This document is the proposal for the TRACKOER project that is supported by the JISC Open Educational Resources Rapid Innovation programme (OERRI). In TRACKOER we are developing potential solutions to how to keep track of content in the open. We are looking both at ways to follow content as it moves from one server to another and then gets reused, and at how to capture other changes that people may make with cut and paste editing. The rationale for the project is to understand whether content gets reused but it also offers a model that could help track other activity around shared content. More about the project progress is available via http://track.olnet.org/ and the project blog at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/tag/view/TrackOER .

1. JISC Grant Funding 18/11
Cover Sheet for Bids
(All sections must be completed)
Name of JISC Initiative: HEA/JISC OER Programme: Rapid Innovation
SECTION ONE
Name of Lead Institution: The Open University
Name of Proposed Project: Track OER: Tracking Open Educational Resources
Name(s) of Project Partners(s)
Full Contact Details for Primary Contact:
Name: Patrick McAndrew
Position: Professor of Open Education
Email: patrick.mcandrew@open.ac.uk
Tel: 01908 652638
Address: The Open University, Institute of Educational Technology, Milton Keynes.
MK7 6AA.
Length of Project: 6 months
(no longer than 6 months)
Project Start Date: 1 April 2012 Project End Date: 19 October 2012
(no earlier than Monday 19th March) (no later than Friday 19th October)
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2. SECTION THREE
1. Outline Project Description
1. Open Educational Resources are released with permission to transfer to other contexts
and use, however often they are placed on a server that provides them with a “home”
location. While the permission typically includes the rights to place on other servers and
make changes, the need to provide an identified place for the content can mitigate
against that transfer and indirectly inhibit reuse. Reasons for wanting to retain courses in
one place include the wish to gather use data, build a critical mass of users around the
course and to bring any changed versions back into view. These need to be balanced
with the users potential wish to place them on local servers, manage groups of students
and organise cohorts studying together, and the overheads inevitably involved in sharing
back versions. The project aims to look at two ways to reduce tensions between keeping
OER in one place and OER spreading and transferring. If we can find out more about
where OER is being used then we can continue to gather the information that is needed
and help exploit the openness of OER.
2. An important business reason is also emerging from the enhanced brand awareness that
is one value of providing OER. However when content transfers the impact of the
content may be reduced, and certainly the ability to measure that impact is limited.
Knowing how much content does in fact go to other servers is an important measure to
be able to report and understand if there is an actual issue. On the other hand if the
content can be tracked information can be collated impact can be retained and help
make the case for sustainable OER.
3. The action of the project will be to develop software that can help track open educational
resources. This provides an enabling function to see the impact of releasing content as
distinct from serving content without the option to take and remix. The software will be
generic in nature and build from existing work developed by BCCampus and MIT,
however a key step in this project is to provide an instantiation of the tracking on the
Open University’s OpenLearn platform. The aim will be to understand the profile of use
of materials from the OU’s OpenLearn and LabSpace systems. The two software
solutions will be to:
a. Track content that is downloaded from OpenLearn and the uploaded elsewhere;
b. Add tracking information to cut-and-paste extraction of materials from
OpenLearn.
4. The solution will build on earlier work, notably by OLnet fellow Scott Leslie (BCCampus)
and JISC project CaPRéT led by Brandon Muramatsu (MIT project partner in B2S).
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3. 2. Use Case
5. Summary: This use case considers the inhibitions and restrictions on OER projects and
the associated impact on the educator community from restricted tracking data.
6. Context: In the Bridge to Success (B2S.aacc.edu) project materials have been
generated that take OER from the Open University and make them available as
reworked OER with a focus on use in US Community Colleges. The content is released
in OpenLearn’s LabSpace. This material is available for use on other systems under the
CC-BY permissive form of the Creative Commons licence. Transfer to other servers is
permitted and supported by the release of downloadable content packages and clear
messages that material can be copied and reused as permitted by the CC-BY licence.
7. Requirements: The project is funded by the Next Generation Learning Challenge
(nextgenlearning.org) with requirements that we research use in identified pilots and
reach targets about the use and impact of B2S content. Some pilots need to manage
their registered students through the content and would like to provide access to B2S
content from institutional VLE. We also are actively investigating other platforms such as
Peer-to-peer University, iTunesU and OERGlue.
8. Existing approach: Information on use is available as long as content remains on the
LabSpace system through analytics and support for groups in the Learning Club. If
content transfers we may then have no data about the use of the content and be unable
to learn more about the use or report back to our funder.
9. Solution: The Track OER system provides information back to the originator of the
content to show the content that is reused and the location in which it now operates. The
scale of reuse can now be monitored and further information sought if needed.
10. Success criteria: A programme of testing will demonstrate the capability to track and
provide accurate data into the system. Impact will be assessed during the period of the
project through use of the tracking data within existing reporting of OpenLearn
performance. Further benefits are expected for example identification of reuse cases and
interfaces that reveal where alternative content can be found, these may occur after the
project.
11. Community: The need for a tracking system appears repeatedly in OER projects and
providing sites, particularly as it is common to need to show impact to funders and
institutions. For the educator community the challenge to correctly attribute and meet the
intent in sharing content is enhanced. We will specifically explore this with the
Community College educator community. For the learner community the benefits will
come from more flexible use of content and the potential to use the data provided to
connect groups learning in different online spaces.
12. Engagement: the idea for tracking has been considered for some time, including in the
context of JISC CETIS, OLnet and work by MIT. In addition Creative Commons have
identified the need for tracking as important in extending use of the CC licence for
Museums and Art works and are interested in this activity and how it could work with the
embedded licence.
13. This use case is released under CC-BY-SA.
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4. 3. Proposal
14. In the JISC Rapid Innovations Call OLnet’s Key Challenges...( http://olnet.org/node/639)
are picked out as a list of issues for OER practitioners. Taking the form of exploratory
questions one of these “challenges” is: “What evidence is there of Use (and Re-Use) of
OER?” The pertinence of this issue, and the OER movement’s need to engage more
fully with this question, was similarly highlighted recently on the JISC CETIS blog
(http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2011/11/24/ukoer-3-technical-reflections/).
15. Central to OER is the ability to take and remix content provided by others. As recognised
in the Call and elsewhere it remains difficult to gather data on the remixing of materials;
content can be hosted on different servers and combined in different ways. Current
standard practice, in which tools such as Google Analytics (via Javascipt) are used, loses
track of OER use once it is removed from its original location. Other tools, such as
CaPRéT (http://capret.mitoeit.org/) and OERGlue (http://www.oerglue.com/) identified by
this call as “…useful in that they provide benefits to users (easy attribution) rewarded by
benefits to content providers (analytics),” allow tracking of cutting and paste reuse, the
insertion of information on the material’s origin and, in the latter instance, enable
educators to individualise OER content with the integration of features such as social
networking.
16. In CaPRéT the project built on the perceived deficit of existing “image attribution tools.”
(http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2011/05/09/jisc-cetis-oer-technical-mini-projects-results/ )
However whilst CaPRéT needs no “end user” input to function this tool is limited to
tracking reuse of sampled text and not, for example, images or videos. The need for an
integrated tool which can track different types of content therefore remains relevant. This
project seeks to address this in two ways:
a. Develop a no-Javascript/static web-bug based server-side approach using Piwik
(http://piwik.org), Google Analytics and/or other analytics software.
b. Provide an extended CaPRéT++ by building on the CaPRéT Javascript libraries,
to address its current limitations.
17. Taken together these approaches will provide an embedded tracker for content that is
transferred as a whole by download, and to provide an enhanced code set to meet and
extend the requirement for tracking and supporting the copy-paste model of taking OER
content. Such data gathering may also be one way to support the work of the Learning
Registry in collating events linked to OER content. While we will review parallel work on
providing data to the Learning Registry, integration is beyond the scope of this project,
18. Track OER’s approach is both cost-effective as it will build on the successes of projects
such as CaPRéT, prior work in OLnet and links with Bridge to Success. The work will be
carried out by existing specialised staff whilst disseminating their skills outside of the
remit of the project. The result will be a broad, multi-platform, self-contained, open source
(released under a GNU General Public License-compatible licence in line with
OSSWatch recommendations) solution to the problem of understanding and monitoring
OER reuse. The flexible approach allows for integration with data analysis systems.
Integration with analytics (both open source and proprietary) gives front-end support for
the analysis and use of data by a variety of users: content owners, researchers,
instructors and re-mixers. From a user perspective the tool will be able to track a
multiplicity of different “cut and paste” reuses: “Save As,” “Print,” pasting into Word, the
file type (e.g. video, text, image) etc.
19. More broadly, the ability to analyse data on the remixing and reuse of OERs would
enable educators and researchers to provide clear evidence for OER re-use and
potentially support the case for an increase in institutional OER provision and funding. It
would also support OER best practice and the case for continued support for OER
projects through identification of which materials are popular with re-mixers of content
and how these are used. Originators of OER would also be able to better understand
and track the multiple paths that OER content takes. Educators would be able to view
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5. how OER is used and reused and the context in which it is reused; this would enable the
sharing of best practice in meeting particular educational requirements. From a re-users
perspective, this data could augment OER search engines or be used to create charts
that highlight 'reuseful' resources.
20. Evaluation of the developed code will occur within the following different contexts:
21. Producing Demonstration Content: The two B2S courses will be integrated as a first
set of content to make use of the platform. The solution will then be extended to the Open
University LabSpace. We also have the potential for comparison with other platforms
such as OERGlue and would encourage take-up following proof of the system.
22. Producing Demonstration Data: We will encourage reuse of this content by working
with a group of instructors and supporting them to do some remixing of content. This is
expected to occur in the remit of the B2S project and the evaluation of this project will
augment that. We will also promote remixing of the tracked content more widely, applying
tracking to users outside the project to give sources for further data. This approach is
both cost effective as institutions have been identified as part of another project, and
maximises dissemination and user engagement opportunities.
23. Iterative Design of Visualisations and Views of Statistics for End-Users: Using the
data produced through 1 and 2, we will set up trial visualisations through systems such
as Piwik and Drupal. This will include statistics and visualisations of reuse for the benefit
of a content creator - answering questions such as 'who has been using it and how?' and
also for a potential remixer - answering questions such as 'what content are people
reusing that might be relevant to me?'. An iterative, participatory design process will be
used, walking through these visualisations with potential users from both groups. This will
elicit data on what they would like to understand and how they would like to view it. We
will revise our design in response to these suggestions, such that the final result is an
appropriate set of tools to make the most of the collected data.
24. As specified in the call this project will disseminate its findings via regular blog posts and
a final two-minute video. In addition testing via the B2S project will see the results
disseminated through the project’s network of partners and affiliates, via the website,
webinars etc.
3.1. Approach and evaluation
25. By developing two solutions the project is able to address both the direct challenge
identified in B2S and expanded in the Use Case, and to provide evidence from more
casual cut-and-paste reuse. It is clear that both types need to be considered and with
existing prototypes it is realistic to seek the combined solution and to integrate the
reporting process. We can also compare the value and impact of the two approaches to
consider:
- Which of the alternative tracking systems provides the most utility for end-users?
- Which of the alternatives is simplest to install/implement in the wild?
- Which generates the most useful data?
- What mechanisms are applied to use and re-use OERs? Eg. cut & paste, consuming
RSS feeds, SCORM packages, etc.
- Whether a multi-pronged approach is needed to provide sufficient coverage?
26. It is proposed that testing and evaluation would take several forms:
- An unsupervised trial of the alternative systems on The Open University’s
OpenLearn-LabSpace, specifically the Bridge to Success (B2S) project course units
(http://labspace.open.ac.uk/b2s | http://b2s.aacc.edu). That is, the systems are made
available, the trial is publicised, and the general public uses the system, with data
being collected and analysed,
- A controlled laboratory evaluation of the systems on the B2S LabSpace and/or other
content, with a variety of users, employing a think-aloud protocol and potentially using
eye-tracking equipment available to the project.
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6. - Building on the work of the Bridge to Success project, we have identified and built
relationships with piloting institutions and instructors who are specifically interested in
remixing OER content. We will use these contact to form an initial group with whom to
evaluate Track OER in order to assess the benefits to, and use of the tracking system
by, both OER producers of content and educators/instructors. This will enable direct
feedback based on existing information gathering in B2S as well as assessment of
the tracking system outputs.
3.2. Workplan for development
27. The overall development plan will start immediately the project is funded to establish the
code base, review use case and engage with the developer community. The majority of
work in the development cycle will take place later to fit with planned availability of
development effort which has been agreed with line management prior to submission of
this proposal. There will be two parallel strands.
3.3. Strand 1: Track OER – web-bug tracker
28. At the heart of most Web analytics systems, including Google Analytics, Piwik,
ComScore and the analytics part of CaPRéT is what is termed a web-bug – code
attached to an image, often a one-pixel by one-pixel ‘hidden’ image. By virtue of it’s
inclusion or embedding in a host Web page it can be used to log data about the host
page, the visitor, and the visitor’s browsing software. The image link can pass back
information, taking the form for example:
29. <img src=
"http://track.example.org/tracker.gif?host=host.example.com&path=path/to&paramA=X&..
." alt="" />
30. Google Analytics, Piwik and other systems wrap a web-bug in a Javascript library, which
makes the analytics system easier to implement, more flexible, and adds extra data
about the visitor that is only available via Javascript (for example, screen resolution,
support for Flash and Java, etc.).
31. The dis-advantage of the Javascript wrapper is that it is not available or is dis-allowed in
interfaces like RSS feeds, Zip and packaging standards (eg. SCORM, IMS Common
Cartridge), and is often stripped out because of security concerns when imported into
content management and online learning systems.
32. Given this overwhelming restriction, no-Javascript web-bugs were researched in
collaboration with Scott Leslie of BCcampus as part of the OLnet project
(http://olnet.org/node/149), and code was released (http://snipplr.com/view/37647). This
code was developed as an example prototype to demonstrate the principles. It is not
currently functional and will form the basis for extension in this project. While web-bugs
are usually linked to one-pixel hidden graphics we will associate the tracking with the
embedded Creative Commons graphic e.g.
33. The code base will be extensively reworked to provide a working service linked to an
appropriate analytics system such as Piwik. Piwik is an open-source alternative to
Google Analytics implemented using Javascript, PHP and MySQL. It provides similar
tracking, visualization and reporting functionality, and is highly extensible. Whereas
Google Analytics is a hosted solution, Piwik can be installed and customized on a local
server (http://piwik.org). (Expected effort 15 days.)
34. Installing/implementing a web-bug in B2S LabSpace: It is suggested that test no-
Javascript web-bugs can be manually added to the RSS feeds and downloads/ archives
for the two B2S modules available via Labspace (http://labspace.open.ac.uk/b2s). This is
a low-risk approach that will be useful for evaluation. The software will then undergo Full-
scale implementation across OpenLearn would be a more complex proposition.
(Expected effort 10 days/5 days testing.)
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7. 3.4. Strand 2 CaPRéT++
35. As the name suggests Cut and Paste Reuse Tracking (CaPRéT) is designed to add
attribution and license meta-data, and to track the informal copying and pasting of OERs.
It has been developed by Tatemae and MIT Office of Educational Innovation and
Technology, and the code is available via Github (http://capret.mitoeit.org &
http://github.com/tatemae/capret).
36. CaPRéT comprises two parts. The client-side consists of Javascript libraries built on top
of jQuery. The server-side part is a Node.js application, which uses Hummingbird for
realtime visualizations (http://nodejs.org).
37. Currently CaPRéT does not appear to track when an individual image or multimedia
resource is copied from within an OER. This limitation can be reduced using HTML5
DOM extensions within CaPRéT. (10 days)
38. Installing/ implementing CaPRéT, in LabSpace and Moodle: The CaPRéT Javascript
libraries have already been implemented in a Drupal 6.x blog (http://freear.org.uk) and a
Moodle 2.0 system (http://freear.org.uk/moodle). In both cases, there was no need to
install plugins or extensions on the server - they were implemented as custom blocks (the
implementor needs super-user/administrator privileges on Drupal and Moodle). Given this
initial success, it is thought that the CaPRéT Javascript can be added to LabSpace in a
low-risk manner, and within the constraints of the OpenLearn development and release
cycle, for evaluation with the B2S course content. (10 days)
39. Moodle version of CaPRéT: As part of the project, a CaPRéT plugin will be written for
Moodle to go through acceptance testing for full inclusion in OpenLearn/LabSpace. (10
days/5days testing)
40. Overall testing and documentation in accordance with requirements (10 days)
3.5. Risk Assessment
Risk Potential Outcome Contingency Likelihood
Staff availability Delay and pressure Staff are in place to Low
to complete. carry out the main
development work.
Alternative solutions Work on adoption of The project aims to Medium
an alternative consider
software base may alternatives,
be more desirable however the benefits
of the planned
implementation are
clear.
Embedding in The scale of The software will be Low
OpenLearn/LabSpace demonstrated use is embedded in the
is not viable lower than planned. Bridge to Success
content as initial
demonstrator and
alternative OER
platforms may be
approached as
demonstrators
Technical difficulties The planned Initial prototypes Low
in solutions implementation does have illustrated
not give sufficient feasibility and
information to be alternatives will be
useful considered
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8. Rejection of tracking Take up is low and Work with Creative Low/medium
by the community there is resistance to Commons on the
the automated value of the
provision of tracking approach and
data ethical ways to
combine it with
licensing.
3.6. Costing
Costing is omitted from the public version of the proposal.
3.7. Team
The Principle Investigator for the project is Dr Patrick McAndrew, Senior Lecturer in Institute
of Educational Technology and Director of the Bridge to Success and OLnet projects.
Academic consultant is Dr Tony Hirst, Lecturer in Mathematics Computing and Technology.
Tony has an established reputation at identifying viable solutions to technical challenges.
The lead developer is Dr Nick Freear (IET). Nick works across project based software
development specialising in accessibility and integration, Nick is also the author of Moodle 2
for Teaching 4-9 Year Olds Beginner's Guide. Acceptance testing will be carried out by
Learning & Teaching Solutions Service Team led by Roger Moore. Implementation by the
OpenLearn and LabSpace team led by Dr Guy Barrett and Jenny Gray. This team has
extensive experience with OER, JISC and development of software to meet requirements.
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