Dear All,
In relation to Nancy's post about tracking OER innovations, my colleague Carol Elston and I have been discussing our concerns about maintenance of shared material – specifically, if we were to update an OER, these improvements would not be reflected in versions already adapted by another institutions.
Carol suggested that perhaps the OER project could look at creating a portal, rather than a repository, for gathering together exemplar resources. This portal could contain links to high-quality resources that are available for re-use, rather than hosting the materials themselves. Bringing together a one-stop shop for these exemplars would also help with identifying where there are gaps – perhaps the project (with appropriate funding) could be involved in creating new IL / academic skills material to fill these gaps (or repurposing existing materials to make them generic / adaptable)?
I emailed Nancy with this suggestion, and here are her thoughts (which she was happy to be shared with the mailing list!):
"I totally agree about the portal idea as we won’t have the resources to be updating versions of OERs etc. MERLOT in the US only hosts links (still not perfect) which shifts any responsibility for updating to the original author. There are currently a couple of initiatives looking at versioning in OERs. One of the JISC Rapid Innovation projects is looking specifically at developing a piece of software to track OERs: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/ukoer3/rapidinnovation/trackoer.aspx This would be great for creators but also anyone aggregating/curating OERs as some may want to highlight newer versions.
The other thing I heard about was that Creative Commons was proposing a way of tracking reuse: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Reuse_tracking
So, it seems things are afoot in the tracking of new OER versions! Alex Fenlon, who attended last week’s event worked on a JISC OER project that also looked a possible fix for tracking, by adding code (the developers called it a date of birth code) to the CC licence you could keep a tag on wherever that OER went and on any subsequent versions produced by the original creator or others."
Would be good to hear other people's thoughts on this!
Thanks,
Dan
Dan Pullinger BA MA MSc AHEA
Faculty Team Librarian
(Science and Engineering)
Edward Boyle Library
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT
T (0113) 343 5574
W http://library.leeds.ac.uk/people/Dan-Pullinger
W http://twitter.com/lulsciengteam
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-----Original Message-----
From: Information literacy open educational resources [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nancy Graham
Sent: 23 August 2012 20:10
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Tracking OER innovations
Dear all
I recently saw this Tweet from OER Commons:
OER Commons þ@OERCommons
Calling all #OER remix tracking enthusiasts: You now receive email notifications @OERCommons when someone remixes your Open Author resource
There is also a JISC Rapid Innovation project on Tracking OER. Details can be found here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/ukoer3/rapidinnovation/trackoer.aspx
It will be fascinating to see how these work in practice, so perhaps one of us needs to upload some material to OER Commons to see how it works!
Best wishes,
Nancy Graham
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