1. From institutional repositories to personal collections of learning resources Julià Minguillón1,2, Jordi Conesa1 1Computer Science, Multimedia and TelecommunicationStudies 2UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Barcelona, Spain

2. Table of contents The UOC Virtual Campus and the institutional repository Management of learning resources The gatekeeper The #metaOER project Preliminary pilot experiences Discussion Future work PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

3. UniversitatOberta de Catalunya Created in 1994, 200 students -> > 40000 Completely virtual (but some F2F evaluation) Virtual classroom: Calendar Communication spaces Evaluation activities Learning resources Open but monolithic VLE -> PLE-1 PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

4. Institutional repository Open repository: teaching, research and institutional resources DSpace based: Preservation more important than dissemination Permanent URLs (handles) + RSS Managed by librarians, neither teachers nor students… …but self-archiving is possible Good for storing, not for searching/browsing PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

5. Learning resources Teachers create collections of learning resources (readings, examples, exercises, …) But it is not easy to add or change resources Resources are linked to a given course and are available only from the virtual classroom Irregular use of all the available resources Learners adopt a very passive role!!! PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

6. Integration in the learning process Do not provide learners with everything they need (they might not need the same!) Final users (students, teachers) should be able to discover and share new resources Promote informational competences: Searching, filtering, summarizing, sharing Activities are more important than resources PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

7. delicious Social bookmarking web 2.0 service Large community of users Users can become “friends” Triplets: URL, user, {tags} -> 1 / 10 / 100 ratio Highly connected to Wikipedia and other large repositories (i.e. OCW) Accessible via API or brute HTML parsing PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

8. Mining delicious Use delicious search engine and API Retrieve “all” triplets for a given concept Discover similar resources: Resources clustered by tags Resources tagged by “expert” users Improve descriptions by analyzing tags: Misspelling Additional tags PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

9. Our proposal Do not use the virtual classroom mechanisms for organizing learning resources Use the institutional repository to store them Create small collections using a delicious account with some predetermined tags Ask learners to use delicious to organize and describe their own personal collections Use a gatekeeper (a.k.a. gardener) to “tidy up” PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

10. The gatekeeper delicious account + RSS / API bots Specialized / thematic (i.e. Statistics, OERs) Maintain a collection sharing the same hashtag (i.e. #metaoer) Provides learners with selected resources Analyzes the community of practice and reintroduces knowledge as recommendations: new resources, tags, expert users, … PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

11. Sharing resources The teacher maintains a collection of resources for a given subject in DSpace + delicious Learners are aware of the RSS of the collection A bot searches resources for a given #hashtag proposed by all users (learners, teachers, any) It analyzes tags from all users sharing such resource and proposes a possible description The teacher decides whether such new resource can be part of the collection PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

12. The #metaOER project UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning OER evangelization: courses, workshops, … Collection of Open Resources on Open Educational Resources Categories: awareness, open formats, metadata, licenses, software, repositories Resources tagged with #metaoer are considered to become part of the collection PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

13. Preliminary pilot experiences First virtual course on OERs (May 2011): 40 students (teachers) -> 23 active Only 4 had a delicious account Workshop on OERs (July 2011): 90 attendees -> 50 participated in the survey 14 use delicious Only 9 “use” the institutional repository PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

14. Discussion (I) The reality is not so 2.0: Only a few users share resources in delicious Even less users edit Wikipedia pages The number of resources in other languages than English is small Users need to be trained to use delicious and become Wikipedia editors Some learners prefer the 1.0 model! PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

15. Discussion (II) Analyzing tags cannot be done “online” Users need to share some predetermined vocabularies The gatekeeper cannot be intrusive The teacher needs to supervise the job done by the gatekeeper A second bot could connect the delicious collection with DSpace automatically PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

16. Future work Implement all bots Add services on top of DSpace:add a comment, rate, make favorite, subscribe, … Better support for multimedia and other non-document resources (i.e. streaming) Integrate the system in the virtual classroom (VLE) as well as a widget (PLE) Anything else? PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

17. In a few sentences… If we provide learners with everything they need, they adopt passive roles If teachers arrange everything in advance, they adopt passive roles Open Educational Resources are out there search, discover, tag, share, use The PLE is just a combination of existing tools and some bots that help to automate tasks PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

18. Thank you! Julià Minguillón Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication Studies UNESCO Chair in e-Learning jminguillona@uoc.edu twitter/@jminguillona http://unescochair-elearning.uoc.edu PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU