Discovering OERthrough RSS and APIsLisa J. Rogers, Research Associate

Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University

About Me

• Two UKOER phase i projects– Core-Materials– Open Engineering Resources Pilot

• Additional OER Technical work with CETIS.– RSS Feed Deposit for OER– Tracking OERs– Aggregation of OERS

Core-Materials

• Collated resources and existing descriptions into central database and made searchable.

• Batch uploaded resources and descriptions to web 2.0 file sharing sites using their APIs.

• Bulk upload resource descriptions and links to Jorum Open using RSS.

• http://core.materials.ac.uk/search/

Core-Materials Usage Stats

Number of Resources Uploaded

Total number of views Number of subscribers / followers

YouTube 128 videos 17,417 20 subscribers

Flickr 860 images 25,940 7 contacts

Scribd 157 documents

40,706(2,261 downloads)

32 subscribers

SlideShare 157 documents

35,240 3 followers

Viewing Statistics for CORE-Materials resources (Sept 2009 – March 2010)

Open Engineering Resources

• Dissemination to web 2.0 sites and Jorum Open by individual partners.

• No central database.

• Cross search web 2.0 sites using APIs to aggregate resources.

• Resources carefully tagged to allow this aggregation.

Aggregation of OERs

• Provide and document demonstrators

• Google Custom Search

• Yahoo Pipes!

• Query through APIs

Google Custom Search

Google Custom Search

Yahoo Pipes!

APIs

RSS

UKOER Search Demo

Lessons Learnt

• Many APIs have official and unofficial examples of code to help you get started

• In my experience technical support has been helpful (if you are persistent)– Reported bugs in Scribd API and in

SlideShare API which have been fixed– Suggested new feature for SlideShare API

which has been implemented

More Lessons

• These approaches may not be scalable– Limit on number of results returned– How are results combined?– Works for a finite number of sources– Current approach relies on tagging (how to extend

beyond UKOER)

• Viable solution for building smaller collections– Open Engineering Resources Search– Collections of OER (UKOER Phase 2?)

Demo

• Open Engineering Resources Search• http://www.engsc.ac.uk/oer• Returns results tagged ukoer, engscoer

plus query.• Can filter by partner (each partner

assigned unique tag (i.e. LoughboroughUniOER)

• Rob Pearce continuing to develop this service

Open Engineering Resources

L.J.Rogers@hw.ac.uk

@lisajrogers