Back to main report

Back to Evidence - main page

see also

Evidence - OER release publishing models

Evidence - Discovery ReUse and Accessibility

Evidence - Collections and subject disciplines

Evidence - OER being adopted and used

Releasing and using OERs

Technical and Hosting issues

Themes strand

CORE-SET (CORE-SET final report) | ReACTOR (ReACTOR Final report) |  Opening up a future in business (Future in business Final Report) | COMC (COMC Final report) | PARIS (PARIS Final Project Report)  HALS OER (HALS OER Final Project Report) | PublishOER (PublishOER final report) | Great Writers (Great Writers Final Report)|  ALTO UK (ALTO UK Final Report)  | ORBIT (ORBIT Final Report) | DEFT (DEFT Final Report)    | FAVOR (FAVOR Final Report) | SESAME (SESAME Final Report) |

OMAC strand

BLOCKeD (BLOCKeD Final Report) |   Digital Literacy and Creativity (Digital Literacy and Creativity Final Report | Academic Practice in Context (Academic Practice in Context Final report) | Teeside Open Learning Units (Teeside Open Learning Units Final Report)

Technical/hosting issues

What technical issues have you met in collecting and making OER available, and how have you addressed them?

• Tracking mechanisms

•    Number of OERs published
•    Google Analytics
•    Repository analytics
•    Continuing focus group work and consultations at the UAL and elsewhere
•    Publicity, including Web2.0 feedback  (ALTO Final Report)

• Google Analytics events were enabled to track a variety of actions on the site. The most frequent action was ‘copy and paste’, followed by video plays and download. There were 514 ‘seconds played’ events which equates to 186,658 seconds of video played (or 3111 minutes). The figures show that people are using the materials on the site and truly engaging with the content. Actions related to ‘reuse’ include cite (someone using the citation text), embed (someone embedding the content elsewhere) and print (printing content, presumably for use elsewhere). (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• the format of the case based multiple choice questions provided by the publisher did not fit the standard multiple choice question format in WikiVet. This couldn’t be automated and required a significant amount of work in re-editing the text and format so that they could be published through a WikiVet template. (PublishOER Final Report)
• The links that LIS has with FE have also kept us mindful of whom the end user is and the constraints in FE on use of certain repositories, the lower availability of technical support and download speeds. There has to be a balance between quality and the ‘weight’ of the video and how quickly it can download and play without endless buffering. (Future in business Final Report)

Open tools

• A number of the case studies explored the affordances of open tools. Perhaps the most prominent e is that of Peter Winter at Monteney Primary School whose case study introduced a set of activities linked by the theme of "Monsters at Monteney" and aimed to develop children’s abilities to use a range of open source online tools for digital arts, storytelling and poetry. Peter was very clear that he wanted to develop a set of resources that would enable children to undertake a series of activities independently and which they could access both from home and school. He felt that it was important that these resources should be open source and able to access across any platform:

I really wanted this project to be about accessibility. Not just for the pupils. But for any teachers or parents who wish to try out some of the activities with their children. Too often the opportunity to try out new and exciting learning opportunities can be stymied by a reliance on  one particular operating system, a  piece of kit they do not possess (or cannot afford) or a level of technical expertise Mr Zuckerberg would quake at. (DeFT Final Report)

• Accordingly, the tools he used for the case studies activities were as follows:

•    ‘Scratch’ (http://scratch.mit.edu) as a simple programming tool
•    ‘Screenr’ (http://www.screenr.com/ )  to create screencasts
•    ‘Spore’ game (http://eu.spore.com/home.cfm )  for creating ecosystems
•    ‘Fotobabble’ presentation tool (http://www.fotobabble.com/) which allows to add users a commentary to photographs/video
•    ‘Aviary’s suite (http://advanced.aviary.com/tools/music-creator) for editing rich media; including a music creator
•    ‘Voki’ tool  (http://www.voki.com/) for creating customised avatars
•    ‘Sumo Paint’ (http://www.sumopaint.com/app/) and ‘Pixlr’ (http://pixlr.com/) online image editors
•    ‘Linio’ annotating tool (http://en.linoit.com/) for creating "sticky notes" (DeFT Final Report)

• Community-led repositories which require individual engagement can be more appealing and user-friendly than institutional, centrally-managed sites

“I think the easy publication of resources and the fact that people have control over what they publish, when they can edit, has been very empowering in terms of LanguageBox…the empowering aspect of really being able to manage your resources is so valuable. I think that motivates people and can only be of benefit.” - comment made by project partner at meeting, 20th September, 2012 (FAVOR Final Report)

• External content was more time consuming, with a manual process to identify and upload with correct metadata. Metadata was sometimes hard to find on external resources with a great variety in how things were displayed and published. Finding the licence in particular and exposing this in the metadata took significant effort. (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• The XHTML editor software used to develop the resources caused a number of concerns throughout the development process. On a number of occasions the editor failed to produce the desired formatting of the content. These errors, although successfully addressed, were time-consuming and distracting. An alternative method of producing the online resources is being considered. This includes evaluating the HTML 5 version of Xerte Online toolkits15 as a potential replacement. (PARiS Final Report)
• When the resources had been built and were ready for publication, they were added to the Equella repository along with UKLOM metadata. Once published into the live section of the Equella U-Now collection, the resources were available on the U-Now website. To enhance the user experience in relation to the resources, the U-Now site offers a number of pieces of supporting functionality. For example, the user can run a search in the Xpert search engine based on the title of the resource the user is viewing. Currently, Xpert offers access to over 300,000 learning resources, and as such provides the user with the opportunity to widen exposure to the subject of Education for Sustainable development. U-Now also suggests YouTube videos that might be relevant to the user, and allows the user to leave comments. (PARiS Final Report)
• The project has also utilised the newly created Mobile Xerte Application in order to enhance the mandated requirement of the project to collect and use existing third party OER. Third party OER collected and used as part of four of the newly created PARiS modules are available as mobile playlists. This allows Nottingham students (and informal leaners through the U-Now site) to access over 400 pieces of OER relevant to their study on Android mobile devices. This will be the first time the mobile application will be used to support teaching at Nottingham. (PARiS Final Report)
• We concluded that new technology was needed to aid discovery and permission seeking for low cost, bitesized licensed works with lower transaction costs/fast responses, linked to new notions of what constituted ‘books’ (breaking the print paradigm for management of commissioned content), to disrupt the current status quo of third party piracy. The systems proposed here could provide ways forward for reducing transaction costs and decreasing the time taken for permission/release in OER. At the same time improvements could be made that would actively assist conscientious staff to comply with copyright law and provide valuable ‘use’ statistics. Usages statistics are urgently needed by publishers and by institutions to determine popularity of resources, and whether charges currently being paid are accurate. It could change the basis of payments in future. (PublishOER Final report)