Education OER: a pan-European meta-data aggregator [1122] Members : #OER16

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Public Group Active 8 years, 7 months ago

Tue, Apr 19 2016, 11:30am – 1:00pm

Authors: Eli Shmueli, Peter Szegedi, and Ilias Hatzakis

Room: Duddingston

Theme: Strategic and reputational advantages of openness

Type: Lightning Talk

Description

The continued growth in the scope of learning resources available in online repositories has contributed to the trend of sharing and use of these learning resources. This underscores the open nature of the materials and their accessibility on the Web.

A large number of OER can be found on the Internet using search engines. However, there is no guarantee that a query will lead to trustable, properly licensed materials on which high quality open education can be built, making the use of them in teaching challenging for educators (Camilleri et al., 2014). Well‐managed OER repositories that aggregate high quality content, such as the MERLOT repository or OER Africa, offer a solution to this problem.

The eduOER service is an OER Metadata Aggregation Hub & Portal which has been created especially to facilitate the search, find and reuse of digital multimedia content at the European level. The service is driven by the trusted circle of NREN (National Research and Education Network) members, primarily serving higher education and research institutes with network connectivity and access federation in Europe and worldwide.

The repository is an open source, metadata aggregation broker/portal that harvests the metadata of OER from the national level of universities and organizations up to the pan-European level. It offers a forum to collaborate, innovate and share knowledge in order to foster the development of Internet technology, infrastructure, and services to be used by the research and education community.

The eduOER service allows users to share materials developed through public funding and encourages adoption of flexible licenses which enable adoption, integration and reconstruction of learning objects. Being an OER metadata aggregator, the service is capable of supporting the online learning, such as MOOCs and online courses, in a variety of languages. The reuse of materials developed by one institute in others will make the materials more cost-effective and promote inter-institutional collaboration.

The service will be officially launched in December 2015. It focuses on meta-data of audio-visual materials, and has harvested so far 15 repositories and around 35,000 learning objects in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek and other languages. As for sustainability and quality, we intend to continue maintaining the repository by applying for EU grants. Paradata displays will be implemented to allow the users to make their own evaluation of the LO’s quality known. Since the referatory harvests meta-data from good quality repositories, we expect the LO quality to remain high.

Our presentation will discuss usage models of the service as a supporting teaching and learning tool, which assists faculty and NRENs in reusing OER to enrich their teaching. Additionally, we will discuss the ways we encourage OER repositories to contribute their meta-data to the repository.

References

Camilleri, A. F., Ehlers, U. D., & Pawlowski, J. (2014). State of the art review of quality issues related to open educational resources (OER).

Hylén, J., Van Damme, D., Mulder, F., & D’Antoni, S. (2012). Open Educational Resources: Analysis of responses to the OECD country questionnaire (No. 76). OECD Publishing.

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