OpenLearn and

Common Cartridge

Ross Mackenzie

Sarah Wood

The Open University

OpenLearn Project• The Open University Open Content pilot

– Creative Commons license

• Funded by William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

• $9M over two years

• www.open.ac.uk/openlearn

Goals / Targets / Dates• Provide OU learning materials to world-wide audience

• 5400 study hours from all curriculum areas– in a learning environment (based on Moodle)– bite size learning (5-30 hours)

• Development of learning communities and tools

• First phase of project ends mid-2008

Development Approach• Material drawn from OU archive (mostly print & AV)

– Appropriate for small chunks– Rights OK

• Material transformed into XML format allowing re-rendering into multiple formats– Initial work outsourced, then refined by OU specialist

staff

LearningSpace/LabSpace

LearningSpace/LabSpace

Portable Content• Multiple formats

• XML key underlying technology

IMS Global Learning Consortium• Membership organisation aimed at “enhancing learning

worldwide through the use of technology”– c. 100 members from HE, publishers and educational

technology companies

• Technical specifications / standard

• Learning Impact

OU Cartridge Collection• Manual

– Initial 10 hand-crafted from Content Packages– Fairly straight-forward

• Automatic– Part of standard OpenLearn production process– c. 400 Cartridges now available.

Publishing Tool

XSLT – Manifest/HTMLGeneration

Course Content

OU Cartridge Collection• OU cartridges are simple examples

– Content plus forums

• Don’t yet have assessed activities

• How confident are we about our cartridges?– Fairly !

CC Alliance

Evaluating Cartridges• Chicken & Egg

• Content & Platforms

• Which comes first ?

• http://www.imsglobal.org/cc/alliance.html

Issues• Testing & Certification

• Cartridge Creation Tools

• Platforms & Players

Testing• Test Suites

– Full set of cartridges close to completion– Pearson are developing a Gold Standard Cartridge

• Testing Services– Potentially, but could be expensive

• Self Test– First Version (beta) end March

Cartridge Creation Tools• OU Publisher

– Production not in Moodle

• eXe– XML course creation tool

• Grava (Microsoft)

Cartridge Desktop Players• UCompass

– based on Adobe Air technology

• Microsoft– based on Silverlight technology

Cartridge Platform Players• Angel - done

• Ucompass - done

• Sakai – sort of

• Moodle – not yet

OpenLearn Common Cartridge ExportsAngel Learning

Ucompass Enrich

Questions