Description
There are many ways to present your Open Educational Resource media to prospective students and colleagues. Whether it be documents, audio or video these resources are no good unless they are presented as the user wants to see them. They should be open in access as well as rights. With so many options for presentation the technologies you choose to show your resources to users is of paramount importance.
For development of the CADARN Learning Portal we implemented a system of managing and displaying OERs within our website. The aim is to provide producers the platform to give users media in any format that is appropriate, so as not to restrain the production choices. The resources are collated under study scheme and institution groupings potential students respond to. The building blocks of the website includes a search engine of these resources and study schemes giving filtering and categorisation options both from a taxonomy of subject and user categorisation and the raw textual information provided to describe the content.
Within our implementation we display the following formats:
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Microsoft Office documents
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PDF files
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Video services like YouTube, Vimeo and oEmbed providers
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Audio services like SoundCloud and oEmbed providers
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Website links
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Individual audio and video files
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Other file types such as Adobe SWF applications and compressed file collections.
When providing resources we identified a need to put them next to the study schemes for which they are intended in order to inform and inspire potential students of all backgrounds. The addition of having them available immediately next to the information a potential student was searching for will hopefully provide additional impetus and inspiration to these users.