Looking at many of the UK-OER resources that have been released so far, it looks like most projects have decided to use a very minimalist approach to ‘wrapping’ their OER resources.

Some I feel have taken this to extremes – I have found some resources which do not even have an author’s name within the resource. This does worry me a bit.  I fear that once a resource becomes separated from its basic metadata then it has become much less usable. Indeed I would suggest that without an ‘author name’ associated with it, it can no longer be covered by the CC license, which requires attribution, so is no longer truly open.

For our C-change partners, the chance to release their materials in an OER form was encouraged by their hope that it would be good publicity for them, their courses and their institutes.  This demanded a much more elaborate presentation of the material, with a much higher level of  ’visual design’, which included institute logos.  It is also the case that much of our materials are rather heavily laden with third party material for which we have to provide separate and individual attribution.

It was therefore unlikely that the ‘minimalist’ approach would work for us and we needed  to consider how best to include all this information within a ‘back page’.

From a project viewpoint, it seemed imperative that as much of the resource-metadata as possible should be included within the text of the resource itself where it is viewable by the user and search engines etc. to make the resource as useful as possible in it’s life in the wild after it has left its primary repository.

This metadata could also be held within the  file header in the Document Properties on Microsoft Office, Adobe file formats and within the header of HTML documents.

It has taken us much discussion with other OER projects, but finally we have written a set of draft recommendations of best practice for writing the ‘back page’, which can be found on our Documents page at:  http://c-changeproject.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/back-page-notes-draft-1f.doc

It is pretty draft, but makes a good start.

Any thoughts?

eib

It has come to our attention that the RSS feed for the blog isn’t working. The feed seems to work in Microsoft Outlook but little else. I am currently looking into the problem and will post here again when it is up and running.

Mark

This is a question that I had very early on,  that somehow got brushed a bit under the carpet.

All our partners have undertaken a fair amount of copyright clearance work and now have a list of permissions, licenses, letters, emails etc covering hopefully all the material within their resources.

Although we did endeavour to try and standardise this metadata across the partners, in reality each partner had a different set of resources, that gave rise to a different approach and now have a different set of materials that make up their due-diligence files.

So, is there any chance of finding or establishing a ‘standard’ way of storing them?

Stephen Whitfield at Keele has suggested we keep the files (or electronic version of them) within their repository with the materials.  I like this idea…..but is this really the best place for it?  It isn’t really a teaching resource is it?

Any thoughts?

Thrilled to see this wonderful ‘Copyright Clearance Helper’ from our friends at HumBox:

http://labyrinth.sgul.ac.uk/openlabyrinth/mnode.asp?id=qwnw2gcf4jesnqajxhq1rx7jzqajxhq

This has been put together by Oren Stone and Erika Corradini at Southampton using the Open Labyrinth software.

It is still in draft form at the moment, so we might see some changes before the final version, but it seems to me like a wonderful resource already.

eib

We are getting to a point where most of our partners have got a large amount of their OER resources ready and we have to make a decision on just how we ‘wrap’ our OER before uploading.

We have already decided not to use a common ‘design’ or ‘look’ to the resources across all the materials as our partners want to retain their institutes logos and corporate design on their own material.  There is also a very wide range of material, that will be delivered in wide range of ways including: JorumOPEN, Institute Repositories, YouTube & Flickr.

But all the same it would be good if we could agree across the partners on some basic metadata and wordings that could be used within all of the c-change OER materials.

Currently we are thinking that this should include:

Front Page:

• Title of Work
• Author and Institute
• Date of creation or last updated

Credits, Terms & Conditions:

• Details of CC license with link to Creative Commons Website
• Details of any other 3rd party licenses are within the work
• Acknowledgements to the programme, project and funders

Should it include a ‘Take Down Policy’?  We are discussing this, but are tending towards the view that only the repository can provide that and not the item itself.

Then there is the question of how this information is best kept with the item.  Certainly it can be put into a page and held within the resource, but I would really like to consider also putting this data into the file-tags so that it is also held within the file itself.

Any thoughts?