Dear colleagues, Initiating the discussion on Phase 2, Topic 2, we would like to provide you with a set of questions that focus on various aspects of the proposed topic. As you will see, some of the questions are more generic, whereas others focus on specific stakeholder groups (i.e. content/course creators, users of the content, etc.). The idea here is to start elaborating on these topics, clarifying and delving into the topic in hand. To facilitate the discussion, we would like to ask you to start replying by indicating the question number addressed (i.e. Q1), so that our colleagues that read you answers can easily identify the question you refer to. It's not obligatory to answer all of these, so feel free to choose the ones you want to answer. It would be nice, to answer with separate "posts" on each question. In this way, we will be able to follow up on your questions more easily. 1. As a portal owner / administrator, how do you ensure that the learning resources accessible from your portal, are high quality? Do you have any mechanisms for reviewing and re-assessing the resources you curate? 2. As a user of such portals, what do you value most when you visit them? For example, simple searching interfaces, accurate results, possibility to interact with the resources (rate, review, tag)? Anything else? 3. As a content creator, do you feel that making resources available on educational portals would interest you? Are you already doing this? If yes, how do you handle intellectual property rights (IPRs)? If not, what are your reasons for not sharing? 4. What are the practical problems that arise during the creation and maintenance of a portal with thousands of resources, from the portal owner side? Which are the most common ones? Are there any that you have yet to address? With kind regards, Lisa McLaughlin, ISKME OER Commons Manager [email protected]

[quote="Lisa-Cespedes"] TOPIC 1 Populating a repository with resources and metadata: The quality versus quantity dilemma [/quote] It really depends on your end goal. At OER Commons we have a fairly large collection, currently around 30,000 items. We have a multi-faceted approach to dealing with this dilemma. One way we ensure quality is by developing and highlighting micro-sites that showcase content we believe is exceptional around a theme (such as our current micro-green initiative which will contain a significant collection of agricultural OER). At our size, however, we think its important to shift to a recommender system model for ensuring quality in our larger collection. Our users can currently rate and review items but we are working on developing models for driving micro-contributions from users who care deeply about particular content areas. Once enough user-contributed content evaluation data is in place, we will shift to a user interface that enables the content with the highest rankings to rise to the top. Ultimately, repositories require significant user-contributions to differentiate them from the wide range of collections out there. Lisa McLaughlin OER Commons Manager USA [email protected]

Q3. How do you measure quality of the metadata within your repository? Do you have any mechanisms (automated or not) in place, to ensure the completeness, correctness, etc. of metadata? At OER Commons, our minimum standard requires that material on our site contains the 12 elements outlined in Q2. We eyeball all data imports from harvesting to determine how comprehensive their metadata is. We also prioritize the import of collections known to be highly reputable. We use a python check script to ensure that automated harvests contain all the required elements but we also do a fair amount of manual curation. When a collection is of high quality or contains OER that is not easy to find elsewhere, we take the time to manually curate the items and add the missing data elements where and when we can find them. Users on our site are able to review items, which provides another quality control mechanism. When an item is poorly reviewed, we go over it to determine whether or not it should remain in the collection. Lisa McLaughlin OER Commons Manager [email protected]

Q2. How many and which metadata elements do you require for a resource to be uploaded in the repository? On OER Commons we currently require the following 12 elements: Title URL Subject Learning Resource Type Media Format Educational Context (Grade Level) Abstract Keywords Institution Conditions of Use URL Conditions of Use Description Conditions of Use Buckets (our own groupings of open license types, exps: Share Only, Remix and Share) Lisa McLaughlin OER Commons Manager USA

Q1. Which metadata standard are you using in your institutional/project repository? For OER Commons (www.oercommons.org) we created our own metadata format and then created cross-walks to export our data in a range of metadata formats: Dublin Core LOM OER Recommender Lisa McLaughlin OER Commons Manager USA