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The Learning Registry: social networking for open educational

resources?

Phil Barker, and Lorna M Campbell, CETISSarah Currier and Nick Syrotiuk, Mimas

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The Learning Registry: social networking for open educational

resources?

Phil Barker, and Lorna M Campbell, CETISSarah Currier and Nick Syrotiuk, Mimas

plumbing

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Introduction

Phil Barker, CETIShttp://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/

Lorna M. Campbell, CETIShttp://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/

Sarah Currier, Mimashttp://www.jorum.ac.uk/about-us/the-team/sarah-currier

Nick Syrotiuk, Mimas

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CETIS is…jisc.cetis.ac.uk

The Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability

Standards. A national Innovation Support Centre providing advice to the UK

F/HE sector on educational technology and standards.

A partnership

between the

Universities

of Bolton and

Strathclyde,

and Heriot

Watt

University.

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Mimas is… mimas.ac.uk

An organisation of experts. A nationally designated data centre hosting a significant number of

the UKs research information assets and building applications to help

people make the most of this rich resource.

Based at the

University of

Manchester.

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What’s the problem?

It’s good to share educational resources! You need to describe your resources so other people can

find them and decide whether they want to use them. That means you need metadata to describe the

educational characteristics of your resources. But learning resources come in all shapes and sizes. Learning resources are used in all sorts of different

contexts. By all people with all sorts of learning requirements. Describing learning resources is hard.

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You can end up with a lot of metadata…

• You can end up with a lot of metadata.

Image attribution: PBCore is licensed under a CC-BY unported licence.

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What’s the result?

Metadata schemas and profiles proliferate. It’s difficult to exchange data between different

repositories using different schema and

vocabularies. Educational resources get stuck in silos where

users can not find them.

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And another thing…

Social media applications allow users to share and

comment on resources. Formal metadata schema are not good at capturing user

interactions. So usage data and context of use gets lost.

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Capturing contextual data is key for OER

According to the UNESCO Guidelines for Open

Educational Resources (OERs) in Higher Education:

“The transformative educational

potential of OER depends on:

Improving the quality of learning

materials through peer review

processes;

Reaping the benefits of

contextualisation, personalisation and

localisation;”http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002136/213605e.pdf

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The Learning Registry

A distributed infrastructure for sharing descriptive and

usage data about learning resources.

Initiated in 2010.

An open source community project.

Funded by the US DoE and DoD.

Partners include Lockheed Martin, NSDL, ADL, SRI

International, NSF, Library of Congress, OER Commons,

Jisc.

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An open approach

An open project – anyone can participate.

Open source – Apache 2.0.

Open documents and standards – Creative Commons.

Open data – all data about resources is open.

But…

The resources themselves may be proprietary or

commercial.

Not just about OER.

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What the Learning Registry isn’t…

A search engineA portalA repositoryA destination

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What the Learning Registry is…

Plumbing!

The LR is technical infrastructure.

It allows the data to flow.

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What the Learning Registry is…

A large scale network of nodes, no single point of

control. Each node based on schema-free database CouchDB. Unlike relational databases, data does not need to

conform to pre-set schema. Documents are stored as a collection of key-value pairs

in JSON format. APIs allow nodes to exchange data with other nodes and

external services.

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Learning Registry APIs

Publish (push from user) Publish SWORD (1.3, 2.0) 3rd party OAI-PMH Utility (We don’t harvest)

Access (pull to get data) Obtain (by ID, record, by URL) Harvest (JSON or OAI-PMH) Slice (subset by identity, schema, keyword)

Distribute (node-to-node, with regex “filtering”) Admin (status, discovery, …)No Search/Query API! (e.g., use Elastic Search)

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Learning Registry node structure

© Copyright 2011 US Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative: CC-BY-3.0

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Metadata and Paradata

The Learning Registry is metadata agnostic.Metadata is stored in a schema-free database.Also designed to store paradata - dynamic

usage data. Paradata is generated as resources are used,

reused, adapted, contextualized, favourited, tweeted, and shared.

Paradata complements metadata by providing an additional layer of contextual information.

Metadata describes what a resource is, paradata records how it is being used.

 

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To go back to the plumbing...

In order for plumbing to be useful, you need to build something on top of it….

….otherwise you end up with a big mess.

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To build useful services on top of the plumbing you need….

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Plumbers neededThe Learning Registry needs developers to build

useful services and applications on top of the

network of nodes. The data processing overhead, instead of being

handled by the database, is pushed up to the

application layer. Develops are needed to create services to

process the data to make it useful to educators.But…this approach is relatively new to the

education domain.

 

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Not just any old plumbers, creative plumbers!

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CETIS, Jisc and Mimas involvement CETIS maintained a watching brief on LR since its

inception in 2010. Jisc / CETIS / LR information sharing meeting in UK,

October 2010. CETIS guest blog post by LR Senior Technical Advisor

Dan Rehak in March 2011. DevCSI / CETIS OER Hackday, March 2011. Developer Pat Lockley attended LR Plugfest in

Washington DC, June 2011. JISC Learning Registry Node (JLeRN) Experiment

funded, Nov 2011. CETIS conference session “The Learning Registry –

capturing conversations about learning resources”, Feb 2012.

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Why all the interest? The Learning Registry adopted an innovative approach

to an old problem. Already tried mandating formal metadata schema and

controlled vocabularies with questionable success.

(UKLOMCore anyone?) Not proposing institutions adopted the LR as the

approach to manage their learning resources. It’s an interesting step in a new direction. Fitted with CETIS and Jisc’s remit to explore innovative

learning technology developments.

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The JLeRN Experiment Funded by Jisc at Mimas from Dec 2011 – Oct 2012. JLeRN Team: Sarah Currier (Manager), Nick Syrotiuk

and Bharti Gupta (Developers). Aimed to build an experimental node. Explore feasibility of contributing and analysing data. Support development of use cases and applications

relevant with UK F/HE. CETIS helped support UK special interest community. Developers liaised directly with LR developers.

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JLeRN Achievements and Outputs Successfully built 3 nodes. Worked closely with OER Rapid Innovation projects. Ingested test data from Jorum via OAI-PMH feed. Built JLeRN Node explorer. Hosted and participated in a number of community and

developer events. Commissioned use cases, case study and “Wider

Potential” report from Sero Consulting. Actively engaged with community. Maintained JLeRN blog: jlernexperiment.wordpress.com

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JLeRN Community Engagement - SPAWSSharing Paradata Across Widget Stores

(SPAWS)OER Rapid Innovation ProgrammeUniversity of Boltonhttp://scottbw.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/

spaws-impact/Used the Learning Registry to share usage

data, e.g. reviews, ratings, and download

statistics, between web app stores of widgets

and gadgets for educators.

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JLeRN Community Engagement - RIDLR Rapid Innovation Dynamic Learning Maps - Learning

Registry (RIDLR): OER Rapid Innovation Programme. University of Newcastle. http://www.medev.ac.uk/blog/oer-rapid-innovation-ridlr

/ Tested the release of contextually rich paradata via

the JLeRN node to the Learning Registry and harvest

back paradata to provide resource discovery linked to

specific topics displayed within the context of the

curriculum and personal learning maps.

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JLeRN Community Engagement - ENGrichENGrich

Digitisation and Content Programme.University of Liverpool.http://engrich.liv.ac.uk/ Developed a customised search engine for

visual media relevant to engineering

education. Information about student ratings

and recommendations are stored in their own

LR node and used to enhance customised

Google searches.

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JLeRN Community Engagement - PgogyPgogy developer Pat Lockley:

http://www.pgogy.com/Developed tools for interacting with Learning

Registry nodes including:Ramanathan - submits information from an

RSS feed to LR.Pliny - submits Google Analytics data to

the LR.

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Issues – sharing data at network scaleJLeRN did not attempt to share data between

nodes. APIs for distributing data between nodes are less

well tested than the APIs for interfacing with

services external to the LR.Projects, e.g. SPAWS, ENGrich, proved stand

alone nodes do have benefits. But LR functionality has not been tested at

network scale.

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Issues – technology lock inNot clear if there are real benefits to using LR as

opposed to vanilla schema-free databases such

as Mongo and CouchDB.LR provides APIs, documentation and

community support. May lock developers in to using CouchDB rather

than other solutions.

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Issues – semantic technologies Why not use semantic technologies e.g. RDF

triple stores? Triple stores have been innovative technology of

choice for sharing data on a web-wide scale for a decade or more.

But uptake in the education domain has been slow.

Steep learning curve associated with such technologies.

Learning Registry’s open approach to dealing with messy educational data seemed to fit the ethos of the teaching and learning sector better.

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Conclusions

JLeRN Experiment was a technical

success. Innovative projects and developers have

demonstrated that useful tools and service

can be built on top of LR nodes. Overall impact on UK F/HE sector

negligible. Always intended to be a proof of concept

development, not a supported service.

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Conclusions

LR technical infrastructure is a genuinely

innovative approach to the thorny problem

of managing and sharing learning

resource descriptions and contextual data. Technical approaches, esp. use of

schema free databases, may have some

impact on the education technology

landscape in the longer term.

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Coda - inBloom US K-12 initiative. “Secure data management service that allows states

and districts to bring together and manage student and

school data and connect it to learning tools used in

classrooms.” Funded by Gates Foundation & Carnegie Corporation. inBloom index is a dedicated LR node that will connect

to the LR network. Will be interesting to see if the LR works at network

scale.

 

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Coda - inBloom inBloom data may include children’s name, social

security number, learning disabilities, test scores,

attendance record, hobbies, career goals, attitudes

toward school, homework completion rates. Parents associated with American Civil Liberties Union

and Parent-Teacher Association have raised concerns

that data will be abused. DoEd says schools do not need parental consent to

share student records with any “school official” who has a

“legitimate educational interest”. inBloom technical infrastructure built by Amplify

Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corps.

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Further information - Learning Registry

@learningreg

#learningreg

http://www.learningregistry.org

learning_registry_collaborate@googlegroups.com

learningreg_dev@googlegroups.com

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Further information – JLeRN Experiment

#jlern

JLeRN blog http

://jlernexperiment.wordpress.com/

Wider Potential Report:

http://jlernexperiment.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/121109-jlern-wider-potential-report-dk1.

pdf

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Further information – CETIS

@jisccetis

http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/

Lorna’s CETIS blog http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/

Phil’s CETIS blog http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/philb/

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Further information – Mimas

@MimasNews

http://mimas.ac.uk/

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Licence and attribution

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence.

To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.

By Lorna M. Campbell<lmc@strath.ac.uk>, JISC CETIS <http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk>