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5th meeting
5th meeting
5th VC Minutes (21 February, 2013)

Date and Time:

Thursday, 21 February 2013 at 16.00 CET

List of participants:

Kostas, Zenon (GRNET), Vicente (UVigo), Antonio (ISEP), Eli (IUCC), Jose-Maria (RedIRIS), Peter (TERENA), and a guest speaker Sorel Reisman (California State University, MERLOT)

Notes:

  • Peter (TERENA) gave a brief update on the actual status of the TERENA TF-Media OER pilot concerning the 8 open questions listed and discussed at the previous (4th technical) meeting (see above). Peter asked for a round of updates:
    • Vicente (UVigo) reported that  he is working together with Giannis (GRNET) to implement the 1st "proof of concept" TERENA OER system by using software components of the two corresponding projects: Campus do Mar and ARIADNE. The pilot system will use the ARIADNE aggregation engine and metadata store as well as the PuMuKit web portal front-end. The simple metadata schema will be based on both IEEE LOM (maintained by IEEE institute) and Dublin Core (maintained by Dublin Core Metadata Initiative).
    • Eli (IUCC) reported that he is willing to offer a local installation of the MAOR system to be considered as the 2nd "proof of concept" TERENA OER system for comparison. Eli introduced Prof. Sorel Reisman (California State University) who will update the meeting participants about MELOR initiative in the US.
    • Jose-Maria (RedIRIS) commented that he is happy to participate with the ARCA repository however, ARCA speaks RSS only. It was said that the TERENA OER system's aggregation engine should be flexible enough to speak both RSS and OAI-PMH to the local content repositories.
    • Antonio (ISEP) summarized the sub-task of the pilot group as follows: 1) architecture design, 2) pilot implementation, 3) partnership. It was agreed that the pilot implementation phase needs a common understanding on the service architecture design first. The clarification of the architecture design is the highest priority, before we start selecting software tools for implementation!
  • Prof. Sorel Reisman (California State University) talked about the architecture of the MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) system initiated by California State University in the US. It's been developing and running for 15 year now. The service community includes both academic and industry partners. MERLOT has a three levels deep layered architecture. The web portal interface is changing as we speak, trying to be much simpler (user-friendly). The metadata aggregation is using a proprietary subset of various standards. It stores and searches metadata in several languages and can turn the search results into an RSS feed. There is a federated search in about 20 libraries connected. Several web services are available (e.g., simple search, key search, etc.), some of them are for free of charge to the academic community. MERLOT is primarily a metadata repository (participants can contribute by exposing their metadata - batch input process) but there is a brand new "content builder" function of MERLOT where content can be managed.
  • Peter (TERENA) commented that the TERENA OER architecture should have as modular/layered design as the MERLOT architecture has. There should not be a competition between the UVigo+GRNET vs. IUCC implementations but a potential collaboration to a common service architecture for TERENA OER. To be able to define the details/potentials of such a technical collaboration, better understanding on the actual components and functions of both the ARIADNE and MAOR systems is needed!

Agreements:

  1. TERENA OER must be a stand-alone OER system that does not use ARIADNE or MAOR services but builds on the (open-source) software components developed and made available by ARIADNE and MAOR projects.
  2. The architecture of the TERENA OER system must be modular/layered (including the aggregation engine, metadata store, and web services) preferably combining the best of the existing tools such as ARIADNE, MAOR, PuMuKit, and others.
  3. In order to start implementing the TERENA OER pilot, a better/deeper understanding on the actual software tools and provided functions is needed. Therefore, Peter (TERENA) calls for a small technical meeting between Eli (IUCC), Giannis (GRNET), and Vicente (UVigo) as soon as possible. The pilot group will be informed about the outcome of the technical meeting.

Anchor
6th meeting
6th meeting
6th VC Minutes (1 March, 2013)

Date: 1 March 2013 at 13.00 CET

Invited participants: Giannis (GRNET), Vicente (UVigo), Eli (IUCC), Peter (TERENA)

We've all started to converge to a common concept that we have to eventually implement as a TERENA OER.

An important intermediate milestone would be the TERENA Networking Conference (3-6 June), where three potential things will happen:

    • Vicente will present the MOOC concept to the TERENA Technical Advisory Council (TAC) also mentioning the TERENA OER as one of the key building blocks.
    • There will be a session dedicated to "Teaching and learning online with multimedia". Take a look at the talks accepted at https://tnc2013.terena.org/core/session/3
    • We'll have chance to demonstrate the TERENA OER proof-of-concept portal over the coffee and lunch breaks.

Hopefully, these things together will set the scene and prepare the ground for an official TERENA OER pilot project approved by the TEC and funded by TERENA. This will only happen after the TERENA Networking Conference. So, our first priority would be to work towards the proof-of-concept TERENA OER to be demonstrated at TNC2013. I have identified the following actions today:

1) Peter (TERENA) to come up with the basic functional requirements for the OER web portal that might have implications on the entire aggregation architecture. To be sent to Giannis.

2) Peter (TERENA) to come up with some design principles (i.e. look and feel) for the actual web interface and/or point to an re-usable example. To be sent to Vicente.

3) Giannis (GRNET) to propose a metadata schema (potentially LOM) to be used by the proof-of-concept aggregation engine. In principle, we have to use the metadata that is available but we have to put efforts in finding the repositories that can expose 'good quality' metadata to us.

4) Giannis (GRNET) to distribute the analysis of the metadata survey. Based on that, we have to select the actual providers for the proof-of-concept (the candidates are MAOR, SURF, PSNC, UVigo, ARCA).

    • TERENA harvesting report

    • Following the analysis of the survey we are now working on the analysis of the existing metadata provided by the candidate providers. This is connected with the paper that we are preparing for the LACRO workshop and will allow to define an element set for the LOM based metadata schema for TERENA OER. This will be ready by 1st of April. Kostas will then transform all the harvested metadata to this LOM based metadata schema that will be used by the first version of the TERENA OER portal for searching and browsing services.

5) Giannis (GRENT) to distribute the ARIADNE RESTfull API description to the group.

6) Vicente (UVigo) and Eli (IUCC) to clarify the solution how the PuMuKIT and/or the MAOR web portals can communicate with the ARIADNE RESTful API.

    • We have done a proof of concept working with the ARIANE API from PuMuKIT and it runs very well. We are just waiting for the final API definition. It can be also great to have a "dummy" aggregator, with the same configuration of the final one, to test with. Maybe Giannis can help us on this.
    • DRAFT service architecture (by Vicente):

Anchor
7th meeting
7th meeting
7th VC Minutes (27 March, 2013)

Invited participants: Giannis, Kostas (GRNET), Vicente (UVigo), Eli (IUCC), Peter (TERENA)

Some notes and actions:

1) Eli, to come up with an Excel sheet proposing mandatory, recommended and optional metadata fields for the OER portal pilot. After several iteration rounds among us, we have to agree on a basic metadata field set that we can recommend.

2) Giannis and Kostas, to distribute the preliminary analysis of the actually harvested metadata fields from 9+ different repositories. The result of the analysis will then be checked against our recommendation in order to identify the "friendly repositories" with good enough metadata to work with.

3) Vicente, to clarify the web portal functional design based on the recommended metadata fields (1) and taking into account the result of the metadata analysis (2). Also, to send the first TERENA-branded design draft of the portal to Peter.

4) Vicente, Giannis and Kostas, to set up a virtual meeting about the technical details of the ARIADNE and PuMuKit interaction.

5) Eli, to send the target URL of the MAOR metadata exposure mechanism (the web service) to Giannis in order to harvest high quality metadata from the MAOR repository.

Further agreements:

  • TERENA OER should focus on audiovisual content in the first place (having something catchy to show off). Later on, other type of materials such as data sets, papers, etc. can also be collected.
  • We should focus on (work with) only 2-3 "friendly repositories" in the first place.
  • We have to have information on the actual categories of the content in order to represent them into the PuMuKit-based web portal. We have to understand how different taxonomies applied by different repositories can match for instance with the UNESCO taxonomy of categories.
  • Translating key words to categories or mapping different taxonomies are not trivial issues therefore out of the scope of the pilot (for now). We have to use that categories that we are getting from "friendly repositories".
  • Eventually, the TERENA OER pilot can result in best practices and implementation options for those repositories that has no adequate quality metadata.

8th VC Minutes (14 May, 2013)

Participants: Giannis, Eli, Vicente, Kostas, Ruben, Peter

Referring to our discussion today, I would kindly suggest to forget about the overall system/service design and ideal architecture for a moment and let's just focus on a potential tangible demonstration that we can give at TNC2013.

The aim of the demo would be to show the potentials and benefits of a pan-European OER metadata aggregation portal via catchy multimedia contents openly available for teachers and students.

  • We want potential end-users to say: Ah, I can easily find/re-use open educational multimedia resources linked to each other in a thematic structure throughout several national repositories. I can easily improve my teaching/learning experience with these.
  • We also want potential content owners to say: Ah, this initiative is great, my content repository is small but joining this federation we can make our content visible as well as we can access others' relevant content easily. How can I join?

To achieve this objective we need:

1) a web portal prototype (It's already done by UVigo)

2) a metadata aggregation engine working (to show the harvesting via standard protocols)

3) at least three different national/institutional repositories with metadata fields matching to the portal needs.

The harvesting engine part is not that critical as it has no impact on the user experience during the demo. All metadat snapshots can be pre-loaded into a local database, doesn't matter. We can explain how the API-based harvesting should work.

The main question is which repositories contain the metadat fields required by the portal? The web portal needs at least:

  • Title to show
  • Keywords to search
  • Valid URL to navigate to
  • Thumbnails' URL to show (optional)

ACTIONS:

1) Eli to provide a metadata snapshot of the MAOR repository off-line (XML). This can be pre-loaded into the local portal database for the demo.

2) Vicente to make sure that the UVigo repository makes the thumbnails available for the portal.

3) Peter to figure out if and how SWITCHcollection repository makes the valid URLs available.

4) Kostas to double-check the latest metadata harvesting results against the portal's needs (4 metadata fields described above) and let us know.

Let's see if we can progress by Tuesday next week and have a VC again. Otherwise we have to postpone the demo, I'm afraid.

Latest RESULTS:


1)
Eli has provided the list of mandatory metadata fields: isracore_en_for_terena.xlsx
He also gave a presentattion at EUNIS2013 conference about the OER pilot. The abstract of Eli's talk is available at EUNIS-speaker.docx

2)
Vicente has provided a proof-of-concept portal front-end using PuMuKit:

3)  Kostas provided the followings:

4) Michael Stücheli (SWITCH) provided the architectural design of the Swiss national repository portal. SWITCH is happy to share knowledge with the TERENA OER pilot participants.