[Oer-community] What is beyond mapping the OER intiatives?

[Fred M Beshears]

Duda,

The IMS website does have a page addressing "IMS Interoperability
Conformance Certification Status" that lists the companies and
organizations that have products that conform to one or more of the
IMS specs. (see http://www.imsglobal.org/cc/statuschart.cfm)

There are at least two open Learning Management System organizations
on this list: Sakai and Moodle.

You can also get a list of the companies and organizations that are
working with IMS by checking out who is on their technical board (see
http://www.imsglobal.org/technicalboard.html) and the governing board
of directors (see http://www.imsglobal.org/boardofdirectors.html).

You state/ask:

> However, you cannot find those [IMS Global] specs actually applied, or even considered on
> the majority of the OER's Sources.
> Should we consider this as one of the parameters for the mapping initiative?

The "mapping initiative" as I understand it supposed to create a map
of the institutions that are participating in the "OER movement" in
some way.

I don't know how big the "OER institution mapping initiative" is going
to be. It could be very small and easily doable if it limits its scope
to a few bits of information for each institution. It could be as
simple as three bits of information:
   1) institution name,
   2) headquarters location (so you can place it on a map), and
   3) url to the institution's homepage (so you can find out more
about the institution).

In my opinion, we should start with a mapping initiative that just
collects and maintains these three bits of information.

If the "mapping initiative goes beyond these three bits of
information, then we may want to give the initiative a new name -
"OER educational institution metadata initiative"

Of course, the larger the mission scope, the harder it gets to collect
AND MAINTAIN all the metadata.

Now, it might make sense for someone to do a whitepaper that discusses
some of the standards that might apply to OERs and OER development,
which OER developers and open tool developers are using or thinking of
using one or more standards etc. Of course, a whitepaper would simply
be a snapshot at a given point in time. So, there's no need to keep
the information updated. However, the whitepaper could address the
idea of creating a database or some other mechanism to gather this
information on a regular basis.

It may be that you could do so automatically if OER metadata contains
information on the standard(s) used to create and package the
resource, which institution(s) the OER comes from. If this were the
case, you could harvest the OER <-> Institution relation data
directly. So, there would be no need to create and maintain a separate
database to do so.

Best,
Fred

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Duda Nogueira <dudanogueira at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Fred and Edward!
>
> Thanks for the answer and sorry for the late response on this one.
>
> I am aware of the specifications presented at IMS. Not deep into it.
> Unfortunately I got to know it after writing the piece of code to pack the
> OER's downloaded by Duda Library and for that reason didn't used it. It's
> surely the spec I plan on study and maybe and follow for the planned
> rewrite.
>
> However, you cannot find those specs actually applied, or even considered on
> the majority of the OER's Sources.
>
> Should we consider this as one of the parameters for the mapping initiative?
>
> So, after actually discover that only a small amount of OER actually apply
> some of those specs, we should then should try harder to show how following
> those specs is important for the OER community, and provide some basic
> usages and case scenarios that clearly shows that if you really want to make
> you "O"ER Open, distributed, available and accessible, following those specs
> will get you exactly that.
>
> Thanks!
>
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