from repositories to personal collections

From institutional repositories to personal collections of

learning resourcesJulià Minguillón1,2, Jordi Conesa1

1Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication Studies

2UNESCO Chair in e-LearningUniversitat Oberta de Catalunya

Barcelona, Spain

PLE'11, July 11-13, Southampton, UK #PLE_SOU

Table of contents

• The UOC Virtual Campus and the institutional repository

• Management of learning resources• The gatekeeper• The #metaOER project• Preliminary pilot experiences• Discussion• Future work


Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

• Created in 1994, 200 students → > 40000 • Completely virtual (but some F2F evaluation) • Virtual classroom:– Calendar– Communication spaces– Evaluation activities– Learning resources

• Open but monolithic VLE → PLE-1


Institutional repository

• Open repository: teaching, research and institutional resources

• DSpace based:– Preservation more important than dissemination– Permanent URLs (handles) + RSS

• Managed by librarians, neither teachers nor students…

…but self-archiving is possible• Good for storing, not for searching/browsing


Learning resources

• Teachers create collections of learning resources (readings, examples, exercises, …)

• But it is not easy to add or change resources• Resources are linked to a given course and are

available only from the virtual classroom• Irregular use of all the available resources

• Learners adopt a very passive role!!!


Integration in the learning process

• Do not provide learners with everything they need (they might not need the same!)

• Final users (students, teachers) should be able to discover and share new resources

• Promote informational competences:– Searching, filtering, summarizing, sharing

• Activities are more important than resources


delicious

• Social bookmarking web 2.0 service• Large community of users• Users can become “friends”• Triplets: URL, user, {tags} → 1 / 10 / 100 ratio• Highly connected to Wikipedia and other large

repositories (i.e. OCW)• Accessible via API or brute HTML parsing


Mining delicious

• Use delicious search engine and API• Retrieve “all” triplets for a given concept• Discover similar resources:– Resources clustered by tags– Resources tagged by “expert” users

• Improve descriptions by analyzing tags:– Misspelling– Additional tags


Our proposal

• Do not use the virtual classroom mechanisms for organizing learning resources

• Use the institutional repository to store them• Create small collections using a delicious

account with some predetermined tags• Ask learners to use delicious to organize and

describe their own personal collections• Use a gatekeeper (a.k.a. gardener) to “tidy up”


The gatekeeper

• delicious account + RSS / API bots• Specialized / thematic (i.e. Statistics, OERs)• Maintain a collection sharing the same

hashtag (i.e. #metaoer)• Provides learners with selected resources• Analyzes the community of practice and

reintroduces knowledge as recommendations: new resources, tags, expert users, …


Sharing resources

• The teacher maintains a collection of resources for a given subject in DSpace + delicious

• Learners are aware of the RSS of the collection• A bot searches resources for a given #hashtag

proposed by all users (learners, teachers, any)• It analyzes tags from all users sharing such

resource and proposes a possible description• The teacher decides whether such new

resource can be part of the collection


The #metaOER project

• UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning• OER evangelization: courses, workshops, …• Collection of Open Resources on Open

Educational Resources• Categories: awareness, open formats,

metadata, licenses, software, repositories• Resources tagged with #metaoer are

considered to become part of the collection


Preliminary pilot experiences

• First virtual course on OERs (May 2011):– 40 students (teachers) → 23 active– Only 4 had a delicious account

• Workshop on OERs (July 2011):– 90 attendees → 50 participated in the survey– 14 use delicious– Only 9 “use” the institutional repository


Discussion (I)

• The reality is not so 2.0:– Only a few users share resources in delicious– Even less users edit Wikipedia pages– The number of resources in other languages than

English is small• Users need to be trained to use delicious and

become Wikipedia editors• Some learners prefer the 1.0 model!


Discussion (II)

• Analyzing tags cannot be done “online”• Users need to share some predetermined

vocabularies• The gatekeeper cannot be intrusive• The teacher needs to supervise the job done

by the gatekeeper• A second bot could connect the delicious

collection with DSpace automatically


Future work

• Implement all bots• Add services on top of DSpace: add a

comment, rate, make favorite, subscribe, …• Better support for multimedia and other

non-document resources (i.e. streaming)• Integrate the system in the virtual classroom

(VLE) as well as a widget (PLE)• Anything else?


In a few sentences…

• If we provide learners with everything they need, they adopt passive roles

• If teachers arrange everything in advance, they adopt passive roles

• Open Educational Resources are out theresearch, discover, tag, share, use

• The PLE is just a combination of existing tools and some bots that help to automate tasks


Thank you!

Julià MinguillónComputer Science, Multimedia and

Telecommunication StudiesUNESCO Chair in e-Learning

[email protected]/@jminguillonahttp://unescochair-elearning.uoc.edu

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:twitter/@jminguillona

mailto:twitter/@jminguillona

http://unescochair-elearning.uoc.edu/