This presentation will reflect on Cetis’ involvement with the Learning Registry and JISC’s Learning Registry Node Experiment at Mimas (The JLeRN Experiment), and their application to UKOER initiatives. Initially funded by the US Departments of Education and Defense, the Learning Registry (LR) is an open source network for storing and distributing metadata and curriculum activity and social usage data about learning resources across diverse educational systems.

1. The Learning Registry: social
networking for open educational
resources?
Phil Barker, and Lorna M Campbell, CETIS
Sarah Currier and Nick Syrotiuk, Mimas
#OER13

2. The Learning Registry: social
networking for open educational
resources?
Phil Barker, and Lorna M Campbell, CETIS
Sarah Currier and Nick Syrotiuk, Mimas
#OER13

3. Introduction
Phil Barker, CETIS
http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/
Lorna M. Campbell, CETIS
http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/
Sarah Currier, Mimas
http://www.jorum.ac.uk/about-us/the-team/sarah-currier
Nick Syrotiuk, Mimas
#OER13

4. CETIS is…jisc.cetis.ac.uk
 The Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability
Standards.
 A national Innovation Support Centre providing advice to the UK
F/HE sector on educational technology and standards.
 A partnership
between the
Universities
of Bolton and
Strathclyde,
and Heriot
Watt
University.
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5. Mimas is… mimas.ac.uk
 An organisation of experts.
 A nationally designated data centre hosting a significant number of
the UKs research information assets and building applications to help
people make the most of this rich resource.
 Based at the
University of
Manchester.
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6. What’s the problem?
 It’s good to share educational resources! 
 You need to describe your resources so other people can
find them and decide whether they want to use them. 
 That means you need metadata to describe the
educational characteristics of your resources. 
 But learning resources come in all shapes and sizes. 
 Learning resources are used in all sorts of different
contexts. 
 By all people with all sorts of learning requirements. 
 Describing learning resources is hard. 
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7. You can end up with a lot of metadata…
• You can end up with a lot of metadata.
Image attribution: PBCore is licensed under a CC-BY unported licence.
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8. What’s the result?
 Metadata schemas and profiles proliferate.
 It’s difficult to exchange data between different
repositories using different schema and
vocabularies.
 Educational resources get stuck in silos where
users can not find them.
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9. And another thing…
 Social media applications allow users to share and
comment on resources.
 Formal metadata schema are not good at capturing user
interactions.
 So usage data and context of use gets lost.
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10. Capturing contextual data is key for OER
According to the UNESCO Guidelines for Open
Educational Resources (OERs) in Higher Education:
“The transformative educational
potential of OER depends on:
 Improving the quality of learning
materials through peer review
processes;
 Reaping the benefits of
contextualisation, personalisation and
localisation;”
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002136/213605e.pdf
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11. The Learning Registry
 A distributed infrastructure for sharing descriptive and
usage data about learning resources.
 Initiated in 2010.
 An open source community project.
 Funded by the US DoE and DoD.
 Partners include Lockheed Martin, NSDL, ADL, SRI
International, NSF, Library of Congress, OER Commons,
Jisc.
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12. An open approach
 An open project – anyone can participate.
 Open source – Apache 2.0.
 Open documents and standards – Creative Commons.
 Open data – all data about resources is open.
But…
 The resources themselves may be proprietary or
commercial.
 Not just about OER.
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13. What the Learning Registry isn’t…
A search engine
A portal
A repository
A destination
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14. What the Learning Registry is…
Plumbing!
The LR is
technical
infrastructure.
It allows the
data to flow.
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15. What the Learning Registry is…
 A large scale network of nodes, no single point of
control.
 Each node based on schema-free database CouchDB.
 Unlike relational databases, data does not need to
conform to pre-set schema.
 Documents are stored as a collection of key-value pairs
in JSON format.
 APIs allow nodes to exchange data with other nodes and
external services.
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16. Learning Registry APIs
 Publish (push from user)
 Publish
 SWORD (1.3, 2.0)
 3rd party OAI-PMH Utility (We don’t harvest)
 Access (pull to get data)
 Obtain (by ID, record, by URL)
 Harvest (JSON or OAI-PMH)
 Slice (subset by identity, schema, keyword)
 Distribute (node-to-node, with regex “filtering”)
 Admin (status, discovery, …)
 No Search/Query API! (e.g., use Elastic Search)
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17. Learning Registry node structure
© Copyright 2011 US Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative: CC-BY-3.0
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18. Metadata and Paradata
The Learning Registry is metadata agnostic.
Metadata is stored in a schema-free database.
Also designed to store paradata - dynamic
usage data.
Paradata is generated as resources are used,
reused, adapted, contextualized, favourited,
tweeted, and shared.
Paradata complements metadata by providing
an additional layer of contextual information.
Metadata describes what a resource is,
paradata records how it is being used.
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19. To go back to the plumbing...
In order for
plumbing to be
useful, you need to
build something on
top of it….
….otherwise you
end up with a big
mess.
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20. To build useful services on top of the
plumbing you need….
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21. Plumbers needed
The Learning Registry needs developers to build
useful services and applications on top of the
network of nodes.
The data processing overhead, instead of being
handled by the database, is pushed up to the
application layer.
Develops are needed to create services to
process the data to make it useful to educators.
But…this approach is relatively new to the
education domain.
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22. Not just any old plumbers, creative plumbers!
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23. CETIS, Jisc and Mimas involvement
 CETIS maintained a watching brief on LR since its
inception in 2010.
 Jisc / CETIS / LR information sharing meeting in UK,
October 2010.
 CETIS guest blog post by LR Senior Technical Advisor
Dan Rehak in March 2011.
 DevCSI / CETIS OER Hackday, March 2011.
 Developer Pat Lockley attended LR Plugfest in
Washington DC, June 2011.
 JISC Learning Registry Node (JLeRN) Experiment
funded, Nov 2011.
 CETIS conference session “The Learning Registry –
capturing conversations about learning resources”, Feb
2012.
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24. Why all the interest?
 The Learning Registry adopted an innovative approach
to an old problem.
 Already tried mandating formal metadata schema and
controlled vocabularies with questionable success.
(UKLOMCore anyone?)
 Not proposing institutions adopted the LR as the
approach to manage their learning resources.
 It’s an interesting step in a new direction.
 Fitted with CETIS and Jisc’s remit to explore innovative
learning technology developments.
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25. The JLeRN Experiment
 Funded by Jisc at Mimas from Dec 2011 – Oct 2012.
 JLeRN Team: Sarah Currier (Manager), Nick Syrotiuk
and Bharti Gupta (Developers).
 Aimed to build an experimental node.
 Explore feasibility of contributing and analysing data.
 Support development of use cases and applications
relevant with UK F/HE.
 CETIS helped support UK special interest community.
 Developers liaised directly with LR developers.
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26. JLeRN Achievements and Outputs
 Successfully built 3 nodes.
 Worked closely with OER Rapid Innovation projects.
 Ingested test data from Jorum via OAI-PMH feed.
 Built JLeRN Node explorer.
 Hosted and participated in a number of community and
developer events.
 Commissioned use cases, case study and “Wider
Potential” report from Sero Consulting.
 Actively engaged with community.
 Maintained JLeRN blog: jlernexperiment.wordpress.com
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27. JLeRN Community Engagement - SPAWS
Sharing Paradata Across Widget Stores
(SPAWS)
OER Rapid Innovation Programme
University of Bolton
http://scottbw.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/spa
ws-impact/
Used the Learning Registry to share usage
data, e.g. reviews, ratings, and download
statistics, between web app stores of widgets
and gadgets for educators.
#OER13

28. JLeRN Community Engagement - RIDLR
 Rapid Innovation Dynamic Learning Maps - Learning
Registry (RIDLR):
 OER Rapid Innovation Programme.
 University of Newcastle.
 http://www.medev.ac.uk/blog/oer-rapid-innovation-
ridlr/
 Tested the release of contextually rich paradata via
the JLeRN node to the Learning Registry and harvest
back paradata to provide resource discovery linked to
specific topics displayed within the context of the
curriculum and personal learning maps.
#OER13

29. JLeRN Community Engagement - ENGrich
ENGrich
Digitisation and Content Programme.
University of Liverpool.
http://engrich.liv.ac.uk/
Developed a customised search engine for
visual media relevant to engineering
education. Information about student ratings
and recommendations are stored in their own
LR node and used to enhance customised
Google searches.
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30. JLeRN Community Engagement - Pgogy
Pgogy developer Pat Lockley:
http://www.pgogy.com/
Developed tools for interacting with Learning
Registry nodes including:
Ramanathan - submits information from an
RSS feed to LR.
Pliny - submits Google Analytics data to
the LR.
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31. Issues – sharing data at network scale
JLeRN did not attempt to share data between
nodes.
APIs for distributing data between nodes are less
well tested than the APIs for interfacing with
services external to the LR.
Projects, e.g. SPAWS, ENGrich, proved stand
alone nodes do have benefits.
But LR functionality has not been tested at
network scale.
#OER13

32. Issues – technology lock in
Not clear if there are real benefits to using LR as
opposed to vanilla schema-free databases such
as Mongo and CouchDB.
LR provides APIs, documentation and
community support.
May lock developers in to using CouchDB rather
than other solutions.
#OER13

33. Issues – semantic technologies
 Why not use semantic technologies e.g. RDF
triple stores?
 Triple stores have been innovative technology of
choice for sharing data on a web-wide scale for
a decade or more.
 But uptake in the education domain has been
slow.
 Steep learning curve associated with such
technologies.
 Learning Registry’s open approach to dealing
with messy educational data seemed to fit the
ethos of the teaching and learning sector better.
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34. Conclusions
 JLeRN Experiment was a technical
success.
 Innovative projects and developers have
demonstrated that useful tools and service
can be built on top of LR nodes.
 Overall impact on UK F/HE sector
negligible.
 Always intended to be a proof of concept
development, not a supported service.
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35. Conclusions
 LR technical infrastructure is a genuinely
innovative approach to the thorny problem
of managing and sharing learning
resource descriptions and contextual data.
 Technical approaches, esp. use of
schema free databases, may have some
impact on the education technology
landscape in the longer term.
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36. Coda - inBloom
 US K-12 initiative.
 “Secure data management service that allows states
and districts to bring together and manage student and
school data and connect it to learning tools used in
classrooms.”
 Funded by Gates Foundation & Carnegie Corporation.
 inBloom index is a dedicated LR node that will connect
to the LR network.
 Will be interesting to see if the LR works at network
scale.
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37. Coda - inBloom
 inBloom data may include children’s name, social
security number, learning disabilities, test scores,
attendance record, hobbies, career goals, attitudes
toward school, homework completion rates.
 Parents associated with American Civil Liberties Union
and Parent-Teacher Association have raised concerns
that data will be abused.
 DoEd says schools do not need parental consent to
share student records with any “school official” who has a
“legitimate educational interest”.
 inBloom technical infrastructure built by Amplify
Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corps.
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38. Further information - Learning Registry
@learningreg
#learningreg
http://www.learningregistry.org
learning_registry_collaborate@googlegroups.com
learningreg_dev@googlegroups.com
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39. Further information – JLeRN Experiment
#jlern
JLeRN blog
http://jlernexperiment.wordpress.com/
Wider Potential Report:
http://jlernexperiment.files.wordpress.com/2012/
11/121109-jlern-wider-potential-report-dk1.pdf
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40. Further information – CETIS
@jisccetis
http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/
Lorna’s CETIS blog http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/
Phil’s CETIS blog http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/philb/
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41. Further information – Mimas
@MimasNews
http://mimas.ac.uk/
#OER13

42. Licence and attribution
By Lorna M. Campbell<lmc@strath.ac.uk>, JISC
CETIS <http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk>
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported licence.
To view a copy of this licence, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a
letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite
300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.
#OER13