Tag Archives: lrmi implementation

LRMI Implementation Case Study: Open Tapestry

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Project team: Justin Ball, CTO;  Joel Duffin, CEO

“Open Tapestry is all about discovering, adapting, and sharing learning resources, whether you’re a teacher, an instructor, a professor, a corporate trainer, a learner, or just a curious mind! We help you organize your content into categories–or Tapestries–that you create. Open Tapestry’s toolset allows instructors to develop course materials in a fraction of the time, while invigorating and enhancing learners’ experience. We give you the tools to mold and shape content already on the web to exactly how you want it.”

http://www.opentapestry.com/

open_tapestryOpen Tapestry provides tools to enable users to author resources and create and share modules, or tapestries, from existing content.  The system also has some repository-like  aspects in that it searches open content repositories, harvests metadata and enables users to upload resources. Open Tapestry pulls in all types of resources at different levels of granularity. There are currently around a million resources, mostly aimed at higher education, however Open Tapestry has also worked with online high schools and a few primary grades.  While Open Tapestry encourages use of open content, but users are also able to create closed instances for their own organisations.

Open Tapestry is a custom platform built on Ruby on Rails.  The platform uses a number of open source libraries and about ten APIs, but is not currently open source itself. The code used to detect and parse open licences is based on Open Attribute, and Gem is used to interact with Canvas.

Open Tapestry supports IMS LTI to facilitate learning management system integration.  This allows users to manage content outside the LMS and then present it inside the system.

Open Tapestry harvests metadata using OAI PMH, web crawlers and RSS harvesters.  The application tries to be as inclusive as possible; any format of metadata that is found, e.g. Dublin Core, LOM, LRMI,  will be parsed and stored internally. This internal metadata can then be transformed into any number of other formats.  The system also facilitates some cross walking.  All harvested metadata is retained and users are able to add to that metadata.  A small number of vocabularies are built into the system, e.g. licence.

The metadata that exists for any given resource depends on what has been harvested, or created by users, however if a page has no metadata, Open Tapestry will produce basic fields used for indexing and searching.  Open Tapestry has two main levels of content granularity;  resources and collections (tapestries) and metadata is applied at both of these levels. Collections can be combined from multiple sources and metadata is provided for each source.

Open Tapestry has fields for all LRMI elements but to date, users have tended not to fill them in.

  • educationalAlignment
  • educationalUse
  • timeRequired
  • typicalAgeRange
  • interactivityType
  • learningResourceType
  • useRightsUrl
  • isBasedonUrl

One way to encourage greater adoption of LRMI suggested by Open Tapestry is to focus on providing targeted search for a particular audience or usecase e.g. learning management systems.  LMS are currently grappling with how to integrate openly licensed resources with closed content and LRMI could potentially provide a solution to this problem.

Open Tapestry does not share metadata records with the Learning Registry as the system is primarily a metadata aggregator, very few new metadata record are produced by Open Tapestry.

One significant issue surfaced by Open Tapestry is how to track metadata assertions as resources, and metadata records are edited and aggregated.  This is particularly important for derivative works, where it is necessary to keep track of entire genealogies of who is making the assertions recorded in the metadata.  While cataloguers are aware of the necessity of creating and maintaining high quality metadata, content creators often have low awareness of the importance of metadata until they have a problem, e.g. concerns about who carries liability for a resource or assertion. Technical solutions are required to address this problem.

Links:

Open Tapestry
Open Tapestry Case Study Questionnaire

LRMI Implementation Projects Case Studies

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As part of our work for Creative Commons on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), my colleague Phil Barker and I have been writing short case studies on a number of LRMI implementation projects that were funded between 2013 – 2014. Ten different OER platforms received small grants from the Gates and Hewlett Foundations to implement the LRMI specification and share their experiences with other developers. I’ll be posting the case studies here over the next couple of weeks and once all case studies have been completed we also plan to produce a high level technical synthesis of the projects’ outputs.

An early overview of some of the implementation projects was presented at the Cetis 2014 Conference at the University of Bolton in June.

LRMI Implementation Projects

Connexions / OpenStax CNX

Connexions, now OpenStax CNX, was launched in 1999 at Rice University to provide authors and learners with an open space where they can share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports. Today, OpenStax CNX is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes. Tens of thousands of learning objects called pages, are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime.

Curriki

Curriki provides peer reviewed open educational resources, curricula and instructional materials to support teachers, professional educators, students, lifelong learners, and parents, primarily in the domain of K-12 education. Curriki is a nonprofit organization and the majority of the resources is provides carry Creative Commons licences.

GooruLearning

GooruLearning an open and collaborative online learning community. Gooru enables teachers and students to find standards-aligned, interactive learning materials that have been rated by fellow teachers, share those materials in the form of personalized custom collections, measure students’ engagement, comprehension, and progress, and contribute to an active community of teachers and students by sharing your collections and best practices.

ISKME

ISKME is an independent, education non-profit company whose mission is to improve the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector. ISKME supports innovative teaching and learning practices throughout the globe, and is well-known for its pioneering open education initiatives. ISKME also assists policy makers, foundations, and education institutions in designing, assessing, and bringing continuous improvement to education policies, programs, and practice.

Jorum

Jorum is a Jisc funded Service for UK Further and Higher Education, to collect and share open educational resources, allowing their reuse and repurposing. Jorum’s free online repository service forms a key part of Jisc’s Learning and Teaching digital content offering. It is the first port of call for 1000’s of resources, all shared and created by those who teach or have been inspired in the FE and HE and professional skills community.

MERLOT

MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web pages, together with associated comments, and personal collections, all intended to enhance the teaching and learning experience.

Open Tapestry

Open Tapestry is a toolkit that enables teachers, instructors, professors, corporate trainers, students and learners to discover, adapt, and share learning resources. The Open Tapestry toolkit allows instructors to develop course materials and organise content into categories, or Tapestries, to enhance learners’ experiences.

Peer2Peer University

Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities.

Untrikiwiki

UntrikiWiki were funded to develop a MediaWiki extension to allow the use of schema.org markup in Wikitext. As part of this project, UntrikiWiki advocated the use of open-source extension HTML Tags on wikis.