I am very pleased to announce fifteen new projects to enhance the digital infrastructure to support open content in education.
The Call for proposals was released in November 2011. We received 34 proposals, the competition was very tough. I’m grateful to all the expert reviewers who helped evaluate bids. Because of the high standard of proposals we were able to allocate more funding than anticipated to approximately £350,000 of HEA/JISC OER Programme funds.
These projects will be completed by November 2012, hence they are Rapid Innovation projects using open innovation methods: plenty of blogging, lots of user involvement, and they are driven by delivering new tools and functionality.
Here is a taste of what they cover
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OER Rapid Innovation Projects: the full list:
| Attribute images | Further developing a tool that allows users to upload images (singly or in bulk), select a Creative Commons licence and specify the name of the copyright holder, publication date and a URL. The tool will then embed a licence attribution statement in the image. It will have integration with Flickr. | University of Nottingham |
| Bebop | The main outcome of this work will be a WordPress plugin that can be used with BuddyPress to extend an individual’s profile to re-present resources that are held on disparate websites such as Slideshare, Jorum, etc. | University of Lincoln |
| Breaking down barriers | Developing open options for Landmap and geo-aware functionality in Jorum. To enable easier and richer sharing of geo-based resources. | University of Manchester, MIMAS |
| CAMILOE | This project reclaims and updates 1800 quality assured evidence informed reviews of education research, guidance and practice that were produced and updated between 2003 and 2010 and which are now archived and difficult to access. | University of Canterbury Christchurch |
| Improving Accessibility to Mathematics | Turn an existing research prototype into an assistive technology tool that will aid accessibility support officers in their task of preparing fully accessible teaching and assessment material in mathematical subjects by translating it into suitable markup. | University of Birmingham |
| Linked data approaches to OERs | Extending MIT’s Exhibit tool to allow users to construct bundles of OERs and other online content centred around playback of online video | Liverpool John Moore’s University |
| Portfolio Commons | Create a plugin for Mahara open source e-portfolio software that will enable users to select content from their portfolio and deposit it into Jorum and EdShare. | University of the Arts London |
| RedFeather | RedFeather aims to provide users with a lightweight Resource Exibition and Discovery platform for the annotation and distribution of teaching materials. | University of Southampton |
| RIDLR | Dynamic Learning Maps meets Learning Registry UK node (JLeRN) to harvest OERs for specific topics within curriculum and personal learning maps and share paradata. | University of Newcastle |
| SPINDLE
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This will be using cheap/free automatic transcription services to transform video to text to enable richer subject specific metadata for cataloguing purposes, using recognised standards and data formats. | University of Oxford |
| SupOERGlue | Will pilot the integration of Tatamae’s OER Glue with Dynamic Learning Maps, enabling teachers and learners to generate custom content by aggregating and sequencing OERs related to specific topics. | University of Newcastle |
| SWAP sharing paradata across widget stores | Using the Learning Registry infrastructure to share paradata about Widgets across multiple Widget Stores, improving the information available to users for selecting widgets and improving discovery by pooling usage information across stores. | University of Bolton |
| synote mobile | Creating a new HTML5 mobile version of Synote to will meet the important user need to make web-based OER recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and others. | University of Southampton |
| TRACK OER | OER in the wild can get lost. This project will add a tracer to find where they go for attribution, research and remix. | Open University |
| Xenith | Adding HTML5 as a delivery platform to Xerte Online Toolkits, allowing content to reach a much greater range of devices. | University of Nottingham |
See the JISC strand page for more detail.