JISC has provided CETIS with funding to commission a series of OER Technical Mini Projects to explore specific technical issues that have been identified by the community during CETIS events such as #cetisrow and #cetiswmd and which have arisen from the JISC / HEA OER Programmes.
Mini project grants will be awarded as a fixed fee of £10,000 payable on receipt of agreed deliverables. Funding is not restricted to UK Higher and Further Education Institutions. This call is open to all OER Technical Interest Group members, including those outwith the UK. Membership of the OER TIG is defined as those members of [log in to unmask] who engage with the JISC CETIS technical discussions.
The CETIS OER Mini Projects are building on rapid innovation funding models already employed by the JISC. In addition to exploring specific technical issues these Mini Projects will aim to make effective use of technical expertise, build capacity, create focussed pre-defined outputs, and accelerate sharing of knowledge and practice. Open innovation is encouraged: projects are expected to build on existing knowledge and share their work openly.
It is expected that three projects will be funded in the first instance. If this model proves successful, additional funding may be made available for further projects.
The project will undertake a semantic analysis of a large corpus of educational metadata records to identify what properties and characteristics of the resources are being described. Analysis of textual descriptions within these records will be of particular interest e.g. free text used to describe licence conditions, educational levels and approaches.
The data set selected for analysis must include multiple metadata formats (e.g. LOM and DC) and be drawn from at least ten collections. The data set should include metadata from a number of open educational resource collections but it is not necessary for all records to be from oer collections.
Many
sites hosting collections of educational materials keep logs of the search
terms used by visitors to the site when searching for resources. The aim for
this mini project is to develop a simple tool that facilitates the analysis of
these logs to classify the search terms used with reference to the characteristics
of a resource that may be described in the metadata. Such information should
assist a collection manager in building their collection (e.g. by showing what
resources were in demand) and in describing their resources in such a way that
helps users find them.
The
analysis tool should be shown to work with search logs from a number of sites
(we have identified some who are willing to share their data) and should
produce reports in a format that are readily understood, for example a
breakdown of how many searches were for “subjects” and which were the most
popular subjects searched for. It is expected that a degree of manual
classification will be required, but we would expect that the system is capable
of learning how to handle certain terms and that this learning would be shared
between users: a user should not have to tell the system that “Biology” is a
subject once they or any other user has done so. The analysis tool should be
free to use or install without restriction and should be developed as Open
Source Software.
Further
information on the sort of data that is available and what it might mean is outlined
in the blog post Metadata Requirements from the Analysis of Search Logs http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/philb/2011/02/23/searchlogs/
Funding: £10,000 payable on receipt of agreed deliverables.
Project 3: Open Call
Proposals
are invited for one short technical
project or demonstrator in any area relevant to the management, distribution,
discovery, use, reuse and tracking of open educational resources. Topics that applicants may wish to explore
include, but are not restricted to: resource aggregations, presentation /
visualisation of aggregations, embedded licences, “activity data”, sustainable
approaches to RSS endpoint registries, common formats for sharing search logs,
analysis of use of advanced search facilities, use of OAI ORE.
Proposals must be no more than 1500 words long and must include the following information:
6. Identification of proposed outputs and deliverables.
Proposals are not required to include a budget breakdown, as projects will be awarded a fixed fee on completion.
All projects must be completed within six months of date of approval.
Submission Dates
Successful bidders will be required to disseminate all project outputs under a relevant open licence, such as CC-BY. Projects must post regular short progress updates and all deliverables including a final report to the oer-discuss list and to JISC CETIS.
We encourage all list members to engage with the OER Technical Mini Projects and to input comments suggestions and feedback through the list.
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