Hi Julian



Sorry, the context was from the eTekkatho site documentation:



  <http://blog.etekkatho.mimas.ac.uk/en/>



In web terms, bandwidth or download speed is both a continuum and can vary in a single connection, so you can't really define "low bandwidth" in absolute terms. What you can do is put together a profile of devices and bandwidth in a target audience, and come up with a specification for your content that should result in an acceptable user experience, including:



*  overall download time per resource;

*  wait time to be able to use the resource (streaming means you may be able to start using a resource when only a percentage is downloaded, which works with HTML text in web browser but not generally with zip files)



Various other strategies like caching (keeping copies closer on the network to the user) can also help, as can splitting up your resources so you can reuse components (or consolidating them to reduce requests), optimizing and minifying them in various ways.



Because there are various strategies and trade-offs (for example, some advocate having a separate mobile website, while others advocate a responsive design approach, where the content served various depending on device capabilities -- but not bandwidth as this is difficult to detect), I am interested in what best practices have developed in real-life OER projects.



Some text-based resources could be ideal for plain text; others would benefit from markup like HTML (especially if there were notations, multiple languages, tables); others would be more media rich. The child with the smudgy photocopy of human anatomy could benefit by an illustration in an optimized vector format like SVG, if their web browser supported it. Sometimes extra markup is required for accessibility.



My interest in this is partly to help answer the question: should OERs be developed in different versions to accommodate different devices/network connections, or can a single version of an OER with some adjustments/alternatives be, in general, universal enough? Or rather, based on research, knowledge and experience, what factors would this decision depend on?





Tavis Reddick

Adam Smith College



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Date:    Thu, 6 Jun 2013 08:35:28 +0100

From:    Julian Tenney <[log in to unmask]>

Subject: Re: Low bandwidth OERs



> Can anyone point me to a technical guide to creating low-bandwidth OERs



What does that mean?





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