RedFeather: Light and Fluffy OER

We’ve been building teaching and learning repositories at Southampton for a number of years now, ever since we were brought into a couple of projects dealing with Learning Objects and decided that there really must be a better way.

I’ve written before about the EdShare software we created and how it was more like a social sharing site than a learning repository, and there are now a number of installations out there (including Southampton EdShare, HumBox, SWAPBox and LanguageBox).

But we still get a few occasions when someone needs a learning repository but EdShare doesn’t fit. That’s because EdShare is a fairly substantial server-side deployment. That’s fine if you are a University or College – because you can throw some IT resource at it – but it’s too complex to get up and running if you are a small organisation, charity or an individual.

RedFeather, our latest project funded by JISC, aims to solve this problem:

RedFeather (Resource Exhibition and Discovery) is a proposed lightweight repository server-side script that fosters best practice for OER, it can be dropped into any website with PHP, and which enables appropriate metadata to be assigned to resources, creates views in multiple formats (including HTML with in-browser previews, RSS and JSON), and provides instant tools to submit to Xpert and Jorum, or migrate to full repository platforms via SWORD. RedFeather will require no significant technical expertise and no database, but will provide a simple and effective repository solution for smaller projects, individuals, or those seeking to demonstrate OER in order to justify a more significant investment in an organisational repository.

It is easy to put files online for other people to download, the problem is that this approach does not reflect OER best practice, which is to include a decent set of meta-data (including licensing info) and to be visible to indexers like Jorum and XPert. In addition the online experience is very poor. Our aim with RedFeather is to develop a simple server-side script that dots the i’s and crosses the t’s for you in terms of OER, and also creates a rich web-browser experience.

Mockup of how RedFeather will appear

RedFeather will be a single PHP script that can be dropped into an FTP directory on a web server. It will then allow you to provide a basic metadata set for every file in the directory and then creates a public facing page and browse view for each item in HTML (shown above) as well as other core standards like RDF, RSS and JSON.

The RedFeather project starts this month. We’re working with Graeme Earl at the Archaeological Computing Research Group (ACRG) in Southampton to make sure that RedFeather works in practice, and to get some outside guidance on its usability and functionality.  Our aim is to get some initial scripts working within a month, and the full software released by end of July.

Our hope is that RedFeather will lower the barriers for putting up a repository, and make it possible for anyone to get started with OER.

You can stay up to date with the latest info on the project by following the project blog.