Open content at Oxford University
Overview
Open Spires has two purposes: Firstly, to increase the amount of educational audio and video content released from Oxford University as Open Content Resources (OER). Secondly, to enable the University to investigate and disseminate the institutional implications of making some of this material available as 'Open Content'. The project is making a range of audio and video podcasting material available (talks, research seminars etc) through the web and other channels. The material will be open for reuse and redistribution by third parties globally, provided that it is used in a non-commercial way and is attributed to its creator.
Aims & Objectives
- Working with groups and individual academic staff to ensure that future and legacy digital content can be released, where appropriate, under a suitable open content licence, and published as RSS/ATOM feeds in OpenJorum and subject portals in perpetuity
- Consolidating legal/licensing issues and the development of appropriate development support materials for staff and documented workflows for cultural change to ensure that considerations of open release become part of the digital content creation cycle at Oxford University
Staff support materials will be integrated into the Oxford staff development programme and shared amongst UK learning technology and staff development units. This work enables ‘lay’ academic staff to engage and be confident in understanding the use of open licences and reuse of OER materials.
Project methodology
The methodology will revolve around supporting academics to use the decentralised content creation workflows developed by the central podcasting service launched in October 2008. The project methodology involves:
- Liaison with early adopters
- Institutional work on policies, legal and technical framework
- Technical support on content creation
- Repository work for related cataloguing and syndication
- Evaluation of the impact of open content release to the subject community
Departments can currently upload recordings of public lectures, including those from eminent visiting speakers into an RSS syndication system, OXITEMS for podcasting to the web and iTunesU.
Through parallel case study work we will research the practicalities of Open Content release and then report back to the UK HE community on our findings.
Anticipated Outputs & Outcomes
The project will produce a cross-institutional set of seminars, lectures and research talks released as OER licensed material available for global reuse. The project will document:
- Scoping activities, technical requirements, use cases
- OER Policies, processes, workflows
- Reports on policy implications of Open Content licences
- Service management material and technical frameworks
- Training and support materials
- Evaluation and dissemination reports
Technology/Standards Used
| Multimedia audio and video formats |
MP3 for audio
MPEG4 umbrella video format using H264 codec |
| Syndication formats |
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Metadata for content is stored and delivered in XML via the institutional system called OXITEMS.
RSS 2.0 and ATOM podcast feeds are the delivery formats.
Resource metadata can be mapped to Dublin Core and provided as OMPL as an umbrella container of all feeds.
RSS/ATOM feeds contain subject hierarchical categorisation per item and per feed. Description, author and User and subject keywords tags are also included per item.
ATOM and Media RSS, an RSS dialect is being investigated to provide more metadata opportunities including full time-coded transcripts, keywords and thumbnail images.
Creative Commons RDF descriptions of the CC license will be attached to each item in a feed. |
Project Staff
- Peter Robinson (Project Manager / Principal Investigator)
- Melissa Highton (Project Director & Champion)
- TBC (Project Co-ordinator)
- Rowan Wilson (OER and Legal Officer)