New Digital Infrastructure Grant Funding Call

JISC’s Digital Infrastructure innovation team is aiming to release a Grant Funding call at the end of this month. It’s aim is to fund work to enable the UK Further and Higher Education communities to improve the digital infrastructure in the areas of managing research data, library systems, disciplinary vocabularies, access and identity management, research tools, and research information management. More details on most of these are available from the JISC Funding Roadmap. We’ll be using this and related blogs to provide further information and an FAQ.

January 23, 2012 | Filed Under funding, general | Leave a Comment 

My Story of O(pen)

Here at JISC we think a lot about openness: what it means, how to support it, where it takes us.

This is my contribution to that thinking. It is very much my individual views, but informed by the work we do at JISC, and by the Open Knowledge Foundation, amongst others.

My open narrative

Open makes things visible.

The everyday sense of “open” is open rather than closed – letting people see what is there, what is happening.

The web enables you to;

Open makes access easy.

This is where open–as-in-open-access comes in: open without needing to log in, and open without payment.

SO

Open is social.

The “many eyes” principle of sharing open data and the open innovation model encourage others not only to view but to comment, to feed back, to engage. This speeds up the process in hand and improves the quality of the resulting work.

AND

Open makes things usable by others.

Open standards exist to encourage as many developers as possible to adopt them.

This is where open licensing comes in: granting others explicit and generous permissions to use your content.

FURTHERMORE

Open can be a way of working.

Doing open working and openly releasing outputs can make a person feel differently about what they do. Researchers might call this collection of activities open scholarship, technologists might call their activities open development, project teams might call it open innovation. Each of these types of open practice has elements in common and elements specific to the sorts of activities the practice involves.

HOWEVER

Open is not exclusive

Open source can mean both the open development process and the open source software. They are not always found together: open development processes can produce non-open software, and closed development processes can produce open source software.

BUT

Opens are mutually beneficial

There is a virtuous cycle when open process and open products combine. In open scholarship, both creating and using open content and using open ways of working, the content feeds the practice feeds the content.

I’m watching the Openness in Education course with interest and I expect this whole meta open concept to deepen in 2012.

A Diagram of Opens

Its important to note that is is an abstracted diagram: in my view, open is not a replacement for the  way things currently work. There is not ever going to be a total transformation to open. The reality is a mixed economy. Business models matter. Practice models matter.

Open can be good for business, open can be good for practice but it exists in a bigger ecosystem of technologies and behaviours. Good is not enough, it needs to be useful. That’s what JISC and other advocates of openness are working hard to surface.

Ultimately I think open is good because it is a good way of working.

Amber Thomas

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My Story of O(pen) by Amber Thomas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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January 17, 2012 | Filed Under open access, open data, ukoer | 1 Comment 

Sharing Learning Resources: shifting perspectives on process and product

I’m working on a paper with my colleague David Kernohan on the context of the UK OER Programme and it occurs to me that people understand the sharing of learning resources in very different ways. Even over the past 15 years that I’ve been involved in the field, the emphasis has regularly shifted.

One way to look at is that each iteration of the concept of sharing learning resources foregrounds different aspects of activity.

Processes and Products

For the sake of simplicity, I am illustrating this as four main activity domains: designing learning, creating resources, sharing resources and using resources. This is activities from a resource-centric perspective rather than a curriculum design and delivery perspective or a software/platforms perspective. This blog post is deliberately couched in soft systems terminology rather than practice.

Diagram

(Paragraph clarified 2012/01/05 based on feedback!)

There are often multiple discourses in play at any one time – it’s not a linear or singular evolution. The diagram can just be used to describe the focus of a particular set of concerns/approaches. Sometimes the emphasis is on the process, with the product as secondary. For example, the late 90s to early 2000s emphasised the benefits of collaborative resource development. Later on, some advocates of Open Educational Resources (OER) brought to the fore the concept of content as by-product, exhaust, frictionless sharing. Simultaneously, the early 2000s saw a focus on reusable learning objects, with the transfer from resource creation process to resource use process being key. Towards the end of the decade that thread partially shifted into a discussion about the sharing process being key to open practices, a different angle again. There is currently an emphasis on making the learning resources themselves available to learners: a focus on access to product rather than improvement of process. Sometimes there is a new interest in eliciting a product/output from an existing process, for example, analytics brings to the fore the idea of usage data as a by-product of use. In parallel, approaches are maturing in designing learning, and an interest in how that design can be shared, directly as “a learning design”, implicitly as learning design built in to the resource creation process, and passively as contextual metadata to assist resource selection and use.  I could expand these examples to show more clearly what I mean.

Value

One of the benefits of looking at it this way is that we can see different models of value. Although deeply unfashionable to talk about academic practices in this way, looked at from a soft systems perspective there are variables of time, cost and quality. The discourse about why and how to share learning resources shifts its benefits model between these variables, and whether the value is in the process or the product.

TCQ Triangle

Examples:

A: PROCESS: Improving shared taught courses by using collaborative learning design

B: PRODUCT: Reducing time spent creating new resources by increasing the availability of existing resources

C: PROCESS: Promoting institutional subject expertise by sharing specialist learning resources

This was just a quick attempt to map the benefits. I found it easiest to think of examples where the driver is quality, though I seem to remember that the late 90s was more about saving time. We may be seeing a shift now to saving or making money (however indirectly). But the variables have always been there: the emphasis just shifts.

Infrastructure and Practice

I have a feeling that understanding where we are in terms of process and product will help us identify more accurately how technology can help. There is a history of sociotechnical engineering in the field of sharing learning materials that would be useful to tell. It’s not just a story of changing practices in pursuit of quality, it is also a story of government investment in a soft system, and a series of interventions (many of which I’ve been involved with), to support emerging good practices both processes and products. Maybe one day I’ll write a thesis on that!

For now though, I think it is salient to draw the conclusion that there is no reason to assume that today’s conception of the value of sharing learning resources will persist. This is a moving field. And that makes it very difficult to anticipate where public investment in supporting technologies should lie. Do we need specialist process based tools? Or generic platforms to share products/outputs/artefacts from each process?

Interim conclusions

There is more to be said about how this process and product model layers itself over individual, institutional, subject, national and global levels. There is also more to be said about how tools/services can get the balance between process-centric and product-centric models, and how this story plays out with VLEs, repositories and web2.0 tools.I found it useful to get my thoughts down on paper and hopefully some readers will be able to point me in a useful direction.

January 5, 2012 | Filed Under learning and teaching, repositories, ukoer | 2 Comments 

Digital Identifiers the New Persistent Identifiers

2011-12-02. British Library, London. The EU (FP7) funded Digoiduna project has come out with its recommendations on what it is calling “digital identifiers”, which (for lack of a better phrase) seems to be ‘a re-branding exercise’ for the “Persistent Identifiers” community.  However (as I understand it), “Digital Identifier” as used by the Digoiduna project is actually an umbrella term that includes “persistent identifiers” as just one of the layers in the identifiers stack; the additional layers they have put atop the technology stack of PIDs include:

The Digoiduna project analysis of "Persistent Identifiers" has resulted in a new definition for PIDs (and therefore new multi-dimensional 'brand') now called 'Digital Identifiers' (DIs).

While we still need to look over the full Digoiduna report in depth, this change in perspective (the new ‘DI’ brand) for PIDs is a welcome change from JISC’s PoV as our previous reports in the area support a complex view of identifiers which are primarily driven by the user need (personally, I think Digoiduna could be a bit more user-centric in their presentation of this new identifier stack), but on the whole their call to action to “mobilise resources” is a welcome one:

“…promote actions to mobilize technical, human, financial resources aiming at triggering a wider demand of usage…”

This recommendation clearly support the previous work JISC has been done in Persistent Identifiers and in fact we are hoping to take more real world action in supporting further end user technologies, to quote from our own report:

“JISC should draw a line under long-running arguments about particular persistent identifier schemes and instead should focus its efforts on enabling HEI’s to choose and implement schemes appropriate to their needs… [support] should be provided on how an HEI might choose between identifier schemes based on their own needs and contexts…the pros and cons of various approaches in different circumstances, for different purposes, should be outlined… [especially on how] the adoption and management on the various identifier schemes available.” -JISC Consultation on Identifiers 2010-

The other encouraging aspect of the Digoiduna work is that they are highlighting efforts such as the Den Haag Manifesto which *is* ‘drawing a line under long-running arguments’ and embracing the potential there is to be had by persistent identifier and linkeddata communities coming together.  While the Den Haag manifesto might still have some technical difficulties it is the importance of not always arguing about the correct way forward and just trying to move forward in areas where we can collaborate and interoperate without trying to claim one is better (aka more persistent) than the other (just do it).

This hope for the community adopting a “fail fast; fail soon” attitude was further supported by the announcement by Salvatore Mele of CERN and Jan Brase of Datacite and the German National Technical Library that they would be looking to work together to make author identifiers (OrcIDs) and scholarly resource identifiers (DOIs) interoperate (hopefully via linkeddata methods); naturally this kind of bibliographic metadata profile that DOIs can provide cross-linked to author profile metadata (OrcID) is one where real value could be generated on behalf of the scholarly community by using both linkeddata and persistent digital identifier techniques (e.g. content negotiation, redirection, abstraction, etc).

Finally, I’ll end this post with a bit of gossip that JISC is itself hoping to launch a couple of new projects in the identifier space that will take action in providing end users tools that easily integrate “Digital Identifiers” into scholarly workflows (this alongside the ongoing work we already have done in this space).

In short, the PID arena has been ‘too much chatter and not enough action’ for some time and that needs to change; accordingly, we are currently looking at taking forwards some new efforts in the space that could really help make scholars lives easier in their day to day use of identifiers. These projects are in planning and as yet not guaranteed to happen…but fingers crossed they will. Stay tuned :)

Post written by David F. Flanders (with help from his Digital Infrastructure team colleagues, special thanks to Rachel Bruce and Neil Jacobs for suggested amendments).  David is an Innovation Programme Manager for the Digital Infrastructure Team.

December 12, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 6 Comments 

Use Cases for OER Rapid Innovation Call

This blog post is a supplement to the requirement in the Call for Proposals for OER Rapid Innovation: enhancing digital infrastructure to support open content in education.

Paragraph 24 states that bidders must submit a Use Case.

“24. Bidders should note the requirement detailed in the Bid Form to produce a Use Case to accompany the proposal. These use cases must be made available as Creative Commons BY SA. Please see examples of Use Cases. “

As the definition on Wikipedia definition shows,  “Use Case” has a range of meanings. Depending on the context it can mean explaining what something is for (using a key to open a lock), through to a specification of a problem and description of the solution, through to a specified methodology as part of a software development approach such as agile .

In software engineering, a use case is a technique for capturing the potential requirements of a new system or software change. Each use case provides one or more scenarios that convey how the system should interact with the end user or another system to achieve a specific business goal. Use cases typically avoid technical jargon, preferring instead the language of the end user or domain expert.

It is always about describing how a solution will solve a problem. It always has measures of success defined with in it: if the key breaks in the lock, it doesn’t meet the use case. There are other terms such as user stories or scenarios that can also be used to describe issues that are being tackled, in some contexts they are used interchangeably with use case.

In terms of the OER Rapid Innovation Call, then, this is what I mean by “Use Case”

This is NOT a job to be done AFTER you have written your proposal: this is a key task in scoping your project. If you can’t articulate a clear use case at the point you are granted project funding, you will struggle to deliver useful technical solutions within 6 months. To increase the quality of bids and resulting outputs, it is a requirement of this Call that a use case submitted with every proposal (as part of it or as a link).

The use case should be made available as Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). This is to ensure that the thinking done by bidders does not go to waste. It is possible that bidders may identify a crucial use case but not have the technical or skills requirements to solve it. I therefore want to be able to share the use cases and make them available to others who may be able to create the technical solutions. Digital infrastructure for open content is global and distributed, there are experts all around the world that we could collaborate on solutions with. (Feedback on this approach is welcome, I recognise it is unusual).

There is no template provided for the Use Case. It is for bidders to identify the best way to structure and describe the problem the project will tackle. As a rough guide for this Call, aim for one page of text / diagrams.

Useful links given in the Call:

http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/navigate

http://sconulerm.jiscinvolve.org/wp/ ,

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/einfrastructure/eius.aspx ,

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/resdis/automaticmetadata.aspx

In addition, here are some further examples of useful approaches:

Use cases

Edina Usability Service Enhancements to Digimap User requirements and Review of existing technology options

ALUIAR Project working through an issues list

Rave in Context open innovation blog

Readers of this blog will know of good guidance and examples of Use Cases – comments and links would be very welcome, please do suggest further reading!

Amber Thomas

JISC Programme Manager: digital infrastructure for learning and teaching materials

December 7, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

Digital Infrastructure to Support Open Content for Education

Background to this blog post

The OER Rapid Innovation Call for Proposals was announced in November 2011. It is open to HEFCE-funded institutions to bid.

I am very aware that the issues in scope for this Call are broader then the UK. It includes a snapshot of the digital infrastructure space at November 2011, it builds on the understanding and experiences of projects within the UKOER Programme and beyond, and is particularly informed by the expertise at JISC CETIS . It therefore seems useful to make the snapshot available as a blog post so that it is more accessible to people working in open content for education around the world.

The following is taken from Paragraphs 25-75 of the Call, but with added headings to enable easier reading online. Please read the full Call for further understanding of what the requirements are for projects.

The Global Picture

The OLnet initiative has recently identified Key Challenges for the OER Movement. These challenges include:

It is these global challenges that underpin this Call for projects to enhance the digital infrastructure to support open content.

The Story so Far

Through the JISC Digital Infrastructure Team, JISC  supports the creation and use of a layer of scholarly resources for education and research across the network. This includes the development of infrastructure, technology, practice and policy to support processes from creation and access to re-use of resources. Major activities include sharing and storing content, providing access to content (via licences and technologies), developing solutions for curation and delivering data and content resources via data centres and distributed solutions.

Through the OER Technology Support Project, the OER IPR Project, the evaluation and synthesis, and the experiences of funded projects, and aided particularly by JISC CETIS’s technology synthesis work,  JISC is developing a clearer understanding of the role of technologies and infrastructure in supporting open practice and open content.

In particular JISC has funded a number of elements that support the sharing of learning materials including Jorum, the Repositories Infokit,  previous rapid innovation funding for the Xpert search, the SWORD protocol, the CaPRet project and an OER Programme-funded prototype showcase of UKOER content that is currently under development.

Opportunities and Challenges

There are some key areas that JISC has identified where developments under this call are encouraged. What follows is a description of some of the opportunities and challenges that have been identified in this space. However this list is not exhaustive and bidders are welcome to submit proposals that address different areas if they fulfil the main aims of the call.


Open licensing is key to open content, and fertile ground for developing digital infrastructure. Tools built around Creative Commons licences may provide a useful backbone, so the Open Attribute tool and projects using those conventions, such as OERGlue and CaPRet are useful in that they provide benefits to users (easy attribution) rewarded by benefits to content providers (analytics). Tools such as Xpert Attribution Tool help the flow of rights. Implementation of Open Attribute into tools and services, and a set of services around embedded licenses are potential areas that proposals could tackle.

Improved resource description, both machine-readable and human-readable are important to enable content to be effectively found, shared and selected. CETIS have provided a summary of the key initiatives to track, namely Learning Resources Metadata Initiative which is a profile of the schema.org initiative for improving html markup. HTML5 may offer promise in this area. Including provenance and licensing information in the sharing of resources is important to digital literacies as well as meeting the requirements of attribution such as in the Creative Commons BY clause.

Aggregation and discovery is another area of interest for open content (see OER aggregation blog post). The OER Thematic Collections projects have explored a range of approaches. The Content Clustering and Sustaining Resources publication provides a good description of the approaches in this area generally. The Shuttleworth-funded OER Roadmap Project proposes an ecosystem of repositories and services, characterised by the use of APIs and shared protocols such as JISC-funded SWORD. The Discovery Initiative promotes an open metadata ecology to enable better use and aggregation of content. The Learning Registry approach explores the use of activity data to enhance the metadata and discovery of resources and the OER Programme is funding a UK experimental node. Solutions might be developed that build on these initiatives, specifically to enhance the digital infrastructure for open content in education.

Many sites hosting collections of educational materials keep logs of the search terms used by visitors to the site when searching for resources. There might be solutions that could be developed to aid the understanding of search activity. For example, a project could deliver a tool that facilitates the analysis of search logs to classify the search terms used with reference to the characteristics of a resource that may be described in the metadata. Such information should assist a collection manager in building their collection (e.g. by showing what resources were in demand) and in describing their resources in such a way that helps users find them. The analysis tool should be shown to work with search logs from a number of and should produce reports in a format that are readily understood, for example a breakdown of how many searches were for “subjects” and which were the most popular subjects searched for. A a degree of manual classification will be required, but if the system is capable of learning how to handle certain terms and that this learning would be shared between users: a user should not have to tell the system that “Biology” is a subject once they or any other user has done so. Further information on the sort of data that is available and what it might mean is outlined in CETIS’s blog post on Metadata Requirements from the Analysis of Search Logs. Solutions should be developed as open source software then made free to use or install without restriction, with full documentation. The tool proposed above is one way that we could improve the understanding of search, other suggested solutions are welcome.

Effective Search Engine Optimisation is key to open educational resources providing benefits of discoverability, reach reputation and marketing. Guidance on “improving your online presence” needs applying to the wide range of platforms and content types used for OER, as described in JISC CETIS’ UKOER technical synthesis. Projects have explored SEO in several ways, for example, the SCOOTER project has produced guidance on its chosen approach to search engine optimisation and the MMTV project experimented with Google AdWords to improve SEO. The variations in format types and platforms mean that it is exposed to web search in a variety of ways. A particular key issue is how “repositories” compare to “web 2.0 services” in terms of search engine optimisation. To answer that, we may need to go beyond theory into running a structured experiment. For example, a technical investigation/tool for the SEO of commons platforms and formats for OER would be very useful. This project would be a repeatable approach, using technical tools to run the SEO work and capture and present the findings in a useful way. The outputs of such an investigation would include the methodology, a findings report to JISC, and an accessible set of outputs aimed at OER projects. Other solutions to improving SEO for open content would also be very welcome.

Understanding use has been a major theme of the OER Programme Phase Two. The Value of Reuse report and the Literature Review of Learners Use of Open Educational Resources captured what is known about use of open educational resources. The Learning Registry is relevant here. The Listening for Impact study analysed the feedback and usage of some open content collections. Further useful resources are available from the Activity Data Programme. Analytics may be an important way to provide evidence of the benefits of open educational resources, so enhancing content and platforms to enable enhanced usage tracking, exploiting APIs of third party systems, exploring ways of capturing and visualising use, and providing dashboards to manage analytics data may be very useful.

Online profiles are becoming a part of academic identity and open content provides a significant opportunity for academics to enhance their profile, alongside managing and reflecting on their professional work. To this point many efforts at creating academic profiles building on institutional information and open content have focused exclusively on profiles of publications and the provision of open access to scholarly communications. However, other forms of open content can play a significant role in academic identity and professional development. A key opportunity is therefore linking a broader range of open content to academic profiles.This might involve fully/semi-automated integration of publication/release/record of multiple types of open content into academic staff profiles. This is not about creating new platforms but of using feeds and APIs to enhance existing systems that handle continuing professional development / CVs / ePortfolios etc. Examples of this sort of functionality can be found in Humbox’s profile on contributing authors which also allows users to embed that author’s content list elsewhere, and Rice Connexions offers author profiles. Services such Slideshare and Youtube host user-generated content are well used as platforms for open content.Proposals could demonstrate fully/semi-automated approaches that can flexible draw on multiple distributed sources of open access articles, OER, blog posts and so on. Proposals to address this opportunity are very welcome.

One mechanism that connects people to content is social recommendation. This includes favouriting, liking, bookmarking, reviewing, and social curation tools such as Scoopit, paper.li, zite, storify, pearltrees and so on.  Often this involves browser-based tools such as bookmarklets making it very easy for people to capture, share and store useful resources. There are two OER-specific bookmarking tools available that handle the licensing characteristics of open content: FavOERites developed at Newcastle University (as a UKOER funded project) and the OER Commons tool both of which have APIs and have open sourced their code. The implementation and enhancement of these tools to handle open content may be a useful area for projects to explore. For example, projects might develop solutions for making content “share-friendly” to these tools, how the tools can use automatically generated metadata about licences, the user and their context, and how shared tags and vocabularies might enable more effective sharing for educational purposes.

The growth in e-books and e-readers, both open and proprietary, is of interest to education. Books are a familiar format to use in teaching, but also digital technologies affording new ways of creating, sharing and using books. For example, the College Open Textbooks initiative states that “We have found that open textbooks should be:

In the UK, JISC Collections have been running the ebooks observatory and examining business models for etextbooks. Developments from the research world are emerging around Enhanced Publications which combine research text, date and rich media. There is a recently announced pressbooks platform. International initiatives such as the The Saylor Open Textbook Challenge the WA State open course library etextbook initiative and have raised the profile of open textbooks. JISC CETIS have described the use case for open e-textbooks. There is guidance on ebooks available from JISC digital media, and JISC has funded the #jiscpub R&D projects. Several campus-based publishing projects have piloted reusable approaches, including Epicure, CampusROAR, Larkin Press and another useful example to look at is “living books about life”.

Phases 1 and 2 of OER programme made use of a wide range of platforms, blogs, wikis, repositories and often made modifications to the software to fully support OER use cases. It is likely to mean improving ingest and expose mechanisms, handling licence information, addressing syndicated feeds, APIs, widgets and apps. An example of platform enhancement would be the work Oxford University and others have done with Wordpress or the CUNY Academic Commons in a Box work. Proposals are welcome to enhance platforms for open content. Bidders may wish to create enhancements to existing release, aggregation and remix platforms to improve the transfer of open content for educational purposes. Projects may wish to combine existing tools to provide enhanced functionality. The outcomes of these projects should be a richer exchange of metadata between publishing platforms, aggregators and other services used in the sharing of openly licensed content.


The opportunities and challenges above are only indicative and not exhaustive.

Please read the full Call for further understanding of what the requirements are for projects.

Bidders are welcome to use the oer-discuss mailing list to refine ideas and identify potential collaborators. JISC will not provide a matchmaking service, but commercial and overseas experts are welcome to use the mailing list to express an interest in collaborating.


I hope you find this useful. Comments very welcome.


Amber Thomas

JISC Programme Manager: digital infrastructure for learning and teaching materials

Addendum

Enhancing platforms for open content: the project cited is from City University New York not State University New York (now corrected, thanks to Matthew Gold, CUNY for spotting the error)

http://openattribute.com/
December 1, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized, devcsi, developers, funding, jiscri, learning and teaching, metadata, mobile, project, repositories, resource discovery, technology, tools, ukoer, usage statistics | 3 Comments 

Open Data Institute

A little bit of buzz going around the (virtual) office today as the Technology Strategy Board announces the ‘Open Data Institute’. Given the Digital Infrastructure Team’s investment and work in open data (not least the recently completed linkeddata programme, #jiscEXPO), we are hoping that the opportunity to collaborate in pushing forward the Open Data agenda (especially in Universities and Colleges) will be a conversation happening soon :)

Stay tuned, you’ll know (in the open) as we know ;-)

November 30, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

OER Rapid Innovation Call

***THIS CALL FOR PROPOSALS CLOSED ON 27TH JANUARY 2012 and this blog post will no longer be updated***

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) invites institutions to submit funding proposals for projects to enhance digital infrastructure to support open content for education.

Read the Call for Proposals.

Supplementary Information

IMPORTANT!: AMENDMENT TO THE CALL DOCUMENT: BIDS SHOULD BE SUBMITTED TO OER@JISC.AC.UK (NOT OER@JISCMAIL.AC.UK AS IT SAID IN THE ORIGINAL CALL)

CLARIFICATION: Proposals can be up to 6 pages long, the coversheet does not count as part of the 6 pages and the Use Case does not count as part of the 6 pages either.

REMINDER: Bidders are strongly advised to ask a peer with “fresh eyes” to read through the Call and Proposal before submission.

An online briefing session was held on Friday 9th December 2011, 10:00-11:00.  A recording of the briefing and the Slides are available. I also ran a skype surgery on Wednesday 11th January 2012. Further queries are very welcome.

An extract of the Call is available: Digital Infrastructure to Support Open Content for Education

Further information on Use Case Requirement is available.

Summary of the Call

Eligible institutions (HEFCE capital) may request between £10,000 and £25,000 per project.  A total of £200,000 is available for this strand. Between 10 and 18 projects are likely to be funded.

I previewed the Call earlier in November 2011.

wordcloud of scope of the Call

www.wordle.net of OER RI Call

The OLnet initiative has recently identified Key Challenges for the OER Movement. These challenges include:

It is these global challenges that underpin this Call for projects to enhance the digital infrastructure to support open content. The Call outlines some of the opportunities and challenges that have been identified in this space, proposals are welcome that meets these, or more generally the main aims of the Call.

Intended benefits of these projects are:

These are Rapid Innovation projects.  In keeping with the size of the grants and short duration of the projects, the bidding process is lightweight and the reporting process will be blog-based.

Bidders are welcome to use the oer-discuss mailing list to refine ideas and identify potential collaborators. JISC will not provide a matchmaking service, but commercial and overseas experts are welcome to use the mailing list to express an interest in collaborating.

The outputs of these projects will be made available open access and open source.

Key Dates

Please do post questions as comments to this blog post, join oer-discuss, or contact me direct.

Amber Thomas

JISC Programme Manager: digital infrastructure for learning and teaching materials (CONTACT INFO)

November 29, 2011 | Filed Under devcsi, developers, funding, jiscri, learning and teaching, metadata, mobile, project, repositories, resource discovery, technology, tools, ukoer, usage statistics | 2 Comments 

Activity data and data protection – what am I allowed to do?

JISC has been engaging in scoping the potential for activity/usage data for the HE sector under the Activity Data Programme with 9 projects.  There is much potential that activity data brings in terms of business intelligence for various uses such as recommendation services, collections management etc.  A very engaging synthesis of the work has been produced plus high level guides for activity data.

However up to this point, the relationship of usage data and the potential arising from data protection issues has not been explored in depth. Following on from a report commissioned from JISC Legal together with a briefing paper by Naomi Korn and Charles Oppenheim, certain issues have been explored in depth which are not clear cut such as the creation and subsequent use of anonymised data which does not contain any personally identifiable information (name, age etc) but where the mashing up of this data could lead to a user being identified.  Services therefore need to be mindful of this but not let it prohibit the potential that activity data affords. The papers and accompanying FAQs explore these cases as well as instances where consent has been given to use personally identifiable information, the importance of seeking consent, how consent might be given and when?

November 17, 2011 | Filed Under open data | 1 Comment 

OER Rapid Innovation Call: Preview

Released later this month, with a deadline of mid January, this Call will be for short (max 6 month) projects to develop solutions to enhance the digital infrastructure to support the use of open content in education.

Eligible institutions (HEFCE capital) can bid for between £10,000 and £25,000. Technical staff should already be in place. Existing partnerships with commercial and overseas organisations is welcome. Proposals should be focussed on a clear use case and have user involvement build it. In keeping with the relatively small grants and tight timeframe, there will be a lightweight reporting process based on blog posts.

Open Education, open academic practice, open scholarship and open content all need digital infrastructure to thrive. The emphasis in this Call is on making use of existing tools, services and standards, to meet clearly articulated use cases.

Areas to bid to will include:

A: Open content and academic profiles

B: Enhancing platforms for open content

C: Enhancing tools and services for open e-books

D: Search log analysis

E: SEO of common platforms and format types for OER

F: Open Call, including:

As you can see, the scope is broad. It includes discovery, analytics, social web and platform work, so don’t be put off if you haven’t been involved in the OER Programme so far. Read my latest programme update, join oer-discuss mailing list, follow #ukoer on twitter, check out the work of the programme and start making connections. Bidders are welcome to use the oer-discuss mailing list to refine ideas and identify potential collaborators. JISC will not provide a matchmaking service, but commercial and overseas experts are welcome to use the mailing list to express an interest in collaborating.

We have high hopes for the technical outputs of his strand. The CETIS OER mini projects call, which this supersedes, funded the CaPRet project for £10k, which may now become a core part of Creative Commons licensing technology. The SWORD protocol was originally funded in this way, and is now used all over the world. Great solutions can come from humble beginnings.

Get your thinking caps on and watch this space!

Amber Thomas

Programme Manager, JISC

@ambrouk

November 16, 2011 | Filed Under general, interoperability, jiscri, learning and teaching, metadata, mobile, repositories, resource discovery, tools, ukoer, usage statistics | 2 Comments 

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