JLeRN and the JISC OER Rapid Innovation Projects

The HE Academy / JISC OER3 Programme‘s new Rapid Innovation strand projects kicked off last week in London at the Programme Meeting. We are thrilled that there are four projects within the strand who want to work with us on Learning Registry related developments.

With only four months left for JLeRN, we want to make the most of the time we have, and participating in well-thought-out projects meeting real requirements in the OER space seems like a good way to consolidate what we’ve learned so far. All of these projects involve folk who supported us by coming to the Hackday in January and the CETIS Conference Learning Registry session in February so it’ll be nice to give something back.

The four projects we are working with are as follows (NB: There were a few other sparks of interest in the OER Rapid Innovation projects’ breakout session, so I think we may pick up a few more along the way: don’t be shy to get in touch if you’d like to work with us. UPDATE: We’ve added a new one already- read down to the end of the list for CAMILOE! And another: SupOERglue from Newcastle University, check under RIDLR!):

Rapid Innovation Dynamic Learning Maps-Learning Registry (RIDLR)

The Dynamic Learning Maps Concept

Based at Newcastle University, and led by Simon Cotterill, this project will build on their Dynamic Learning Maps work, and their FavOERites social bookmarking project, to develop “open APIs to harvest and release paradata on OER from end-users (bookmarks, tags, comments, ratings and reviews etc.) from the Learning Registry and other sources for specific topics, within the context of curriculum and personal maps.” Also (added to post 4/04/12) from the Dynamic Learning Maps folks at Newcastle, we have the SupOERglue project, led by Suzanne Hardy, which aims to enable easy content creation and aggregation related to specific topics.  They will also be looking at collecting paradata on OER from end-users.

Sharing Paradata Across Widget Stores (SPAWS)

Based at Bolton University (with partners KMi (Open University); IMC AG, Saarbruecken; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) and led by Scott Wilson, this project will use the Learning Registry infrastructure to share paradata in the form of user views, reviews and ratings about educational widgets across four existing widget stores.

Xerte Experience Now Improved: Targeting HTML5 (XENITH)

Based at Nottingham University (with partners JISC TechDIS, EDINA and Mimas (us!)), and led by Julian Tenney, this project builds on the Xerte Online Toolkits, which integrates directly with the Xpert Repository. As an adjunct to its main development work, it will explore sharing metadata and paradata about Xerte resources with the Learning Registry.

Track OER: Tracking Open Educational Resources

Based at the Open University, and led by Patrick McAndrew, this project aims to “develop software that can help track open educational resources” as they are used away from their point of origin. JLeRN has already entered discussions with them to ensure mutual affordances are identified.

CAMILOE (Collation and Moderation of Intriguing Learning Objects in Education) (added to the list 3/04/12)

Based at Canterbury Christ Church University, and led by Mike Blamires, this project aims to  reclaim and update 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. They are aiming to discuss the potential usefulness of JLeRN and the Learning Registry in achieving their aims.

In addition to these projects, the University of Liverpool will soon be working with the JLeRN team to set up their own node, as part of their JISC OER project CORE-SET. As well as assisting with meeting Liverpool’s requirements, this will enable JLeRN to experiment with sharing data between nodes at different locations. Work with Jorum will continue, and discussions have begun with the resource discovery strand of JISC’s Information Environment 09-11 activities, to widen the reach of the Learning Registry concept. Watch out for blog posts on all of these activities!