Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/Global Course Catalog

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Create a Global Course Catalog for OER

  • Contact: Pierre Far (pierre at ocwsearch dot com), Mary Lou Forward (mlforward at ocwconsortium dot org)
  • Team: Larry Cooperman, UC- Irvine, Pierre Far, OCW Search, Mary Lou Forward, OCW Consortium, Meena Hwang, OCW Consortium, Joel Thierstein, Connexions
  • Hosts: OCW Consortium, OCW Search, Connexions
  • Status: confirmed

Summary

Help create a global course catalog to categorize existing and future open educational resources.

What do you want to achieve?

  • Plan the organization, content and format of the catalog
  • Consider examples of categorization protocols, such as course catalogs, library classifications, etc.
  • Create a protocol that can cross languages and educational systems for use worldwide

Who should come? How many? For how long?

  • Educators, learners, anyone.

SPECIAL NOTE: Keep hacking and planning! We have extra space allocated to small organic sessions during and after our main sessions. Other tool experts will be on hand to discuss approachs, support users, and gather feedback and ideas. Feel free to work at your leisure on OER in this sub-space.

What will they do when they get there?

  1. Look at examples of categorization methods from around the world. Evaluate their applicability to OER. What's useful?
  2. Play with existing OER. Try different search engines and search terms. Consider metadata and tagging.
  3. Think about what's intuitive for users/learners and producers/educators of OER. What categories make sense? How should they be developed? What level of specificity?
  4. Share your comments, ideas, insights. Discuss. Play around some more. Add to someone else's ideas.

What will you / they have at the end?

  • A lot of great input into what the catalog will include. Hopefully some volunteers to help with the project and/or review it as its developed.

Additional background and context

Good metadata make materials easier to find. However, there are no metadata standards for OER presently. Further, most producers of OER are educators, who may not be very familiar with, or comfortable creating, appropriate tags for their materials. By creating a categorization protocol, a global course catalog, metadata tags will be automatically defined through association with the category selected. Using the catalog to generate these tags will enable better searching and browsing of materials.

As a second step to this project, we plan to create software with an intuitive user interface that will allow creators of open content to have their materials automatically tagged by selecting the appropriate category from the catalog. This could be a drag and drop interface, or another easy to use system. We welcome ideas for this, too.

Related links

http://www.unesco.org/education/information/nfsunesco/doc/isced_1997.htm