Lisa J. Rogers presents methods for discovering open educational resources (OER) through RSS feeds and APIs. She collated OERs into a central database and uploaded them using RSS and APIs to sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Scribd. For another project, individual partners uploaded resources to sites and tagged them for aggregation. Rogers demonstrates using Google Custom Search, Yahoo Pipes, and APIs to query and aggregate OERs across sites. While useful for smaller collections, these approaches have scalability limits and rely on consistent tagging.

1. Discovering OER
through RSS and APIs
Lisa J. Rogers, Research Associate
Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University

2. About Me
• Two UKOER phase i projects
– Core-Materials
– Open Engineering Resources Pilot
• Additional OER Technical work with
CETIS.
– RSS Feed Deposit for OER
– Tracking OERs
– Aggregation of OERS

3. Core-Materials
• Collated resources and existing
descriptions into central database and
made searchable.
• Batch uploaded resources and
descriptions to web 2.0 file sharing sites
using their APIs.
• Bulk upload resource descriptions and
links to Jorum Open using RSS.
• http://core.materials.ac.uk/search/

4. Core-Materials Usage Stats
Number of Total number of views Number of
Resources subscribers /
Uploaded followers
YouTube 128 videos 17,417 20 subscribers
Flickr 860 images 25,940 7 contacts
Scribd 157 40,706 32 subscribers
documents (2,261 downloads)
SlideShare 157 35,240 3 followers
documents
Viewing Statistics for CORE-Materials resources (Sept 2009 – March 2010)

5. Open Engineering Resources
• Dissemination to web 2.0 sites and Jorum
Open by individual partners.
• No central database.
• Cross search web 2.0 sites using APIs to
aggregate resources.
• Resources carefully tagged to allow this
aggregation.

6. Aggregation of OERs
• Provide and document demonstrators
• Google Custom Search
• Yahoo Pipes!
• Query through APIs

7. Google Custom Search

8. Google Custom Search

9. Yahoo Pipes!

10. APIs

11. RSS

12. UKOER Search Demo

13. Lessons Learnt
• Many APIs have official and unofficial
examples of code to help you get started
• In my experience technical support has
been helpful (if you are persistent)
– Reported bugs in Scribd API and in
SlideShare API which have been fixed
– Suggested new feature for SlideShare API
which has been implemented

14. More Lessons
• These approaches may not be scalable
– Limit on number of results returned
– How are results combined?
– Works for a finite number of sources
– Current approach relies on tagging (how to extend
beyond UKOER)
• Viable solution for building smaller collections
– Open Engineering Resources Search
– Collections of OER (UKOER Phase 2?)

15. Demo
• Open Engineering Resources Search
• http://www.engsc.ac.uk/oer
• Returns results tagged ukoer, engscoer
plus query.
• Can filter by partner (each partner
assigned unique tag (i.e.
LoughboroughUniOER)
• Rob Pearce continuing to develop this
service

16. Open Engineering Resources

17. L.J.Rogers@hw.ac.uk
@lisajrogers