WordPress for hosting and describing learning resources

Reflections from UKOER Delores and other projects.

Phil Barker

http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~phil

Background: Delores

Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design.

Static and dynamic collections of university-level OERs and other openly available resources relevant to Engineering Design.

ICBL, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University

Innovative Design & Manufacturing Research Centre, University of Bath

HE Academy / JISC UKOER phase 2 project

Delores systems

Hosting & description reqs for static collection

• Hold copy of resource?

• Metadata: title, description, authors, origin, date, subject classification, licence, resource type

• Embed preview

• Allow comments?

• Good web presence & participation

• RSS feeds

• Embedded metadata

• Flexibility

• Easy to use & maintain, familiar

• Exportable metadata??

Idea: use WordPress

• One blog post per resource (if required, can attach resources that are single files)– Gives basic description & web

presence

– WP handles author, date, title. + tags and topics for classification

– Extensions for metadata & additional functionality

Idea: use WordPress

• We’re not the only/first people to have an idea along these lines...

Similar ideas

• Oxford’s Triton Project (also a UKOER phase 2 collection project)

• Politics Inspires blog– Regular short scholarly posts and commentaries released as OER

– Learning pathways drawing together sets of quality controlled OER material

– Thematic collections dynamically generated channels to learning

• http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/triton/about/

• http://politicsinspires.org/

http://politicsinspires.org/

Similar ideas

• Edinburgh University’s OpenMed

.... more later

Similar ideas

• CETIS

• Exploring the idea for disseminating our own publications

• Not available yet

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/scotland/

Similar ideas

• Scriblio (formerly WPopac)

• Wordpress theme• open source CMS and OPAC with faceted

searching and browsing features based on WordPress.

• project of Plymouth State University

• http://about.scriblio.net/

Hosting & description reqs for static collection

• Hold copy of resource?

• Metadata: title, description, authors, origin, date, subject classification, licence, resource type

• Embed preview

• Allow comments?

• Good web presence & participation

• RSS feeds

• Embedded metadata

• Flexibility

• Easy to use & maintain, familiar

• Exportable metadata??

Hosting & description capability of WordPress

• Hold copy of resource

• Metadata: title, description, authors, origin, date, subject classification, licence, resource type

• Embed preview

• Allow comments?

• Good web presence & participation

• RSS feeds

• Embedded metadata

• Flexibility

• Easy to use & maintain, familiar

• Exportable metadata??

Customisation

• In our case these are not properties of the WP post:– Author, origin, date, licence, resource type

• Use WP “custom fields”

• Adapt theme so that these are displayed

• Plugin/theme? So that they are in RSS feed (yet to do)

Delores Selections

• http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/delores/selections/

Delores project

• http://deloresoer.wordpress.com/header image cropped from Ford 6.8 sohc 3v triton v10 engine cutaway by Shannon Ramos. Licence: cc:by-nc