1. Supporting teaching in higher education to improve student learning across the Biosciences
OeRBITAL – Launching
and Sustaining OER
Chris Taylor
c.d.taylor@leeds.ac.uk
Follow me @chr1staylor
http://tinyurl.com/bioukoer
UK Centre for Bioscience logo © University of Leeds. All rights reserved.

2. The story so far...
 JISC/HEA OER pilot phase (09/10)
 Pilot project with 10 partner institutions to explore the issues
surrounding open educational resources, production and use/reuse
 Locate
Call out to Bioscience community to put forward
*potential* OER for development
 Collate
Rework into OER and upload to JorumOpen, suitably
described and tagged
 Aggregate
Ensured all resources bioukoer-tagged to ease resurfacing
and assist tacking
General HE – Bioscience JorumOpen (JO) collection easy
Individual PPs resources difficult - custom (Feed43) solution
required

3. OER1
 Tried to automate as much as possible
 Monitoring and aggregation of blog outputs from 10 partners
 YahooPipes
 Potential tracking of re-uploaded resources
 Monitor new uploads for relevant keywords
 Limited – reliant on upload to same repository using same/v.similar
title
 Harvesting of JorumOpen-held bioukoer resources to
reproduce on Bioscience website for added context
 YahooPipes
 Feed43

4. YahooPipes
 Why?
 Wanted straight-forward way to collate project
partners’ blog entries and other resource outputs
 Visual and fairly user-friendly
 Versatile
 Just scratched the surface
 Number of ways of exporting results
 Can produce size-customisable output window to
embed in site/output through web2.0 in addition to
standard further RSS feed output
 Examples of my YahooPipes:
 http://tinyurl.com/bioukoerYahooPipes

5. YahooPipes

6. YahooPipes

7. YahooPipes
 However, restricted by content and quality
of RSS feed input to it
 Unable to draw out our specific project
partner resources from JO due to lack of
keywords field in RSS
 Not practical to repeat keywords in description body
 So, more challenging solution required
 Feed43

8. Feed43 custom RSS
 What?
 Feed43 is a free third-party custom RSS creator
 http://feed43.com/
 Scrapes contents of URLs offered to it and
produces tailored RSS feed based on defined
search parameters
Feed43 logo Copyright © 2006–2009 A.I.Studio. All rights reserved.

9. Feed43 custom RSS
 Why?
 To resurface links to JO records within our own site
 11 pages on our site required content
 Central page and each of 10 project partners
 http://tinyurl.com/bioukoer
 Updates pages automatically when new resources
added
 Sustainable
 Side-effect: caused issue with JO search data

10. Feed43 custom RSS
 How?
 Run specific search query in JorumOpen for individual
partners (Surname AND bioukoer)
 Take resulting URL and input into Feed43
 Set parameters on data to collect and output
 Bake for 40-50 mins until golden
 Manipulate using ASP.NET* and display on website
 More details on blog:
 http://tinyurl.com/bioukoerFeed43
 *If easier you can of course feed resulting RSS into
YahooPipes instead

11. Feed43 custom RSS
From this:

12. Feed43 custom RSS
To this:

13. Risks
 Vulnerable to stability of third-party
applications
 Feed43
 YahooPipes
 Reliant on JorumOpen not changing their
search results URLs

14. OER phase 2: OeRBITAL
 Open educational Resources for Bioscientists
Involved in Teaching And Learning
(Aug10/11)
 Sustaining OER, not creating
 JISC/HEA OER phase 2
 Thematic Collections strand
 To identify existing dispersed OER from multiple
repositories and build subject-specific collections
 Focus on reuse to provide sustainability

15. OeRBITAL
 8-12 Discipline Consultants (DC)
 Discovery agents and curators
 2-3 Learning Technologists
 Assist adaption
 Provide example enhancements
 Combine resources

16. OeRBITAL
 Planned use of MediaWiki as hub
 Established standard
 Familiar and straightforward
 Themed areas/collections curated by
individual DCs
 Consideration of WordPress installation

17. OeRBITAL
 Use experience from OER1 to automate as much as possible
 Locate
 Mine existing repositories
 Use Discipline Consultants' local knowledge and network contacts to
unearth resources, and to identify demand
 Collate
 Feed resource links into wiki structure (or poss WordPress) to build
collections and add educational context.
 Aggregate
 Use Learning Technologists’ expertise to enhance/combine collections
where possible
 Produce feeds from themed collections for further distribution/promotion
opportunities

18. Supporting teaching in higher education to improve student learning across the Biosciences
OeRBITAL – Launching
and sustaining OER
Chris Taylor
c.d.taylor@leeds.ac.uk
@chr1staylor
http://tinyurl.com/bioukoer
UK Centre for Bioscience logo © University of Leeds. All rights reserved.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence except where explicitly exempted.