15 REUSABLE
TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS FOR OER
developed by the UK Open Educational Resources
Programme Phase Three: Rapid Innovation Strand
Slides Amber Thomas, JISC. Acknowledgements:
Alicja Shah, JISC for slide design
Martin Hawksey, JISC Cetis for technical advisory
Image: Nerdegutt http://www.flickr.com/photos/nerdegutt/3584415133

problems to solve
how to create rich
how to enrich and
machine-readable
how to simply manage audio-
resources that
and cheaply host visual content
contribute to the
and display in an educational
global content
content? context?
commons?
how to bring OER content closer to the everyday life of academics?
how to make use more visible to aid discovery and decision making?

background
OER Rapid Innovation Strand is part of the JISC and Higher Education
Academy UK Open Educational Resources Programme. The Strand
ran from March to October 2012.
15 small and short projects (£10k - £25k each) were funded to produce
technical solutions supporting open content in education. The projects
all blogged their progress and have made their solutions reusable.
open innovation + open source + open standards
= reusable solutions
OER Rapid
OER Programme Innovation
Programme Page

Introducing ...
15 TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS

how to create rich machine-readable
resources that contributes to the
global content commons?

CAMILOE: Collection and Management of Intriguing Learning Objects
The Teacher Training Resource Bank (TTRB)
was a web based resource that aimed to be a
one-stop portal for education academics and
professionals to gain evidence informed
briefings that are
authoritative, credible, relevant and timely. In
2010 the materials were archived and were
difficult to access in any meaningful way. The
project has begun to make the archive
available again using OER approaches.
TTRB3 Engaging with the Evidence for
Teaching and Learning comprises 250
articles and case studies about Access Visit project
education, cleared under the UK Open TTRB3 blog
Government Licence (compatible with
Creative Commons Attribution), marked-up Watch a short
and tagged, available through a choice of video
RSS feeds, and ultimately with rich usage
data.

MaxTract Improving Accessibility to Mathematics
Maxtract is a tool for converting PDF into
formats such as LaTeX, MathML and text.
It provides translation services into
standard mathematical markup languages
and adds accessibility to mathematical
documents on multiple levels.
Maxtract produces output compatible with
web browsers, screen readers and tools
such as copy and paste, which is achieved
by enriching the regular text with
mathematical markup.
The output can also be used directly, Download Visit project
within the limits of the presentation MaxTract blog
MathML produced, as machine readable
mathematical input to software systems
such as Mathematica or Maple.

Breaking Down Barriers: Georesources and OER
Opened up 8 courses in the Transferred the hosting of the ELOGeo
Landmap Learning Zone through repository to Jorum from University of
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA and Nottingham ensuring the sustainability of
redesign the Learning Zone area of the ELOGeo Project outputs.
the Landmap website, linking
Visit project
through to the ELOGeo repository at
Jorum.. blog

SupOERGlue: supporting rich remixing
Open Tapestry is a web tool previously
known as OERGlue. Open Tapestry
supports LTI (Learning Tools
Interoperability) integration which
allows us to seamlessly link the
.
Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM) system
into it.
If a user has an Open Tapestry account
they can access their snippets from
Open Tapestry and use them to create
a mash-up resource in DLMs which
could then be stored locally. This is Visit project
similar to how Open Tapestry interact blog
with Canvas LMS.

how to simply and cheaply
host and display content?

Red Feather
RedFeather is a lightweight server-side script from the ePrints/Humbox family that
fosters best practice OER sharing without the overheads associated with the
installation and use of a full-scale repository platform. By eliminating the need for
complex server infrastructure and emphasizing a concise, simplified workflow,
RedFeather provides an out-of-the-box solution for users wishing to quickly annotate
their OER and make them available in a variety of formats (including HTML, RSS,
RDF and JSON).
. Red Feather is for:
- The small project
- The solo sharer
Preview
software
Visit project
blog

Bebop Plug-in to enhance BuddyPress profiles over hosted WordPress blogs
The Bebop project is an extended use of BuddyPress, which can be installed onto over
hosted WordPress blogs. Bebop provides web developers with a flexible way for staff to
update and maintain their professional profiles. By processing data from a number of
sources, web managers can re-presented it in a way that helps improve the corporate
website, helps validate and update existing data about staff, and mandates staff to use a
social networking tool in order to maintain their public, professional web presence.
The Bebop plugin provides a way for
.
staff to link to teaching resources
which they are publishing on a number
of platforms and aggregate them into
their staff profile, alongside information
about their research and other
professional responsibilities.
Preview Visit project
software blog

how to enrich and manage
audio-visual content
in an educational context?

Synote Mobile
Imagine how difficult it would be to use a textbook if it
had no contents page, index or page numbers. Synote
provides the way to find or associate notes with a
particular part of a recording,i.e. the media fragments.
The project designed and developed the Synote web
application suitable for mobile technologies. This
provides users with the ability to access, search,
manage and exploit video and audio OER whilst on the
move. Learners, teachers and other users can create
notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions
synchronised to any part of a recording, such as a
lecture.
Access Visit project
Browse Synote Recordings for a lecture Synote blog
series

Linked Data Approaches to OERs
This project takes a linked data approach to
aggregation of OERs and other online content in
order to improve the „usefulness‟ of online
resources for education.
„Autokitty‟ is an open-source application which
uses linked data approaches to present a
collection of pedagogically related resources,
framed within a narrative created by either the
teacher or the students. The „collections‟ or
„narratives‟ created using the tool will be organised
around playback of rich media, such as audio or
video, and will be both flexible and scalable.
Preview the Watch a
software short video This tool extends the established SIMILE Exhibit
web application framework and the tools
developed collaboratively between the SIMILE
Visit project team at MIT and the ESRC/EPSRC „Ensemble„
blog project in the UK.

SPINDLE: speech > text > keywords > captions
The project used speech-to-text technologies to
automatically create transcripts of lectures in order to
generate keywords which will help with the indexing,
description and discovery of the lectures.
SPINDLE created a program that automatically filters the
uncorrected transcript to a set of statistically interesting
keywords. The program analyses the lecturer‟s words and
compares them with the British National Corpus of Spoken
Words. Better keywords improve the discoverability of open
content !
SPINDLE created a “captioning” toolset to help media
producers deal with cataloguing media. With this toolkit, a
media service can now:
- batch process recordings to create transcripts
automatically (using the free toolset CMU Sphinx) Preview the Visit project
- generate keywords software blog
- correct any transcript errors while listening to the media
- and export into time-coded captioning and archive formats Watcha short
video

Attribute Image
The Attribute Images project has extended the Xpert Attribution service by creating a
new tool that allows users to upload images and have a Creative Commons attribution
statement embedded. This removes the reliance on images stored in Flickr, and puts
the power to attribute specific images into the hands of the user.
Automatically embedding open licences simplifies content development, removes
barriers to repurposing and publishing OER, and substantially increases the usability of
open content. Automating licence attribution also enhances digital literacy around the
use of third-party images, as the tool enables best practice in relation to attribution to
be followed.
The tool is available as part of the Xpert site, providing access to an immediate and
established user group. It also has an API allowing developers to make use of the
service in other sites.
Use the tool Visit project
(beta) blog

how to bring OER content closer
to the everyday life of academics?

RIDLR: paradata for curriculum maps
In RIDLR tests the release of
contextually rich paradata via the
JLeRN Experiment to the Learning
Registry and harvest back paradata
about prescribed and additional
. personally collected resources used
within and to augment the MBBS
curriculum, via the Dynamic Learning
Maps system, to enhance the
experience of teachers and learners.
Preview Visit project
software blog

Portfolio Commons
Students and staff at the University of the Arts London who use the e-Portfolio system
(based on Mahara) will be able to select content from their personal portfolio collection
attach Creative Commons licences to that content and then publish to the open web
using 2 different repository systems as publishing platforms:
• Jorum (http://www.jorum.ac.uk/)
• Filestore (http://alto.arts.ac.uk/filestore/)
They will be able to do this without leaving
their e-Portfolio.
.
This means the content they publish in this
manner will be retained in the long-term after
they leave the UAL and their e-Portfolio
system is closed.. Because the content has
been deposited in institutional and national
repository services users will be able to
reference the content in the future in their
CVs for professional purposes.
View short Visit project
video blog

Xenith: adding html5 export to the Xerte tool suite
Developers of rich, interactive learning materials are increasingly challenged to
deliver content to a wide range of devices. The project has added HTML5
delivery capability to Xerte Online Toolkits with significant benefits for its user
community.
. Content developers will be able to exploit emerging pedagogies for a variety of
devices. Xerte Online Toolkits facilitates simple publication and licensing of
content via the Xpert repository. HTML5 will help improve discoverability.
Preview
software
Visit project
blog

how to make use more visible
to aid discovery and decision
making?

Track OER
Track OER has developed ways to help keep track of Open Educational Resources.
OER have the challenge of being in the open and so actually what happens to content
can become a bit of a mystery –- if content is trackable then we can improve what we
know about use, help increase the evidence base and make it easier for those who
want to reuse content to do the right thing.
The project has produced:
. •A transferable tracking system
combining the Cut and Paste “CaPRéT”
software built by MIT in a previous JISC
project
•A way to add tracking code to
downloads so that we can see where
new copies are being used and served
•Tools to help apply tracking.
View short info View short
Get the code video slidecast

SPAWS: sharing paradata across web stores
.
Visit project Building on the Learning Registry and Activity Streams SPAWS
blog connected together several web app stores aimed at sharing web
widgets and gadgets. Each time a user visits a store and writes a
review about a particular widget/gadget, or rates it, or embeds it,
Get the code that information is syndicated to other stores in the network.

15 REUSABLE
TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS FOR OER
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/
ukoer3/rapidinnovation
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