Jisc to pioneer the use of social media technologies to improve the discovery of educational content
The UK is to participate in a global experiment, based on the social media technology behind Twitter and Facebook, to find out how the social activity around online educational content can be captured and fed back to users, creators and publishers.
Working with the Learning Registry, a project funded by the US Department of Education and the US Department of Defence, Jisc and the HE Academy are calling for institutions and developers to work with them on a new 10 month project. This project will lay the foundations of an infrastructure that will improve the way people choose educational information online.
Amber Thomas, Jisc programme manager says, “This international collaboration will see us contributing the UK’s expertise to the Learning Registry. We are working with Mimas and Jisc CETIS to support the Registry’s vision of gathering together the conversations, ratings, recommendations and usage data around digital content.
“We know that users and providers want access to more information about how educational content is used by others and this is an innovative approach to meeting that need.”
It is commonplace to read reviews of books, music and items before your choose to buy or use them. This experiment will look to assess how we can create the technical capabilities to reveal a rich picture of what people are doing with educational content.
Steve Midgley, Deputy Director, Office of Education Technology at the US Department of Education says, “I am greatly encouraged by the collaboration and opportunity presented by our work with Jisc on the Learning Registry.”
This builds on Jisc’s work in discovery, activity data, Jorum and open educational resources supporting the discovery, use and analytics of digital resources for teaching, learning and research. The experiment will give, Jisc a much clearer view of the potential of this approach, and there will be a rich dataset of content available to future services.
Read more on the Learning Registry.
Find out about the Jisc, Mimas and Jisc CETIS project the Learning Registry Node Experiment.
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