Resource description, discovery, and metadata for Open Educational Resources

1. Resource description, discovery, and metadata for Open Educational Resources R. John Robertson, Phil Barker & Lorna Campbell OER 10, Cambridge, 22nd-24th March 2010 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 UK: Scotland License.

2. Overview • UKOER and JISC CETIS • Stakeholders • 6 tensions in description and metadata • Where next?

3. Purpose • To begin to provide an overview about how the UKOER projects have approached describing educational resources • To highlight issues relating to description that should be considered when sharing learning resources

4. UKOER and JISC CETIS

5. Key stakeholders in the programme • Academics • Creating OERs • Using OERs • Institutions/Consortia • Releasing OERs • Consuming OERs • HEA/ JISC / HEFCE

6. Other stakeholders in the programme • Aggregators • JORUM • Others • Independent learners • On related course elsewhere • Truly independent • Enrolled students • On original course • On other courses • Employers and the marketplace • Training benefits?

7. Description for your use vs. description for sharing (1/4) • Description costs, so prioritisation required. • Balance the needs of immediate users of system with requirements of taking part in wider networks. • For example, needing course codes for local use and JACS for sharing.

8. Description for your use vs. description for sharing (2/4) • Requirements: • programme tag • author • title • date • url • file format • file size • rights

9. Description for your use vs. description for sharing (3/4) • Key influences on descriptive choices? • project team (and support/ programme) • Technology already in use • Jorum’s requirements (or perception of them)

10. Description for your use vs. description for sharing (4/4) • Do standards help or hinder this decision? • Mostly irrelevant • Exist in underlying systems • Export in a given standard can be mapped • Tools hide standards • However, perceptions about standards do play a role • Jorum uses ‘X’ so we’ll use it; • ‘X’ has a space to describe this feature

11. Metadata standards vs other forms of description • Most projects are creating metadata • For some projects license information only in the metadata • But others are not using any formal descriptive standard • Does full text indexing eliminate the need for keywords? • audio, video, image, and flash materials as well • keywords and tags are very useful for aggregators • Do we need metadata if we have a cover page (or vice versa)? • Use of cover pages is not yet fully known but it appears to not be a major feature.

12. SEO vs. description for specialized discovery tools (1/3) • Specialized discovery tools include: • format-based tools like Vimeo, YouTube, Slideshare and Scribd • aggregators like DiscoverEd and OERCommons • subject or domain repositories (such as Jorum)

13. SEO vs. description for specialized discovery tools (2/3) • Specialised tools often require domain specific terminology and their search indexing can reward comprehensive description – e.g. Use of MESH. • Specialised tools may restrict the fields of descriptive information that can be supplied or that will be used. There is therefore a temptation to put everything into the fields which are available.

14. SEO vs. description for specialized discovery tools (3/3) • SEO is more of an arcane art; the mmtv project found that too many high value terms (teacher-training, online, education) in a description diluted the page’s ranking. It’s better to be highly-ranked in a few terms • Perhaps not so much of a tension as a balance between comprehensiveness and selectivity is required. OER producers need to be good at both.

15. Rich metadata vs. thin metadata (1/2) • How much metadata do you need to create? • How much of it is actually used? • No answer to this yet • programme was deliberately not prescriptive • Jorum’s deposit tool expands on this

16. Rich metadata vs. thin metadata (2/2) • Different projects have taken different approaches to description. • OpenStaffs: LOM, XCRI • ADOME: DC • Most projects using metadata seem to have taken a light approach. • No clear answers yet • Medev OOER project survey about the use of description for learning materials out soon • Longer term balance informed by: • efforts to track usage and discovery of UKOERs • the usability of this material when aggregated in Jorum

17. Specialist vs. generic standards: description • Dublin Core: 15 projects • LOM: 9 projects • QTI: 9 projects • In most cases it seems to relate to the metadata options which the software chosen provides • Longer term • comparative volume of use (number of OERs) • which elements used

18. Specialist vs. generic standards: packaging • Content Packaging: 10 projects • 3 projects choosing to use it. • Zip: 2 projects • But this figure doesn’t reflect use –too obvious to record. • Default support by tools and project team background seems to be key factor • Perceptions of the available content package creation tools plays a role.

19. RSS/Atom based dissemination vs. OAI-PMH based dissemination • What tools, services, and communities can take advantage of each dissemination approach? • most of aggregators of learning resources are based exclusively around RSS/ATOM or support both RSS/ATOM and OAI-PMH. • existing OAI-PMH harvesters are firmly focused on the Scholarly Communications community • Are there any inherent difficulties in either approach? • Both have problems • Steer to use RSS/ATOM and many projects using technologies that doesn’t support OAI-PMH.

20. Summary thoughts • The UKOER programme so far: • Many diverse choices • Thus far no one clear right answer • Next steps • Ongoing synthesis • Tracking work • Jorum usage statistics

21. Further Information • http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Educational_Content_OER • http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk//topic/oer • Contact details • robert.robertson at strath.ac.uk • Lmc at strath.ac.uk • Philb at icbl.hw.ac.uk