Do I.T. Academy: Investigating good practices to increase discoverability and guidance for use of OER for a community of practice

Chesterman, MJ (2014) Do I.T. Academy: Investigating good practices to increase discoverability and guidance for use of OER for a community of practice. Masters by Research thesis (MSc), Manchester Metropolitan University.

Preview

Available under License : See the attached licence file. Download (3MB) | Preview

Abstract

This project identifies and implements good practices surrounding discoverability and guidance for use of OER for a specific community of practice. The pilot group chosen is Community Arts North West and their Do I.T. training programme which delivers workshops on digital skills for Manchester-based artists. The project addresses the need of the Do I.T. programme for a tool to house training resources in an online repository. The project also addresses an issue shared by many learning providers. While there are many learning resources available free of cost from disparate sources on the Internet, systematic information surrounding how they can be used in an educational context is often lacking. Specific areas of good practice including the use of metadata to describe educational use, design patterns and suitable web-technologies are identified in a review of literature in the area of OER and a review of three high-profile OER repositories. The innovative technologies of LRMI and schema.org (restricted sets of metadata fields which are marked up using semantic HTML tags) are chosen as the best candidates to maximise discoverability of learning resources by search engines. Based on this review and the priorities of the pilot group, a tool in the form of a web repository is created. This website is now in use by the pilot group here: http://doitacademy.flossmanuals.net.