Evaluating OER World Map with its users – your input requested

As part of our commitment to iteratively improving the OER World Map through its development, we are always keen to receive feedback from our users.  To encourage participation from as many stakeholders as possible we have formalised this process in the form of a survey (found at https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/OERWM2017).

The survey asks about:

• Your role in OER and how you use (or would use) OER World Map
• The technologies you use to access content
• Your views on what OER World Map should be
• How you prefer to interact with other users
• Your user experience
• Areas where more support would be beneficial

We have intentionally kept the survey quite short in order to encourage participation – it should take no longer than ten minutes to complete.

Please consider sharing your views with us by completing the survey: good quality feedback really helps us to prioritise useful developments and improve the experience of working with the OER World Map.

 

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Building an Open Operations Room for the OER Community #opened16 #oerworldmap

In case you  couldn’t make it, here are the slides from today’s presentation at the Open Education conference.  All feedback welcome!

Can we map Open Education Week?

During a small research project starting during Open Education Week, we will try to look for ways to map Open Education Week, e.g. to put the activities of Open Education Week on the OER World Map.

Our interest in mapping Open Education Week data is twofold: on the one hand we made progress defining our data model by taking real world examples and trying to model them on the OER World Map. Initially we used OER stories for doing this on a micro level, targeting individual actors and activities. Just recently we produced the OER Atlas, giving us the experience of collecting data of a complete country. Collecting Open Education Week data will provide us with another interesting example of collecting real world data on a macro level.

The OER World Map Openness Indicator – Background & Introduction

Since most of our team members are somehow connected to the library world, one of the first things we wanted to do, when we started phase II of the project, was to define a clear collection policy for the OER World Map, which should define which data to collect and which not. A clear scope, so we thought, would be especially important for a project like the World Map, since trying to collect too much often ends in collecting nothing right.

We consider ourself to be dedicated to Openness, which means that we support open licenses, develop open source software and even do most parts of our project communication openly on GitHub. Therefore our initial approach to define a collection policy was to restrict the OER World Map to entries, which are related to ‘real OER’, which according to my understanding meant in Creative Commons terminology CC BY, CC BY-SA and also CC BY-NC licenses and equivalents (though another strong opinion in our team argued that NC was no ‘real OER’ according to the Open Definition).

Announcing v0.2 of OER World Map

Following on from Felix’s recent post about the technical development that has gone into producing v0.2 of OER World Map, I’m writing to announce the official launch of the latest iteration. By the time you read this a whole host of new functionality will have been added to the site.

OER World Map at #oer15

Helo ffrindiau OER, a chyfarchion o Gaerdydd yng Nghymru (DU)! Here are the slides from today’s presentation by myself and Philipp at the OER15 conference in Cardiff, in Wales (UK). They provide a snapshot of the current progress of the project and we also managed to collect our first examples of user stories. You can access the list of stories (and add your own) at http://tinyurl.com/oermap.

Call for OER Stories

Background

As reported earlier Rob and Felix hosted a session about the OER World Map project at an unconference which was part of the Hewlett Grantees Meeting in Sausalito last month. One of the most exiting new ideas which where discussed in this session was the proposal by Mike Smith to collect “OER stories”. We liked the idea so much, that we deceided to implement it instantly. The idea is simple: In order to start building the OER World Map community soon we should start with a rather simple format, which can be contributed to easily and which is fun to read and to write. Stories seem to make an ideal starting point here, since the term is quite open and gives much room for interpretation, so that many people will be able to contribute. The best thing is that it fits into our strategy quite well, since we planned to approach our goals in two ways from the beginning on: On the one hand we aim at collaborating with OER data curation projects and services in order to automatically input their data into the OER World Map. On the other hand we aspire to develop an infrastructure which can be used by every participant of the OER community directly. This call for OER stories marks the starting point for the latter part of our strategy.