pierre@ocwsearch.com

www.ocwsearch.com www.wisdombee.com
@ocwsearch @wisdombee
 Mission:
Making OER more useful
1. Improving discoverability

2. Collecting OER from multiple sources

3. Making OER interactive

OCW Search and Wisdom Bee

Podcasts
Video
OER
Text

Text
OCW
Video
Wisdom Bee

Open Education Resources High quality content from top sources

(OER) released under permissive licenses

Search Users find content faster

engine Builds personalised bookshelves

Self-learning Like a physical book online

Tools Note taking, annotation, bookmarking

Social learning Like off-line study groups

Tools Friends, other self-learners
 Problem: Extracting OER Data

• Metadata not easily available

– Protocol soup
– Variation in fields

• Extracting full text

– Very service-specific function
– More later....
 Problem: Duplicate handling

• Content in different repositories

– No single cross-service ID

• Content in different formats

– Example: Course videos and lecture notes
 Problem: Sharing full content

• What is the best format to share full content covering all

types of media?
– Excellent attempt: CNXML
– What does HTML5 allow?

• No format stands alone!

 Idea 1: The “Write API”

• Initially proposed by Kathi Fletcher of Connexions

– A single standard API for services to support
– Fosters interoperable publishing
– Fosters an OER ecosystem

• Details: http://is.gd/h1ZAW
 Idea 2: robots.txt for OER

• Making discoverability machine readable

• Like robots.txt but for OER

– Let’s call it oer.txt

• Use/adapt Sitemap Protocol

– Web pages and video protocols
– sitemaps.org
 Thanks

pierre@ocwsearch.com
@pierrefar

www.ocwsearch.com www.wisdombee.com
@ocwsearch @wisdombee