Discovering OERs through RSS and APIs

Discovering OER through RSS and APIs Lisa J. Rogers, Research Associate Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University

About Me
Two UKOER phase i projects
Core-Materials
Open Engineering Resources Pilot
Additional OER Technical work with CETIS.
RSS Feed Deposit for OER
Tracking OERs
Aggregation of OERS

Core-Materials
Collated resources and existing descriptions into central database and made searchable.
Batch uploaded resources and descriptions to web 2.0 file sharing sites using their APIs.
Bulk upload resource descriptions and links to Jorum Open using RSS.
http://core.materials.ac.uk/search/

Core-Materials Usage Stats Viewing Statistics for CORE-Materials resources (Sept 2009 – March 2010) Number of Resources Uploaded Total number of views Number of subscribers / followers YouTube 128 videos 17,417 20 subscribers Flickr 860 images 25,940 7 contacts Scribd 157 documents 40,706 (2,261 downloads) 32 subscribers SlideShare 157 documents 35,240 3 followers

Open Engineering Resources
Dissemination to web 2.0 sites and Jorum Open by individual partners.
No central database.
Cross search web 2.0 sites using APIs to aggregate resources.
Resources carefully tagged to allow this aggregation.

Aggregation of OERs
Provide and document demonstrators
Google Custom Search
Yahoo Pipes!
Query through APIs

Google Custom Search

Yahoo Pipes!

UKOER Search Demo

Lessons Learnt
Many APIs have official and unofficial examples of code to help you get started
In my experience technical support has been helpful (if you are persistent)
Reported bugs in Scribd API and in SlideShare API which have been fixed
Suggested new feature for SlideShare API which has been implemented

More Lessons
These approaches may not be scalable
Limit on number of results returned
How are results combined?
Works for a finite number of sources
Current approach relies on tagging (how to extend beyond UKOER)
Viable solution for building smaller collections
Open Engineering Resources Search
Collections of OER (UKOER Phase 2?)

Demo
Open Engineering Resources Search
http://www.engsc.ac.uk/oer
Returns results tagged ukoer, engscoer plus query.
Can filter by partner (each partner assigned unique tag (i.e. LoughboroughUniOER)
Rob Pearce continuing to develop this service

Open Engineering Resources

[email_address] @lisajrogers

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Discovering OERs through RSS and APIs

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