Lisa Rogers
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Discovering OER through RSS and APIs Lisa J. Rogers, Research Associate Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University
Transcript of Lisa Rogers
Discovering OERthrough RSS and APIsLisa J. Rogers, Research AssociateInstitute 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
APIs
RSS
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
