Resource description, discovery, and metadata for Open Educational Resources

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.

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

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
3

UKOER and JISC CETIS
4

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

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?

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.

Requirements:
programme tag
author
title
date
url
file format
file size
rights

Key influences on descriptive choices?
project team (and support/ programme)
Technology already in use
Jorum’s requirements (or perception of them)

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Resource description, discovery, and metadata for Open Educational Resources

by R. John Robertson

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