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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.

Notes of the "small technical meeting"

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):