OER Recommender and OER Glue

Joel Duffin & Justin BallTatemae

OutlineBackground and Research Goals System Description Evaluation Issues What's next? 

BackgroundCenter for Open Sustainable Learning (COSL)

Utah State University, David Wiley 

eduCommons - OpenCourseWare CMS

OCW Finder - http://ocwfinder.orgSimple, popular search engine for OpenCourseWare

Folksemantic - MOCSL User centered tools for open education - Ozmozr, Make a Path,

Send2Wiki, Annorate, Scrumdidilyumptious

How do we get people to USE

OER effectively? 

"most of the OER you see at conferences encourages bad

learning design"

http://tinyurl.com/34qsux6

ReferencesShelton, B. E., Duffin, J., Wang, Y., & Ball, J. (2010). Linking OpenCourseWares and open education resources: Creating an effective search and recommendation system. 1st Workshop on Recommender systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (RecSysTEL 2010). Procedia Computer Science 1, 2865-2870. doi:10.1016/j.procs.2010.08.012 Maull, K. Sumner, T., Recker, M., Shelton, B. E., Duffin, J. (2009). Recommender Systems, Contextualization and Personalization in NSDL: Current and Future Research Directions. Panel presentation at the National Digital Libraries Conference, Washington D.C.  Caswell, T., Henson, S., Jensen, M., & Wiley, D. (2008). Open content and open educational resources: Enabling universal education. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 9(1). http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/469/1001 Duffin, J. & Muramatsu, B. (2008). OER Recommender: Linking NSDL Pathways and OpenCourseWare Repositories. 2008 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Pittsburgh, PA. Duffin, J., Muramatsu, B. & Henson Johnson, S. L. (2007). OER Recommender: A recommendation system for open educational resources and the National Science Digital Library. White paper funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Folksemantic.org project.  Henson, S., Ball, J., Wiley, D. and Muramatsu, B. (September 2007). Tag, Annotate, Rate and Share: Activities of Daily Living on the Web. European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 2007, Crete, Greece Henson, S., Muramatsu, B. and Caswell, T. (2007). Web 2.0 for Teaching and Learning…Folksemantic Tool Set. New Media Consortium Summer Conference, Indianapolis, IN. 

Research GoalsIncrease effective use of OERs by cross linking

OpenCourseWares and NSDL OERs

• Widgets and APIs for OER providers• OER recommendation algorithms and architectures

• Recommendation display• Adoption

Related Resources Cross Repository Links

Related Resources Widget

Evaluation

QuestionsHow is OER Recommender being used?

How well is it accomplishing goals? How can it be improved?

MethodsAnalytics

User tests and questionnaires

Strengths

It is being used eduCommons and OpenLearn are primary adopters Recommendations attract interest (11% click through rate)

Areas for improvement: Algorithms (ranking & learning)

Display Ease of adoption

Coverage (more resources)

Conclusions

Issues• Learning from user implicit

and explicit feedback • Presentation bias• Narrowing scope of search

and recs• Dead links• Catalog pages• Duplicate entries• Incremental update • Coverage • Score cutoff level

• Confidence vs reliability • OER rank

(getting beyond text analysis)• Faceted search• Metadata vs content• Personal recommendations• Scaling up processing (hadoop,

mahout, cascading, bixo)• Activity specific recs • More & better widgets

Evaluation CriteriaRelated Novel Diverse Popular

Changed / updated

Task-appropriate Learner

o Do well in classo Explore interests

Teachero Use resourceo Remix (use part of a

resource)

Try It!Add Cross-Site Recommendationsto Your SiteExamplehttp://ocw.usu.edu/English/english-1010 

Instructionshttp://www.folksemantic.com/widgets

Add Your Resources to the Index

Related Work

Globe - http://globe-info.org/

OER Commons - http://oercommons.org/

Ariadne Finder - http://ariadne.cti.espol.edu.ec/

Xpert - http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/

Supports effective teaching and learning by "glueing" together

open content and services  

 Embracing openIntegrates with everyone

Easily extensible

Modifies pages in place, using content where it exists instead of copying into an LMS

 Provides functionality through integrations

 Recommends OERs to authors

 Allows extension via JavaScript

 We are looking for partners - joel.duffin@gmail.com

Help Evaluate OER Recommender!

Online questionnaire (15 min)

Teachers

OER providers

http://oerrecommender.org