There are two ways of thinking about learning resources. How you think about them, and how everybody else thinks about them. Although this initially seems a banal statement, the different perspectives are important when it comes to sharing learning resources, especially when other people describe their resources so that you can find them. Considerable amounts of money have been spent on repositories to store content, and schemes for describing content meaningfully, consistently, and perhaps in a standard way, so that your system uses the same approach as mine. This is by and large a good thing, providing it helps you find the learning resources you are looking for.

But has anyone ever asked you how you go about searching online for learning resources? Do they know what attributes of a learning resource are important to you, how you decide what’s useful and what’s not, do they even know where you look for learning resources?

Well gentle reader, don’t say I’ve never asked you, because now there’s a simple survey online that asks how you search online for learning resources. I’ve tried to keep the questions straightforward, and reflect the activities, decisions and behaviours most of us can identify with. The survey is anonymous, so no names, no pack-drill. And Stephen has already completed the survey so you’ll be in good company. Just click the link below and answer a few simple questions. And please feel free to share the link with your colleagues because the more evidence we collect, the better our understanding will be about how all of us search online for learning resources.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D3TPRVK

The survey is part of some funded work on an OER project I’m involved with. You can find out more about the rest of the project here.

1. What is your most dystopic future scenario for OER
2. What do you expect to happen in the future for OER
3. What would be your perfect future for OER

I didn’t catch the moderator’s name, but he elaborated on question 1 by raising a concern that what’s happening in the UK now, government investing in OER to raise the profile of the UK. This was a little uncomfortable for him. Hmm, I wonder why? There was an implied element of state control being bad for OER. As a Brit, and involved in a state-funded, well JISC funded OER project I felt I couldn’t let that pass.

Public money investment in opening up educational resources is a good thing isn’t it? After all, public money paid for the creation of a lot of content in the first place. A more dystopian society would surely suppress the release of educational resources, prevent the education of a majority, and control access to information. The investment of around £5M in OER by the JISC is in part a response to the UK being relative latecomers to OER, and if this investment raises our profile in this area then I’m all for that. The UK has a good track record at innovation in technology enhanced learning so I’m sure we have a lot to contribute to the OER agenda.

For what it’s worth, here are my answers to the three questions above:

Worse-case scenario? Either no content being released/shared by anyone because they’re too afraid they’ll get the licensing wrong, else no content being released because everyone foolishly thinks they can sell it.

Most likely scenario? We’ll do what we’ve always done and get what we’ve always got. A wide range of resources available under a spectrum of licenses to reflect the diversity of uses. There will always be some good freely usable stuff, some good stuff you’d like to use but it’s not available under a suitable license, and some good stuff that will always be commercial.

Best-case scenario? World peace and unlimited access to all knowledge and the resources to apply that knowledge for the betterment of human kind.

Easy

Tony’s point however is still a good one, it’d be great if you could have a single search interface to everything. But typically universities for example have separate systems that don’t always talk to each other. Shame. However it cuts both ways. You should be able to search the library catalogue from within a VLE. I tried out the OU website search Tony mentioned. It doesn’t seem to search the library holdings. You have to use the library catalogue for that.

It’s time that library and learning system integrated better. If FriendFeed can aggregate potentially billions of tweets, blog posts and status updates, then why can’t a single institution’s systems share their content?

We’ve had quite a bit of semantic debate so far, so maybe the guys are just warming up. But how many potential producers of OERs are listening to this discussion, hoping for insight from two highly respected individuals, but are instead feeling just a little confused by what the issues are.

On the other hand maybe they’re just getting on with producing and releasing great content, selecting from a spectrum of licenses that reflect the different contexts in which content can be used. As a consumer of content I’ll make the judgement about what content is right for me and my purpose from all the content that’s licensed according to my needs. If I search content in Flickr for example I can choose whether I want to see content to use commercially or content to modify, adapt, or build upon. I don’t have to see stuff that’s not useful to me. Why should discovering educational resources be any different?

David and Stephen will be coming back refreshed from lunch soon. So let’s see where this goes. I just hope we don’t get into any false dichotomies where open educational resources all have to be either like this, or like that, because it’ll never be that black or white. Creative Commons understands this, that’s why there’s a range of licenses for a range of conditions. They may not cover every context just yet, but it’s the best framework we have so far.

I write in context of our own iTunesU presence, the University of Warwick. Here’s our home in iTunesU. We’re quite proud of it, and it seems to be working for us. By that I mean we seem to be reaching an audience thanks to the marketing profile that being on iTunesU brings. And for us, largely, that’s what it is just now, a marketing opportunity to tell people more about who we are and what we do. Plus of course it’s a chance to explore this as a publishing channel.

But that’s not the only publishing channel we have. We of course also publish learning & teaching resources for our own students via our home-grown web publishing system, and we’re constantly looking at new ways of publishing content. It’s a publisher’s dream perhaps to be able to reuse existing content in new ways without having to constantly create new content. And we’re also trying to find ways of being publisher of open access resources, whilst at the same time trying to track resource use to enhance the learning experience for our students. So it’s a balancing act between requiring users to log into our systems so their needs are known and their experience enhanced as a result, and simply making everything open for anyone. It’d be great to be able to do both with the same content in one location.

So we’re doing what we can with RSS, and RSS with enclosures, or podcasts they’re more commonly called. Here’s one of our iTunesU RSS feeds, a collection called ‘Slow Poetry‘ by Professor David Morely. You can subscribe to this feed with your favourite RSS reader. When it’s rendered by iTunesU it looks like this…

But not everyone likes iTunesU, which is fine. Because iTunesU is just an RSS agregator, then if you don’t like it use a different aggregator. The same feed can be rendered in Google Reader for example, and it looks like this…

But wait, as I said, we also publish content for our own students, so in our web publishing system the very same content looks like this…

It’s the same content, just deployed in different ways. The underlying content, MP4 movies in this case, is at the same location or URI in each case. So that’s one of the myths in the recent JISC-REPOSITORIES discussion busted. As an added bonus Apple are not being evil as they do not ask for exclusivity when publishing content in iTunesU, so content can be redeployed elsewhere, which fits with our publishing strategy nicely.

Another objection was that iTunesU content is not discoverable by Google. Well, of course it’s not true as this and this shows. Now granted you might not want to search iTunesU content via this route – the search facility inside iTunesU is actually quite good – but you can if you want to. But regardless it’s an unfounded myth that it can’t be done at all.

Lastly, the original poster on the JISC list asked why would anyone want to publish in iTunesU when you can publish on YouTube and use the whole web/web2 infrastructure. Well, why not reuse content and do both, as we have done. That’s the beauty of the web and reusable content

Go find: itunesu

With today being the last day of January, a bunch of us are celebrating the first milestone, and 1/12 of the way through the project. Here’s a slideshow of my pics for January. There are a few duffers in there but overall I’m pleased with my first 31 pics.

I’m curious to know who looks at iTunesU sites and whether they find the content there useful (as opposed to simply ‘peering over the garden fence’ to have a look at what the neighbours are doing). I’ve looked at lots of iTunesU sites and viewed lots of content but I wouldn’t say I was a consumer of iTunesU content, merely curious to see what’s there. But then again I’m probably not part of the target audience.

So what is the target audience? Is it prospective students, wanting to find out what they can expect if they choose a particular educational establishment? Or current students perhaps, trawling for useful learning resources? Then again maybe iTunesU is just a digital market place, where institutions set out samples of their wares, and where turning up and being seen is as important as what you have to show (there is some shockingly awful content on some sites). Perhaps it’s all of these things, and more.

One less good aspect of iTunesU is that it seems to enforce content silos. Although it’s early days (for us) it doesn’t seem to encourage or provide a mechanism for collaboration between content providers. The platform, and I use that term loosely at least in the edtech sense of the word, is simply a smart looking aggregator of channels of content, and limited content types it has to be said, where channels are institutions rather than topics, themes or cross-institutional content areas. I will however acknowledge that the search engine in iTunes is quite good, although you apparently can’t subscribe to an RSS feed of search results but I might have missed that.

It’s hard to deny that iTunesU has an appeal to many content providers (marketing and comms departments?) as there’s a growing list of institutional members. But as for who’s using the content, I guess after a little while we’ll find out, or at least find out who’s been looking at our stuff.

This is one of the photos I am most proud of. My beautiful kids