Services/Tools Across Multiple Sites

<- Back to OER Interoperability Scenarios

Services/Tools Across Multiple Sites
As the OER movement has grown, especially OCWs, we have seen communities of use, or rather a number of individuals that would participate in a community of use if one existed. User needs, coupled with the interconnectedness of the OER movement and relationships between different OER providers provides an opportunity. A number of organizations are interested in overlaying “value-added” services and tools over the tops of their sites. These organizations are not necessarily interested in developing the tools themselves, but are interested in providing these tools to their users. In addition, metadata and the infrastructure that supports it can be reused and disseminated across sites and used in new applications that facilitate the communities of use.

Examples:
 * MIT-led initial design of myOCW to enable community-based support and to create a social network among OCW users (myOCW Mockup)
 * COSL development of MOCSL/Folksemantic tools funded by the Mellon Foundation and U.S. National Science Foundation (MOCSL Tools, Folksemantic Tools, OER Recommender)
 * COSL/Teachers Without Borders toolset(s), incorporating the above, working on connecting content and social networking.
 * Essay writing help Resource for students and teachers.
 * Various aggregation tools, such as The Instructional Architect, Sophie, Content Clips, etc.
 * OER Commons metadata and search infrastructure reuse, including brokering/federation, syndication or widgetization with partners and developers, including European Schoolnet LRE, Facebook, ccLearn.
 * Open Learning Search on Facebook
 * 3rd party services/tools bring annotating and organizing content, creating groups, and other social bookmarking or content mapping features across sites to new useful levels, i.e., Diigo, Zotero, H20, Compendium.

Challenges:
 * Design and implementation of common tools
 * Ease of use
 * Cultural accessibility
 * Marketing and broad awareness across sectors, targeting educational content providers
 * Single sign-on
 * <aking the tools and services close enough to the content to be relevant and useful - too many clicks to get to them (or back again) and they won't be used.

Enablers:
 * Access to metadata, content and user login/registration for third-parties (e.g., to COSL for MIT OCW)
 * Community sign on (e.g. Shibboleth or OpenID
 * Ability to insert third-party code/services/tools in an OER site