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Presentation given at JISC-CETIS Repositories and the Open Web meeting 19th April 2010.

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Resource discovery survey presentation

I’m speaking at the JISC CETIS Repositories and the Open Web meeting on Monday 19th April, even if it is my birthday. I’m not expecting a card from the audience, but cake would be acceptable.

Speakers have been asked to prepare a position paper. This isn’t quite a position paper, but it is an outline of what I’ll be speaking about. It’s not that I’m lazy, well not much, but I’m not taking any particular position on an issue at this meeting (makes a change some of you might say). Instead I’ll be reporting back on the resource discovery survey run as part of our open education resources project. I thought some of the findings might be useful as an evidence base from which to frame a discussion about repositories and sharing learning resources. The final report isn’t written yet, and I’ve not done a detailed analysis of the responses (it’s a rich data set – 155 responses) but there’s a lot I can say from the summary data so far.

I’ve titled my contribution ‘What do people look for when they search online for learning resources?’. As part of the OER project I ran a survey that asked questions about people’s search strategies, where they they look for learning resources, how they evaluate what they find, what’s useful, and what’s less so. My aim was not to formally evaluate metadata, but instead to get some insight into people’s behaviour while searching for learning resources. It’s just a different side of the same coin as far as I’m concerned.

A couple of focus groups were run to unpick some issues in more detail, one with academic staff and another with students. Perhaps not surprisingly, students used a richer collection of search sites and services than their teachers. My view is they’re more motivated to. They also seemed better skilled at searching, or at least using the advanced search facility, if one was available. Must be all that library skills training they get.

No prizes for guessing that Google is the most used search service by a considerable margin, especially when combined with Google images and scholar search. And yes Wikipedia was very popular, including with staff, although it was only the student group that told us they start with Wikipedia to get an overview, but find what they thought in their opinion were ‘more authoritative’ references to cite in their assignments. Sadly Jorum was one of the least used services. More than one focus group participant asked “what’s Jorum?”.

What do people think about provenance of learning resources, licensing, openness, reviews & ratings, to download or to link in place, and many other important issues? Well that’s what I’ll be talking about in my presentation. But for those not able to come along on Monday, our list of recommendations below more than hint at many of these issues, and if I end up doing PPT slides I’ll upload those next week too.

What are the recommendations we came up with? Well, nothing astoundingly new, but these are evidence-based, which is what we wanted, and still an important set of considerations to reflect on when sharing learning resources. So, in no particular order:

• Make your learning resources easy to find. Clearly written descriptions of resources are always valued, especially if they contain the kinds of keywords you might use yourself if you were looking for similar resources. The more technical metadata fields are seldom used to find resources.
• Clearly license your learning resources. Consider Creative Commons, as users find this clear licensing framework easy to use, and it takes the guesswork – and admin – out of permissions.
• Make sure your metadata is searchable by Google. Federate your metadata to other repositories, or at the very least allow searching by third party search engines. In terms of ease of finding learning resources, many people prefer to use a small number of trusted search engines, most notably of course Google. So if you must create another repository, at least open it up to external searching.
• Make sure your resource is downloadable. This is a common practice, so resources that require server/client interaction might be less favoured than those that are self-contained and downloadable. If you want people to use your resources, then make it easy for them to do so.
• Make sure open really does mean open. The majority of users prefer not to have to register with a site or service to access your learning resource.
• Don’t worry about peer review. User comments, reviews and star ratings are not as important as some might think they are. Think carefully before investing in this functionality if you are creating a new repository. Formal peer review processes can be expensive to implement and our evidence suggests it’s not that valuable.

The full OER project report will be published by the HE Academy/JISC some time over the summer, and a separate paper on the resource discovery survey is in preparation. This work will likely be a proposal I’ll submit for Open Ed in Barcelona too, so hopefully see you there. In the meantime I look forward to sharing more of the data with those attending the Repositories and the Open Web in London next week.

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What do people look for when they search online for learning resources?

If you’re a teacher, or someone who supports the learning of others in any way, there’s a fair chance that you search online for learning resources. Perhaps you look for just the right picture to illustrate your seminar presentation, maybe you search for an e-learning package to help your learners study a topic at their own pace, or perhaps you’d like to use the latest published paper to support a class discussion, well either way these are all examples of learning resources, and there are many more besides.

There are two ways of thinking about learning resources. How you think about them, and how everybody else thinks about them. Although this initially seems a banal statement, the different perspectives are important when it comes to sharing learning resources, especially when other people describe their resources so that you can find them. Considerable amounts of money have been spent on repositories to store content, and schemes for describing content meaningfully, consistently, and perhaps in a standard way, so that your system uses the same approach as mine. This is by and large a good thing, providing it helps you find the learning resources you are looking for.

But has anyone ever asked you how you go about searching online for learning resources? Do they know what attributes of a learning resource are important to you, how you decide what’s useful and what’s not, do they even know where you look for learning resources?

Well gentle reader, don’t say I’ve never asked you, because now there’s a simple survey online that asks how you search online for learning resources. I’ve tried to keep the questions straightforward, and reflect the activities, decisions and behaviours most of us can identify with. The survey is anonymous, so no names, no pack-drill. And Stephen has already completed the survey so you’ll be in good company. Just click the link below and answer a few simple questions. And please feel free to share the link with your colleagues because the more evidence we collect, the better our understanding will be about how all of us search online for learning resources.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D3TPRVK

The survey is part of some funded work on an OER project I’m involved with. You can find out more about the rest of the project here.

See the rest here:
Learning Resource Discovery Survey

• @Shazzal Any chance you could cut my lawn? It's the one job I dislike the most in the garden in reply to Shazzal #
• Making bread. #
• Welcome to Twitter @untouchedurchin in reply to untouchedurchin #
• Home from sunny Spain to a chilly and wet Birmingham. #
• @tonemcd oh dear, what can the matter be … (works best when sung) in reply to tonemcd #
• @msnancygraham I went to Picasso museum in Barcelona but was disappointed as it mostly contained his early work. in reply to msnancygraham #
• Check out http://bit.ly/NtQai from @VirtualPatients and #evip for #amee2009 virtual patients news. #
• High point of #amee2009 so far for me is @hjason opening keynote. We must allow time for consolidation & practice in the curriculum. #
• Great networking so far at #amee2009 met up with many friends and colleagues. Ideas aplenty fro new collaborations. #
• @msnancygraham Ah, you in/have been in Spain? No time to look around Malaga yet, might get chance Wednesday afternoon. Tapas good tho in reply to msnancygraham #
• @iamse Yes, many in the audience felt left out of the opening. Plus having two separate auditoria didn't help. Otherwise good conf so far. in reply to iamse #
• Symposium on research in e-learning – need for more clarification studies to show benefits of educational technology interventions #amee2009 #
• Hillard Jason – brain studies show what Buddhists have always known, the world is mind made and subject to inferrence and illusion #amee2009 #
• @nzary we can compare notes with #amee2009 in reply to nzary #

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My Twitter updates for the week 2009-09-06

• @tonemcd not that enthralled by opening speeches in Spanish? http://twitpic.com/fv95w #
• Opening ceremony of #amee2009. So many people >2,400 we're in an overspill room with video link. http://twitpic.com/fv7en #
• In Malaga. Around 28 degrees, makes a change from chilly England. Workshop after lunch, not a holiday #
• @kiyanwang AMEE http://bit.ly/UbFfC. Always a good conference with lots of networking. in reply to kiyanwang #
• Packing for Spain again, this time for a conference in Malaga for 5 days. Still not feeling 100%. Maybe sun and warmth will help #
• UK high-speed rail plan unveiled. Birmingham to London in 45 mins. Completion date 2030, a mere 21 years away! Can't wait. Are we there yet? #
• @sheilmcn I doubt it'll make the train go any faster in reply to sheilmcn #
• I had some great tapas in Barcelona. Will compare with tapas from Malaga when I get there this weekend #

Excerpt from:
My Twitter updates for the week 2009-08-30