JISC

Overview

A JISC sponsored project to deposit high quality educational resources, in different formats, in the University learning repository and develop policies and procedures to retrieve and repurpose learning objects internally and externally.

Aims and objectives

The project will deposit OER content the equivalent of over 500 credits and expose the content via Harvest Road Hive and deposit in Open JORUM. It aims to establish policies and processes to identify, deposit and store content. Address cultural and practical issues around the sharing of resources, including quality, Intellectual Property Right and Copyright.  Investigate metadata requirements and develop search interfaces to facilitate the retrieval of open educational resources. At the end of the project it is anticipated that there will be an established workflow for depositing educational resources in the Hive repository along with a procedure for withdrawing and archiving redundant learning objects.

Project methodology

Initially work will begin with faculties to gather learning material already committed to the project.  The team will commence scoping in detail the work required to deposit learning objects through Blackboard into the Hive repository and then into Open Jorum. When resources have been collected work will start on developing workflows the take objects from creation, through quality assurance processes to deposit through Blackboard into Hive. In the course of this work metadata schema will be evaluated so that objects can be effectively labelled for future search and retrieval.  In parallel work will proceed on copyright and ownership statements for each object.  New content will be labelled with meaningful descriptions to identify content, file type, course details, etc.  To maintain the quality of objects in the repository and their usefulness to learners and educators it is planned to embed procedures that manage version control, track variations from original objects, generate statistics, review and withdraw objects from the repository as and when appropriate.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

• Definition of OERs for the project and identify any access restrictions internally and externally
• Address current author and faculty issues regarding ownership of learning objects by developing policies and process relating to IPR and copyright for objects produced by Staffordshire University
• Develop a ‘take down’ policy for unsuitable and obsolete objects
• Investigation and implementation of a metadata schema
• Develop a customised interface between contributors and Hive
• Develop a customised interface to facilitate searches for objects to reuse and repurpose
• Process and interfaces for gathering statistics on content and (re)use of content
• Continual evaluation of work packages throughout the course of the project

Technology / Standards used

• Harvest Road HIVE
• IMS Content Package
• IMS Common Cartridge
• SWORD
• Blackboard
• ICODEON
• OAI PMH
• Open JORUM
• Web Services
• RSS