JISC

The goal of the ENGrich project is to produce a customised search engine that pulls together existing visual teaching and learning resources in Engineering disciplines. This will be used to support education and training, and to facilitate the incorporation of innovative and value-added services, all within a subject-specific context.

The resources brought together and displayed by ENGrich will range from static images to interactive animations, improving upon existing search engines, which return too many results irrelevant to the discipline with limited educational value.

Existing searches for educational resources relevant to Engineering return a great number of results of unknown quality and relevance, which are presented textually and can take too long to filter out. The Engineering information environment is very complex, and due to potential ambiguities, many important subject-specific terms (e.g. stress, fatigue, fracture, circuit, current, etc.) produce results more relevant to other disciplines. A lot of time and effort is often required to eliminate ‘false hits’ and isolate potentially useful results.

In recent studies of teaching and learning in Engineering, it has been shown that visual content can help in making concepts clear to students. It can make lectures more visibly appealing, attractive and interesting. Most especially in Engineering Education, moving images, such as interactive animations, clips, flash files, etc, are finding an increasing use.

This project will deliver the following as outputs. In the main, a dedicated web-service, with visual gallery of thumbnail representations of digital content, providing merged metadata and paradata, links, input GUI (for community to apply their evaluation), and other utility code (such as share and embed). In addition, a portable ‘widget’ version of the enhanced ENGrich search facility, which will be used by the engineering community in their own teaching and learning platforms. Also, enriched metadata and paradata, which includes usage data, will be acquired with subject community input through the ENGrich service, in a sharable and interoperable format.

The Engineering community formed within the project will continue contributing and using the outputs above. In addition, outcomes and lessons learned will be shared within and beyond the HE sector, and amongst JISC-related communities.

Objectives

to produce a visual media search engine for Engineering Education, including embed code that can be used on third-party sites (a ‘widget’).

• To create a community of academics and students in Engineering to develop, test and use the ENGrich search 
• To investigate the possibility of drawing and posting metadata and paradata from/to the Learning Registry.
• To produce open metadata and paradata in compliance with the Discovery Open Metadata Principles.
• To work with the JISC, their services, and other projects funded within this call, to develop a robust information architecture, resource description, clustering policy.
•  To disseminate and evaluate project outcomes, drawing heavily on existing networks and the project partners, this to be both formative and summative.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

• A dedicated web-service with visual gallery of thumbnail representations of the ENGrich digital content; providing merged metadata, links, input GUI (for community to apply their evaluation) and other utility code (such as share and embed).
• A community of active contributors/reviewers, comprising students (undergraduate, postgraduate, international) and academics from the Engineering disciplines.
• A portable ‘widget’ version of the enhanced ENGrich search facility that will be used by the community in their own teaching and learning platforms.
• The enriched metadata, and paradata, (which includes usage data, feedback, rankings, likes, etc), that was acquired with subject community input through the ENGrich service, in a sharable and interoperable format. The reusable open metadata will be fully compliant with the Discovery Open Metadata Principles.
• Reports and dissemination practices that will be of relevant to JISC-related communities.