Lisa Petrides: Making Open Content More Accessible

Lisa Petrides runs ISKME, Institute for the Study of Knowedge Mangement in Education.  OER Commons is probably her most visible project.
What is OER Commons?
An aggregator of open content with over 500 contributing institutions. About half is higher education, the other half is K-12.
What’s the state of search?
The Advanced Search feature shows our metadata fields.  We track author, topic as well as subject, material type, media format, grade levels, and terms of use.
Is your content mostly courses?
There are two buckets: modules and courses.  The majority of out metadata is for modules.
The folks at Connexions, Rice University (a contributing partner), have tagged everything to the module level.
What’s the limit to growth?
Tagging.  There are amazing collections of materials on individual websites but it’s not tagged and often not discoverable.
What’s new?
Next week we will launch framework for teachers to tag content to Core, a folksourcing approach.  Scale requires make easier to tag.
With a grant from Hewlett Foudnation, we’re studying teacher use and reuse.
We’d like to have a social networking recommender—something simple to use likeYelp.
How much capacity do you have to help folks use OER?
ISKME has 16 people, and OER gets about half of our time and energy but that includes our research agenda.  We have a great but small team.
For more:
ISKME presentation at Connexions conference