Introduction to the OER World Map Project [750] Members : OER15

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Wed, Apr 15 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am

Authors: Jan Neumann, and Rob Farrow

Room: Weston Anthony Hopkins Centre

Theme: Learners and Other Communities

Type: Workshop

Description

Since several years there has been a discussion about “OER mapping” within the open education community. As an early milestone Susan D’Antoni presented her vision of an OER World Map at the 2012 UNESCO OER World Congress in Paris. 2013 The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation decided to fund an OER World Map project existing of two phases.

After three prototypes were developed in phase I by the Institute of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), the Brazilian Mira project and the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz) at the beginning of 2014, Hewlett Foundation announced just recently that a team made out of members of hbz, graphthinking and the Open University UK will be funded to develop the production system in 2015.

By adding a data-centric perspective the hbz proposal extended the original idea and shifted the focus of the project from the front- to the backend of the system. In doing so it unleashed the full potential included in the original idea since it became obvious that the data underlying the world map could be used to build many other services which suit the faster development of the OER community as well as a better dissemination of its contents.

Besides the visualization in form of an geographic map the project aims at developing several other applications such as a search module for OER actors, profile pages for persons, institutions, projects and services, a statistics module as well as a calendar and a timeline. Going even further, an open API will be developed, so that the data can be easily reused by others and become the foundation of a rich and flourishing ecosystem of applications.

A special challenge will be to install sustainable editing processes, which guarantee the actuality of the data at all times as well as its quality. In order to do so the World Map project will use a hybrid process, which allows every member of the OER community to input data while at the same time reuses data collected by projects and institutions like the POERUP project, UNESCO`s WSIS Knowledge Community, the Open Education Consortium and many others (“OER data curation projects”).

To achieve fast growth, an “OER-World-Map-Edit-A-Ton” will be started to engage the OER community in collecting data as complete as possible. In order to do so a network of national champions will be developed which take care of the data collection in their countries.

As an introduction to the workshop the main features of the planned system as well as an initial version of it will be presented. The workshop aims at discussing critical question (What kind of data should be included? Should the scope of the project be limited to OER or should it include other open approaches like OA as well? What applications should be developed? How can the participation by the community be achieved?) as well as at collecting use cases which can be used to develop the system according to the needs of the OER community.

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