 Mae'r unig yn gweld iawn i ddechrau i'r gwahau, ond felly mae'r astag yng Ngheilwyr wedi ddod i'r unig, ac mae'n ddigonwyr iawn i'r unig. Mae'r unig yn cynnwys iawn i'r unig o'r Llywodraeth Miol, i'r llwyddiant mewn i'r unig sydd wedi'u gymhagiaeth ar y Cynllun. Mae'r unig yn cynnwys iawn i'r unig o'r unig sydd wedi'u ein gweithio ar y Cynllunu, was created at Southampton, but more specifically about some of the recent work we've been doing around the creation of an aggregation service layer to aid the discoverability of open educational resources. So, if you haven't heard of Ed Share before, it's a digital content platform that's built on the open source software E-Prints, which is also created at Southampton, and it's been optimised for sharing, teaching and learning materials. And many of you may have heard of E-Prints already. There's a lot of institutions, particularly across the UK, but also across the world that are using it to support open access. But Ed Share's been heavily influenced by the design and ethos of the Web 2.0 media sharing sites, and it's part of a suite of products that we have available through our enterprise team at Southampton to support various forms of open. So, it was originally created as part of a research project at Southampton known as the Ed Space Project, and this was in support of our institutional e-learning strategy at the time. And the intention was to provide a single shared safe storage location for all sorts of educational resources. And this was after finding people were putting educational materials all over the place. So, they were closed in the VLE, they were on personal web pages, on networks, on people's USB sticks, and the needs to gather this in a centralized location so it could easily be discovered across the university. But the project was also about a degree of staff change and culture change and facilitating more sharing and collaboration across the university. Now, I should say this wasn't about creating an OER service for Southampton at the time, but given the timescales that we're talking about here, there was growing interest around open education and OERs specifically, and it certainly was the long-term hopes for that project that this, an aspirational, that this would become a project that wouldn't just release materials from the closed spaces such as the VLE, but they could transition to being available across the university and then openly to the world. So, the output of that project was the University of Southampton Ed Share instance, which I'll shorten to Ed Share Sutton, which was launched in 2008. And following this, we saw an emergence of a number of Ed Share platforms that were created to share OERs specifically, and many of those came about as part of the GISC UK OER program that ran from 2009 to 2012, and that includes spaces such as Humbox, which was focused on humanities resources, Swapbox, which was social work and policy, and Language Box and Loro, and a couple of others as well. Now, with it being built on open source software, it's extremely extendable and flexible and adaptable, and that's what we do at Southampton. So, we started to repurpose it for other uses as well. So, we also created a version to sit behind our iTunes U store. So, this was accepting submissions from across the university that were reviewed by our communications department. The content was being transcoded into the required formats and then fed through to the iTunes U front end. Our School of Medicine also created their own instance, and theirs was far more about secure access. So, they needed to share content with their students, but it needed to be controlled and only available to a whitelisted set of individuals due to the sensitive content. And then, we started to see a shift to the bigger scale institutional spaces coming on board. So, one at Edge Hill, one at Glasgow Caledonian, and more recently at UCL and the University of Glasgow. But, there were two key points in this timeline that were really influential that I wanted to highlight. So, as with many research projects and particularly ones that create software, if there's not the funds or people involved to sustain them in the long term, they tend to get left. So, our enterprise team adopted the project code that was created as part of that Ed Space project, and we refactored it so that it could be made available as an enterprise offering for other people that wanted to create their own Ed Shares. And then further down the line, we did some major work on upgrading the core solution and creating an upgrade path for those existing platforms and ensuring that it was going to be more sustainable in the long term alongside our other products. So, this is the community of Ed Shares that we have that's still available and some, as I say, some of those recent additions. And across all of these platforms, they share a core set of features as part of being an Ed Shares, but it is extremely flexible. There's lots of different options, and it would take me all day to go through the wealth of possibilities that there are with the software. But as I say, this was focused on reproducing a Web 2.0 experience. So, some of the features that are in there, there's an immediate lightweight deposit. There is no review process just as you would find on any other social media sharing sites. There's lots of different ways of tagging and organising the content. There's inline previews of the materials, flexible editing permissions, and the ability to share editing rights with people as well as many other things. Well, that underlying software that sits beneath that is about open digital content. And what it does is that resources that you create on there, it will make the metadata open. So, even if you've created educational materials that need to be closed, the metadata, the descriptions about them about perhaps who created it, what it's about, the subjects it's associated with, who created it, and so on, are available openly on the Web for harvesting and to be indexed by search engines. And what we've got here is quite a diverse community, both in terms of that functionality, but also motivations and reasons for having the platform. So, we've got somewhere the focus is open, but also we've got others where it's a mix of closed and open, and that's fine. And just to look at a couple of examples a little bit more closely, this is Humbox, which was one of those GISC UK OER projects and is very well known in the OER community. This involves multiple institutions and a distributed project team, and it's available openly for anyone to have an account and create resources on there. So, and when I was looking at the figures for this, about 99% of the content is open, and I think to be honest that 1% is probably a couple of test records that I've been creating in there. In terms of the specific features they've got, they've got the ability for people to provide feedback on the materials that are shared to remix existing content, and the platform then maintains a relationship between those remixes and provides lots of support around the creation of virtual groups and the ability for those groups to showcase the resources they create or associated with. Another example is Edshare at GCU, so at Glasgow Caledonian. This is an institutional platform, and this is supporting multiple agendas. So, this is supporting their institutional OER policy, but it's also hosting some legacy content from other systems that have been withdrawn from the university and it was no longer funding for, but it's also about taking content from outside, taking the content from out of the VLE, where it was extremely expensive for them to host it with the VLE hosting solution. Now, only staff and students can actually log in to have an account to create items in Edshare at GCU, but obviously it's open for browsing and there's lots of open content on there, and there's lots of work that we did with GCU around the support and handling of video content. With it being an institutional system, we've also got it linked in with lots of institutional feeds, so things like we've got course feeds coming in, we've got close links with the VLE, and it's linked in with single sign on, and we also do things like campus recognition or network and VPN recognition, so students don't have to sign in if they're on the institutional network. So, I gathered together some figures across our community of those Edshares that are still accessible because there are some that have disappeared, and those that have at least some open content, and you see I've grouped the institutional platforms at the top followed by those subject-specific ones towards the bottom, but what you can see is there's a significant amount of resources that are being shared across our community of Edshares, and therefore their existence is already being exposed to the world, and amazingly 55% of those are already open. And, of course, this figure isn't fixed, so as I took these figures the other day, these figures are going to continue to grow, and hopefully as we see more Edshares come on board, it will grow even further. And I'm always saying to people, it's fine to have closed content, there is no one-size-fits-all, some content needs to remain closed, for some people it's a transition, if it's been in closed spaces it can seem quite scary to suddenly put them in the open, but they're in a great place in an Edshare that from a technical perspective it's extremely easy to make them open and available to anyone. But when you do have this mix of content, we do need to be thinking more about how discoverable the OERs are, specifically by that worldwide audience. Because if OERs cannot be discovered from a practical perspective they may well be closed or not exist, and within each platform we're already spending lots of time focusing on how we can organise and present the content and support the ways in which people are working, since using things like course codes, descriptors and as I say linking with the VLE. But as I say when it comes to OERs we need to be thinking about reaching that global audience, making them accessible and discoverable to people who perhaps traditionally won't be able to access higher educational content. Now Google is obviously part of that story but it's certainly not the end of it and we wanted to make it possible for someone to come along and search and know that all the results that they're retrieving are open and available for reuse. And to this end we've created the Edshare Hub. Now this is a separate service that we are running on our servers and it harvests that open metadata that exists across our community. And there you can carry out a federated search across the network and have that confidence and convenience that you're knowing that you're only discovering the open content. Now how did we achieve this? Now obviously in computer science school we like to write code and we can create things extremely rapidly. And this was achieved through the rapid development of a plugin that we've called Synkit which was developed by my colleague Justin Bradley who's the lead for e-prints. Now the Synkit plugin gets installed on the Edshares themselves and then we have the host service running centrally. Now let's say we have an OER that gets created at Edshare at Glasgow, this sends a notification to the hub and if it's recognised so we recognize and accept requests coming from that service a request will be sent back to the client for the metadata of that resource. That Edshare will then send it back in an XML format and that metadata gets imported into the hub and then at that point it's available for searching and exactly the same process would apply if you were modifying a record so we can keep up to date with any updates that are happening to records all the time. Likewise if we were deleting a resource so or for example if a resource was open and it needs to be closed a notification will get sent to the hub confirms the ID and the action that it wants to take place if it's accepted it will be processed and the record is deleted it really is that simple. Now I do get asked about the sustainability of solutions our solution Edshare and a service like the Edshare hub and yes there are challenges but there's also a number of strengths about the way that we run so yes there's no driver for OER and we do find that that has an impact and our work with Edshare is largely focused on champions in the sector but also applying our own expertise and ideas as we move forward and certainly as I'm picking up a number of things through the presentations and sessions that I'm attending at this conference and I should say when Eprints was first created Eprints had those same challenges while we were waiting for those kind of national drivers to come along with open access we were always working with champions in the sector and that's still true today. Now we're not centrally funded at Southampton so we can't ring fence funding to dedicate to some of these community service layers but our enterprise team now has been established within our university for over 15 years. We're not for profit and we exist to sustain the software which we do through the services we provide and we're working with over 80 institutions directly to support them or host them and Eprints itself is used as I say across the world. Now I put this green box it's sort of staggered between the two because we exist the purpose of our enterprise team is we exist to sustain the open source software and we support those who are using it. Now this can be a challenge to our sustainability and I've seen this point come up on Twitter earlier today because it depends ultimately on how open fits in the strategy of institutions and organisations across the sector and those making the decisions so and we also do find that people's perceptions of open and even open source can be a challenge so when we see large-scale commercial providers come along you know we don't have the same multi-million pound marketing budgets that perhaps they do and in the procurement processes when we sort of convey the costs for an open source solution such as Eprints or Ed Share we don't have the fee in there for a recurring license fee or anything like that to use the software and you'd think that would be great because it is cheaper than the commercial providers but actually perceptions of open source from some people sometimes can be that it's a lower quality or perhaps it's too high risk but this is a mature piece of open software Eprints has now been around for almost if not longer than 20 years it's owned and managed by Southampton University Southampton but this can also be a strength because we do work across sectors we work across people that are working in the open access spaces, open education and open data and we also do find that there's lots of innovation coming from these spaces and we can apply them and make them available to our community so looking ahead we are running user group meetings for Ed Share I just had the first one last week at the University of Glasgow and we're hoping to run that on an annual basis with virtual meetups in between we've also got an open Google group space for anyone that's interested in being part of the conversations contributing ideas we will be responding to feedback from some of the recent recently launched Ed shares and certainly locally at Southampton we're following up with some of our champion users on how Ed shares can support them in their day-to-day working as well as in the open and just to highlight a couple of things that we have coming up for work ahead for us is we've already got in progress that we're working on a preview service and this is in response to Blackboard Ally that you can up when you upload content to Ed Share it gets transformed into different formats now we've already been doing this for a very long time but actually what we can do is return it in far more formats if you upload a word document for it to go through our preview generation service and it returns it to you in various formats so we want to extend that further and ensure that it's providing it in accessible formats and something I tweeted about yesterday off the back of one of the presentations towards the end of the day is exploring some integration with Synote now Synote again was created at this university of Southampton and is for transcribing media content and providing collaborative editing around transcripts so there's a lot an awful lot of things and again I could I could talk all day about the sort of things that we want to be doing but I think I've run out of time thank you very much thank you Kelly and so we've got some questions again on on the Vvox about sort of how we can reuse them so what the content on the licenses and whether people can embed the stuff on their own VLEs so in terms of the most common types of records it depends on the platforms largely it is PowerPoints and Word documents but the GCU for example they use there's heavily for hosting their video content so lecture captures and things it really does vary across all the platforms and yes you can embed content in the VLE we've specifically put a feature again this was developed through the GCU version that you can embed we focused heavily on the audio and video content there's the embed feature so exactly like you can do with YouTube you grab the embed code and and post it in your VLE and all of the resources that we create have permanent URIs so if you post them in your VLE they will roll over to your next academic year and they won't have changed and for the content is there a specific license are they all under creative commons licenses for reuse so the licenses is down to the person that's depositing the resource in question but all the creative commons licenses are there and we can even extend them if there's licenses on there that aren't there currently and as creative commons updates we we keep them up to date as well brilliant thank you so you have any questions in here so you have some more questions online one that seems to be popular that's got some likes is whether edshare can help with the duplication of resources across an institution we do actually have on the e-prints we have created a deduplication tool because this is an issue across our platforms on when people are submitting records in support of open access and where we're getting feeds from publisher sources as well there's duplicates coming through so we do have a deduplication checker yes and there are facilities that when you are creating resource it does checks as you're entering it to see well has someone already entered something with the same title you know to try and reduce that duplication so yes we do have tools in there and then do you have any data about the extent to which your shared resources are used by other users maybe across universities and things like that we do have a stats package that's added to all of our ed shares and some of them advertise that dashboard and some of them don't so not so not specifically down to i think it's like school level and things like that but we certainly do and i think i've put on one of the slides that sort of hits from google and from that they're coming from a variety of sources we sort of track who the referring sites are so whether it's coming from the vle whether it's coming from external sites and so yes each repository does have a stats dashboard so you can get that data brilliant thank you so if there are any more questions in here otherwise we'll thank kelly and all of our speakers from this session idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupiter notebook servers our digi map services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education future developments include a text and data mining service working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology