JISC

Overview

Work done at Oxford during the pilot year of institutional OER activity through the OpenSpires project (http://openspires.ox.ac.uk) resulted in the release of a collection of materials from the Politics and International Relations subject area. There is now a significant opportunity to build upon this departmental interest to promote a wider set of textual and research-oriented OER materials tied together by a topical departmental news and research blog. This project is particularly timely due to the considerable general public interest in political issues surrounding the recent hung parliament and the project will exploit this interest through marketing activities.

Aims and objectives

The Triton project will bring high-quality OER resources closer to the Politics and International Relations subject community and increase the discoverability of OER materials through a heavily promoted cross-institutional blog – http://politicsinspires.org.

Triton will aid discovery of OER in three ways:

1.     Regular short scholarly posts and commentaries released as OER

2.     Learning pathways – drawing together sets of quality controlled OER material

Thematic collections – dynamically generated channels to learning.

Project Methodology

Triton is a collaboration between the team at the University of Oxford responsible for OpenSpires (funded under the HEA/JISC OER Programme Phase 1) and Oxford University’s Politics and International Relations Department which is top-ranked in national research and teaching assessments and teaches around 1,000 undergraduates and 300 graduate students.

Triton will also collaborate with and be supported by C-SAP, the relevant national HEA subject centre. Cambridge University students and staff will also contribute to the core blogging system, and we hope to build an even wider community of contributors and maintainers around the material. 

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

Outputs include:

• The academic research blog (Politics in Spires, http://politicsinspires.org/)
• Linked learning pathways
• Dynamic thematic aggregation collections
• Analysis and evaluation of impact through focus groups, usage stats and qualitative feedback

The outcomes of the project aim to help the UK-OER Community by:

• Evaluating how discoverability and uptake of OER resources is affected by the direct marketing of expertly chosen OER materials to a known audience;
• Reporting on how cost-effective social technologies can be used to create a lightweight OER subject portal;

Testing the feasibility of generalising this framework to other subject areas.

Technology / Standards used

WordPress CMS, RSS 2.0, OPML/RSS, MP3 for audio, MP4 H.264 codec for video