Contents: | Contact details: TF-Media mailing list is at <tf-media@terena.org> TERENA PDO is Peter Szegedi <szegedi@terena.org>
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Motivations
The TERENA task force TF-Media (2010-2013) concluded with a project plan to try and implement a European-level OER metadata repository service for the benefit of the Research and Education community gathered under TERENA/GÉANT. The fundamental principles of such a platform/service have been discussed and summarised by the task force.
There is a large interest around the global education community in establishing and maintaining OER or Learning Object (LO) repositories as exemplified by the number of existing repositories (e.g., MERLOT [2], MAOR [3], OER commons [4], Learning Resource Exchange for Schools from European Schoolnet [5]), organizations building and sustaining them (e.g., MITOpenCourseWare [6]), contributors integrating learning objects in repositories (e.g., OpenContent [7]), and users of these learning objects (e.g., Universities, Libraries). The fundamental reasons are:
- the growing educational demands in all countries,
- the limited capacity of face to face education to fulfil the demand in a timely manner (i.e. emerging MOOCs),
- the effort and cost involved to build multimedia learning materials, and the new possibilities offered by the Internet.
The main motivation for developing a metadata repository (European-level aggregation point or referatory) and an OER portal (federated single access web front-end) service would be to support the NRENs and their stakeholders (i.e. the broader TERENA/GÉANT Community) in engaging with open education by providing value-added support services.
The OER service intends to aggregate metadata (not the content) at the European-level and helps Universities and NRENs stepping to the next level (reach the critical mass e.g., in terms of the number of objects) towards exposing their OER to global repositories (such as GLOBE [9], for instance).
Aim of the pilot
The primary aim of the TERENA small project is to develop the first working prototype of the OER service (including the metadata aggregation engine and the web portal front-end) and pilot a service for the broader TERENA/GÉANT Community in 2014. The pilot service can then be taken over by the GN4 project for further technical enhancement and service development aiming to roll out in production.
The TERENA small project is to bridge the gap between the end of TF-Media (now) and the beginning of GN4 (April 2015). The reason why the idea must be tested in a TERENA small project before it’s introduced in GÉANT is the fact that the critical mass (in terms of participants, support, interest, etc.) has to be gained before any sustainable service development can be done. OER seems to be a typical “chicken-n-egg” problem at the moment (i.e. without a working prototype it’s hard to gain significant interest and without significant interest it’s hard to convince the development) therefore, the TERENA small project has to take this initiative. The OER is not the service that the NREN community is desperate to build (e.g., like the Trusted Cloud Drive pilot was in 2012) but it’s something that TERENA has to take the lead on (e.g., like the NRENum.net service pilot was in 2008) in order to facilitate the development of future value-added services on top (including MOOCs and others).
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The TERENA small project can be delivered in four tasks over 9 months (relaxed timeline):
- Definition of the minimum requirements for a common metadata schema (flexible, scalable. standard-based, etc.) taking into account the information model of the pre-selected “friendly repositories”. The potential piloting of a sample/reference repository with “good quality” metadata will also be considered by this task.
- Implementation of the ARIADNE-based metadata harvesting engine in the TERENA network.
- Development and deployment of the PuMuKit-based web portal front-end (web template).
- Integration of software components and piloting of the metadata harvesting, validating, transforming and publishing service.
More information is available in the pilot project description.
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1st meeting - 28 March 2014 @ 10.00 CET
2nd meeting - 2 April 2014 @ 10.00 CEST
3rd meeting - 12 May 2014 @ 14.00 CEST
4th meeting - 15 May 2014 @ 11.00 CEST
5th meeting - 15 May 2014 @ 11.00 CEST
Next coming:
6th meeting - TBC (possibly face to face)
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Attendees: Eli, Giannis, Kostas, Adam, Nelson, Peter Agenda:
Peter summarized the actual status of the pilot. We have now two contracts in place; one is with IUCC primarily to coordinate the initial study preparation and the second one is with GRNET mainly to develop and deploy the metadata aggregation engine at TERENA. Eli (IUCC) is coordinating the study preparation, everybody is invited to contribute. External experts will also be consulted. Giannis (GRNET) will contribute to the metadata schema definition. There was an agreement to use IEEE LOM with about 8-10 mandatory and other 10 optional fields. Kostas commented that a widely used/known schema should be selected in order to be able to aggregate good quality metadata. Metadata translation will be needed anyway. It was suggested to pull a meeting dedicated to the metadata schema discussion. Eli is responsible for coordinating that. Sharing of documents and information via Google docs is preferred. Giannis and Kostas (GRNET) reported that they have started to contact the potential content providers. 13 NRENs and other organizations have been contacted and requested to harvest and analyze their metadata via OAI-PMH protocol with mixed success. Some repositories only support RSS though. Work is in progress… Some analysis will be available by 25 July and the metadata schema contribution will be ready by 1 August. Peter (TERENA) said that the discussion about the web portal front end development is progressing. UVigo agreed to lead that part of the pilot. Contract will be in place by September. We have to come up with clear requirements and recommendations for the web front end interface by then. Nelson (FCT) would be happy to contribute to the outreach and dissemination strategy part of the study. He could also be our liaison person to TF-CPR. Peter will put him in contact with TF-CPR. Peter will Doodle for the potential dates of a face to face meeting where the results of the initial study and the next steps can be discussed and agreed. The meeting most likely will take place in September in Amsterdam. |
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Attendees: Eli, Kostas, Vicente, Rui, Adam, Antonio, Peter Agenda:
Recording: http://emeeting.campusdomar.es/recording/4bcc81ced2cb65ced4c3f95720654625 Notes: Peter predented the DRAFT table of contents for the Initial Study and opened the floor for comments and discussion. Coordinator: IUCC Contributors: GRNET, UVigo, ISEP Deadline: 15 August 2014 ----- OER state-of-the-art and outlook 2. Architecture design 3. Promotion and outreach ----- Eli commented that Chapter 1 should give the bigger picture (open education, MOOC, etc.) and the whole study should narrow down to the specific recommendations and requirements. We have to clearly understand the current trends in education and response to that. Vicente added that first we should describe the "idealistic" picture reagarless of the existing tools and then in Chapter 2 we should take into acount what tools we can reuse and see how close we can get to the idealistic solution. The closer the better. Antonio commented that the understanding on the typical workflow how professors develop courses and use tools (such as Moodle LMS) is the key. The proper liaison with the various institutional repositories (mostly DSpace-based in Portugal) is also important to support the federated model. Trust is the key for quality assurance (the use case of sexual education was mentioned where finding good quality educational content is difficult). Integrating with AAI and developing functions such as the peer review system could maintain the trust relationship with content providers. Antonio and Vicente offered help to incorporate the professors' view and review the study from the education perspective. It was also suggested to use Google docs for the collaboration and distribution of the study. Peter noted that the administrative steps (contracting, etc.) will be done shortly after TNC2014.
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Attendees: Eli, Giannis, Kostas, Rui (partly), Nelson, Adam, Peter Agenda:
Notes:
Peter summarised the key requirements comming from the Personas proposed at the last meeting. The group made an effort to categorise the Personas. Two main categories have been identified: a) End-users; such as students, professors and researchers (i.e. A, B, C, D, G, K) b) E-learning administrators; such as service managers and system/service integrators (i.e. E, F) Giannis suggested to extract the requirements from the Personas and identify the list of "top problems" that we are trying to give an answer to. Attendees had a consensus on writting an initial study that leads to some clear design requirements concerning both the aggregation engine (back-end) and the web protal (front-end). Such a study must be done by mid August 2014 as the latest so that the necessary software developments and deployments (recommended by the study) can be done by the end of the year. Eli (IUCC) agreed to coordinate the production and delivery of such a study and Giannis (GRNET) offered to contribute to the harvesting engine related technical parts of the study. Adam (NIIF) and Nelson (FCCN) will check back whether they could also contribute to the study, provided that the draft table of content of the study is agreed. The attendees did a short brainstorming on the potential content of the study. Peter suggested that the study should start with a technical overview on the state-of-the-art content repositories and their basic characteristics. Giannis said that the overall picture should also be described including similar global (e.g., GLOBE) and European (e.g., openeducationeurope.eu) initiatives and their relation to TERENA OER. The basic information model, metadata schema, and protocol set should also be suggested by the study. Contribution to the user interface and the web front-end requirements is necessary. The functional description should look ahead to 3-5 years in time taking into account the latest trends in on-line teaching & learning . The study must be delivered by 15 August 2014 as the latest, the harvesting engine adaptation and deployment as well as the web portal development can then go hand in hand base don the recommendations of the study. The next meeting will be dedicated to the discussion on the Table of Content of the study.
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Attendees: Eli, Giannis, Rui, Adam, Peter, Nelson Agenda:
Recording: http://emeeting.campusdomar.es/recording/a5fcb5b9c50cc97b644b159387021180 Notes: Rui's personas were Adam, Bob and Charlene. Bob usually searches for materials in Google but the academic value for him is in TERENA OER. Bob is a not-so-experienced guest teacher who uses Moodle but needs some ready-to-use content. He values that Moodle that he knows reasonably well is connected to the TERENA OER. Charlene is the person at the university who teaches the teachers. Reusability of materials is important for her. Displaying "favourite content" can help to find similar contents more easily. Ratings, registered user tracking (AAI) and social networking are important. There is a difference between the monilithic LMS approach and the open MOOCs approach. TERENA OER should support both. Following the users' behaviour is important in case of MOOCs where they can alter from the default learning path. We need to know what they are searching for. Eli commented that the community and social aspects are challenging. We need to focus on the repositories with good quality metadata, then allow the collection of paradata (remarks, rating, comments) and finally we can bring in the networking/social aspects. The confidence of the users can be gained by trusted information sources, good quality metadata, additional paradata and maybe in the future a peer review system. We should be able to integrate Moodle LMS with TERENA OER by the end of the pilot. Next step: We need to transform the requirements (coming from the Personas) into basic features Some administrative aspects of the pilot must be clarified:
Personas:
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Attendees: Eli, Vicente, Giannis, Rui, Jack, Peter Agenda:
Recording: http://emeeting.campusdomar.es/recording/838013fa539370e4d9a7d3cd3fd55361 Notes: Virtual meetings will be held bi-weekly for the pilot participants. The delivery of the contracted tasks should be monitored more closely and frequently (at least weekly) by the person responsible for the delivery. There was a discussion whether the 9-month pilot period is okay or too short. It basically depends on the detailed objectives (SMART goals) that we want to achieve. The identification of the target user groups and the engagement with the professors are essential. Portal features like access to thumbnails, embedded rich media players, see what other people use, etc. are important for them. The only demonstrator of the OER harvesting engine back-end is the portal front-end. We need to define the most important features of the portal. An agile approach must be taken where we define some personas (user stories) first, mock-up a couple of portal examples, and define the back-end requirements to that. Users => Portal features => Metadata schema and information model => Aggregation engine
The processing and validation of the collections (connected repositories) takes time. We also need some kind of filtering of the good quality metadata. Moodle LMS widgets should also be incorporated into the pilot system. The next coming meetings should focus on only one topic at a time to reduce discussion time. (Personas will be discussed next time).
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