This blog post is a position paper for the CETIS: Repositories and the Open Web meeting on the 19th April 2010. See http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/cetisrow
for more details.

I’ve worked as a Research Associate at the Institute for Computer Based Learning since January 2006 and have been involved with many projects related to the shareability of teaching and learning resources. I’m currently working on two projects from the UKOER programme (Core-Materials and EngSCOER pilot).

Though all resources released by these projects will be deposited into the Jorum Open repository, Core-Materials and EngSCOER opted to disseminate these resources further using web 2.0 file-sharing platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare, Scribd, Zoho and Flickr.

The Core-Materials project had large collections of resources to be released and therefore required a facility to batch upload these resources and associated descriptions to the web 2.0 platforms in order to take advantage of the benefits they offer (see list below). As the metadata for its resources was already contained within a database, manual upload would have been an unnecessary drain on time, requiring re-keying or copying and pasting of metadata. The project used the APIs provided by each of the Web 2.0 sites to batch upload resources. This included over 800 images to Flickr, over 100 videos to YouTube and over 150 documents to Scribd and SlideShare. The Core-Materials project is currently trialling the use of RSS as a mechanism for bulk deposit of its resources into JorumOpen. RSS is a simple, effective mechanism for sharing descriptions and even the resources themselves (think of podcasting).

The Core-Materials project has developed a search facility for the database of OERs released by the project. Each resource is available in a variety of locations, therefore it was essential to keep track of where these resources were deposited, in order to keep it’s database up to date and to consolidate duplicated results. Since the project used APIs to batch upload the documents, it was straightforward to return the unique id for each resource at the time of upload to store in the database.

The Engineering Subject Centre’s OER pilot project consisted of many smaller individual partners willing to contribute their content as Open Educational Resources. The project team provided support in suggesting web 2.0 platforms best suited to sharing their resources and helped some partners getting started by creating accounts and uploading some of their content to these sites. This will help with sustainability as each partner has the facility to release more resources in the future through these channels.

The EngSCOER project made occasional use of the APIs provide by these web 2.0 services for batch upload where metadata was similar or already contained in electronic format. However, the main use of APIs for this project was to provide a search interface for these resources. This was an alternative to creating another database of resources. Prior to deciding upon using the APIs as a search interface the project also investigated using a Google Custom Search and Yahoo! Pipes.

More information on the EngSCOER’s attempts at remote searching is detailed in the presentation given at OER 10: Pull yourself together! Remote searching of multiple sources to best present OER materials.

Using web 2.0 platforms as a repository for educational resources fulfils many requirements or expectations that both contributors and consumers of content have come to expect. The following list describes some of these features:

• The ability to view or preview content online without the need to download. (How successful would youtube be if users were required to download each video clip prior to viewing).
• Many services (such as Flickr, Scribd, SlideShare, Zoho) allow contributors to release their content under creative commons licences, giving users clear guidelines of reuse.
• The resources can easily be embedded in other websites or blogs using html embed codes provided to users.
• These services tend to have a high web presence and often results have a higher visibility in search engines.
• Many of these sites provide socially networking functionality allowing users to share or reuse the content more easily.