This week I ventured to explore a number of OER projects and conduct a preliminary assessment of the reusability and remixability of the OER hosted in each. Based on earlier (albeit shallow) familiarity with some of these OER initiatives I am able to presume that the structure and technology of a selected sample OER from each is generally representative of all or most OER in the given project.
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I undertook this task as Rogue Quest 1
for David Wiley’s Intro to Open Ed course. The Rogue character class that I’ve adopted focuses on content production with an emphasis on finding and releasing or untrapping “open” content to allow for reuse and remix. I have only theoretical experience with remixing OER, and so it is fitting that I begin at experience level 1.
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Reuse/Remix Estimates
As I purview each of seven different OER projects I will give each collection a reuse/remix value rating based on my initial impressions and observations. These estimates may change as I move forward to release, reuse, or remix some of these OER.
My reuse/remix rating is a scale of 1 – 5, where “1″ is extremely difficult or low value, and “5″ is extremely easy or high value, referring to the act of taking CC content and reusing or remixing it on a separate server. To produce these ratings I consider:
- technical openness of media (e.g. Java applet vs Javascript)
- quality of source
- variety of media sources
- semantic/standard structure (e.g. HTML tables vs semantically-correct XHTML; IMS)
- CC license compatibility
- hosted tools and support for remix
I expect to address the why of reuse and remix of OER in another post and catalogue some of the key benefits.
UK Open University’s OpenLearn
Though constructed in Moodle LMS, the UK Open University’s OpenLearn is less like a “walled garden” for OER and more like a playground. It takes advatange of some of Moodle’s learning tools and features and customizability, and content is of immediate to use to anyone else using Moodle.
The project’s LabSpace site is specifically design to encourage educators to “collaborate with others and publish new versions of [UK Open University] learning materials to share with the world.” I was nearly distracted by the ability to “join this unit”–identifying myself as willing to engage in a self-organizing learning community.
I began by checking out Start Writing Fiction. I’ve had the bad fortune of reading some particularly bad fiction this holiday season, and recognized how freeing this OER might benefit all mankind. In each OER the “Versions” block includes “Upload this unit” and “Make a copy for revising”–presumably on the LabSpace web site. Is this custom block’s source code available?
Another useful custom block is “Alternative Formats”, which provides versions of the entier OER including print (HTML), XML, RSS, OU XML, IMS, Common Cartridge, Plain Zip, Moodle Backup. I looked at Print and saw the whole unit in one file. I grabbed the URL (http://labspace.open.ac.uk/file.php/2861/formats/print.htm) so I could test this with Send To Wiki later. I also grabbed an IMS package so I could to try fitting it into other “IMS-compatible” systems, such as the the foppish Bb Vista.
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
OLI is like a museum: you can get in and see some fabulous artifacts, but don’t plan on taking any out as a souvenir … without some serious pre-planning.
I recently reviewed OLI’s project on this web site, so let’s cut to the chase:
OLI’s OER content is a mix of non-semantic HTML and media, usually SWFs. The HTML pages are all generated from what looks to be a Java Servlet using Javascript to set cookies and carry the “context”, or unique identifier. This will prevent any normal “spider” software from loading all the pages automatically (they would ignore the passed variables and just re-download the same “page” over and over), inhibiting the download of an entire “course” as a single collection. The passed context appears to be arbitrary; at any rate, it’s not predictive, so if we want to automatically download the content we will have to do so based on spidered links, and will have to rename links and files as we go (Nate Snapp suggested I just use a PERL script in cURL. It seems obvious to me to use the [non-semantic] context IDs as the file name, so page?context=b487c83c80020c69016e6ce63813c727 simply becomes page_b487c83c80020c69016e6ce63813c727.html)
Because there are currently no ways to download an entire package for remix, I intend to ask the OLI warden when the OERs are up for parole, if ever. Of course I’ll phrase it more nicely.
MIT OpenCourseWare
I knew I was not the first to traverse this part of town, so I needed to make sure my target was something of a challenge. Thanks to a list of audio/video-enhanced MIT ocw I was able to find a worthy mark. Linear Algebra contains video lectures and interactive Java applets, presumably already of the lowest usable granularity. Anytime I see the TM Java I want to call it a day. But it will be worth investigating how these applets might be found and extracted for localized reuse, if at all.
Looking a little deeper into the course I found several paths to other course media, and was pleased that videos were available as MP4–most of the early MIT OCW media I’ve seen is in RM format.
Though the media and formats in MIT OCW may vary from course to course, the OCW structure of each is reliable and learnable, making traversing the resources as potential remix “maps” feasible.
As far as extracting the OER from the host, this should be no problem: the course provides a zip file which contains all the course except audio and video files. If I recall, this is even in an IMS package of some flavor. The question will be, once the ZIP is free, what will it contain? And how can it be reused?
webcast.berkeley
Webcast.berkeley is UC Berkeley’s multimedia forray into OER. Strangely, at the bottom of the page I saw Copyright 2002-2009, Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved
but maybe that’s just for the web page design, which I admit is striking.
Courses are navigated through semester; I chose History 4A – The Ancient Mediterranean World, which contained MP3s of nearly all Isabelle Pafford’s lectures from Fall 2007. I noticed a podcast RSS feed, which I grabbed: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/rss/course-archive.php?seriesid=1906978476 — opening this in a podcast-ready media player, like iTunes, is one rapid method of extracting all the media files for reuse.
There is some video on the site (e.g. ASTRO C10), some of it SWF, some of it streaming RealMedia, which I still haven’t found a suitable codec for on Ubuntu (comment if YOU have). As far as the streaming video goes it is possible, of course, to capture this onto your hard drive with desktop software. However…
I was nagged by the fact that the only licensing info directly on this page was still © All Rights Reserved, so I took a detour and go to the bottom of things. A quarter of a way down the page under Policies we find the actual licensing details:
Beginning in 2007, the default license attached to media recordings for distribution is Creative Commons – non-commercial, attribution, no derivatives (CC2.5 license).
This showed that the Ancient Mediterranean course that I had begun looking at was still ©. Also, the ND was unexpected and puts an entirely different spin on things, eliminating the option of remixing altogether, and thereby reducing my Reuse/Remix rating by a full point. Ben Hubbard of the webcast.berkeley project noted in the comments that the CC license info on all OER published after 2007 is featured prominently at the top of the page, and h.264 video is available via RSS feeds.
Stanford Engineering Everywhere
Stanford School of Engineering’s CC By license was the first thing I noticed, and offers just a bit more freedom for remix/reuse.
I’d never been to the SEE site before, and I chose from a list of SEE’s more “popular” courses: Oussama Khatib’s Artificial Intelligence | Introduction to Robotics. Scrolling through the first page I found a link to “Download Zipped Course Materials”. The ZIP file did not have an IMS manifest, which is a minor disappointment, but it was a self-contained web site with hyperlinks back to media files served only on the SEE web site.
I took a look at the media files found under Lectures, provided as streaming video as well as the following formats: YouTube, iTunes, Vyew (which actually facilitates compiling and downloading the videos), WMV Torrent, and MP4 Torrent.
Note that many of these videos aren’t actually stored on the SEE web site, and yet they haven’t sacrificed reuse/remix by not making MP4/WMV formats available. Instead they made a brilliant choice: Torrent to facilitate and distribute the server load of these videos. (Based on the speed of delivery of the YouTube version I highly recommend downloading the files, which facilitates localized reuse and remix.)
Open Yale Courses
Reuse/Remix Estimate: 3.5 – Easy. Fair captured content, delivered for reuse, easy to extract as a package, but some remix limitations from license.
License: CC By-NC-SA
Media Types: HTML, XML, MP3, FLV, MOV, PDF, (IMS ZIP)
Though I’d visited Open Yale Courses before I hadn’t deeply investigated the media or packages. My impression was that this project’s results are very much like MIT OCW–a “Polaroid” version of the on-ground class. I checked out a couple of courses before settling on the featured course and favorite author ENGL 220 Milton.
Milton, like the other Open Yale Courses I checked out, is primarily a collection of media files with some PDF notes. Though no feeds are available, all media files are listed under Downloads, making it simple to grab all the MP3s or MOVs at once with a Firefox add-on like FlashGot or Down Them All. The rest of the course is available as a downloadable ZIP files featuring HTML and media structured by an IMS manifest. Hyperlinks to audio files point to the Yale server, but I expect some search and replace can link them to the local copy I just finished downloading.
Rice Connexions
This OER project’s site is similar in many ways to the UK Open University’s LabSpace, providing not only packaged content but also resources and tools to facilitate reuse, remixing, and republishing of OER. “Feel free,” the candy store clerk says, “to help yourself. Take some for your friends. Do you want to help me make taffy?”
I first stumbled on Places in Egypt, but became moderately uneasy when I was whisked away to a separate, domained web site called Travelers in the Middle East Archive. This was not quite what I’d expected, but I explored and discovered CC-licensed photos, illustrations, and enhanced images, as well as several e-texts, for instance The Nile : notes for travellers in Egypt in both HTML and XML. Connexions is far deeper than I had fathomed.
Going back to Connexions I next browsed by subjects, into Arts, and found Musical Travels for Children, which used an e-text with images of sheet music and MIDIs(!) within the Connexions standard framework. Musical Travels also presented the text as a PDF and as a ZIP “multimedia” package–very useful for local reuse/remix.
I took a moment to learn about Connexion’s homegrown XML schema, CNXML, a semantic markup language “for education” parsed (probably on the backend) to produce content, similar, I’m hypothesizing, to the way the UK Open University’s OpenLearn project is stored and generated. Connexions provides several tutorials on writing and using CNXML, though it’s not immediately clear how this is useful to the general-use public. (is CNXML usage required for user contributed uploads?)
As I headed back to check a third OER on Connexions, I noticed a hyperlink to the metadata for each resource, which cued me into their unique search system. I used that search system this time, and came across a number of interesting “modules”–short, tutorial- or lecture-like OERs that are typically HTML or PDF with hyperlinks to other subjects on connexions. In some instances I could not immediately determine where one module began and another ended. One can add modules to a “lens”, but it’s not apparent whether or not one can then download a “package” based on lenses.
Intrigued by the Connexions search engine’s options, I next searched based on popularity, and found music OER at the top of the list, though I could not immediately determine how that metadata was stored, or if there was public access to any of it.
Though the media use may vary from OER to OER, and the diverse organizational structures and interfaces may inhibit reuse for novices, the markup and accessibility of the content allow for great potential reuses, and the Connexions system is bolstered by the potential impact of the fostered user input and folksonomies that may result.