OER Harvester

1 Initial Problem

Authors are able to put their content under a Creative Commons licence (if enabled for the installation) to signify that such content can be used by other users as open educational resources. Unfortunately, only a very few persons will notice that such content is available - as long as authors are not registering such OER in a dedicated portal or make them available in a dedicated category of their ILIAS installation. No matter which way one goes, letting people know about one's OER needs additional effort at the moment. And additional activities by a user that always has decided to add content under a CC licence is not necessary and another barrier for promoting OER.

2 Conceptual Summary

This feature request suggest to create an OER harvester as a simple but effective feature to identify already available OER on an ILIAS installation and make them available at one place. In a first implementation, only file objects will be supported. Possible extensions of this feature could be to consider also metadata-supporting object types like ILIAS learning modules or Mediacasts. The OER harvester is implemented as a cron-job that supports four workflows:

1. Configuring OERharvester: The OER harvester is enabled in the cron-job administration. To be activated it requires Creative Commons licence support to be enabled and a category in ILIAS to be defined where the harvester adds all OER to.
2. Identifying OER: All file objects in ILIAS are regularly checked by a cron-job if any of them has been published under a CC licence. IDs of all CC-licenced files are saved in database, incl. time stamp of first entry and last update. The harvester can ignore any RBAC settings of the content because setting an object under a CC licence means making it available to the public implicitly.
3. Listing OER: After having harvested OER at the installation the cron-job adds / updates a list of available OER in a pre-defined category in ILIAS. Files are copied. Permissions of the listed file objects are set according to permission policy of the defined category (read-only should be set for most roles). A "Last Update" notice should be placed on the category page to notify interested users.
4. Removing OER from list: Objects that are no longer set under a CC licence are removed from the category of available OER. Related entry in database for OER harvester is deleted as well.

• Notifying Owner: every owner of a first-time harvested OER would be notified by e-mail that this object is now listed as OER and made available accordingly. The e-mail contains a link to category where all content is listed. Additionally, it contains also a link to "ignore" this object in case the owner does not want this content to be listed.
• Ignore Content: If a specific content published under a CC licence should not appear in the list of available OERs it can be set on "Ignore". In this case the object is not listed even if is intended to be an OER. Setting can be done by clicking on e-mail link (see above) or as additional setting in Metadata tab of object.

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

• Administration » General Settings » Cron Jobs » Edit 'OER Harvester'
• Administration » Metadata » Copyright
• File » Metadata » Quick Edit

3.2 User Interface Details

Cron-Job Configuration

OER Harveseter cron-job is listed in Administration » Cron-Jobs with default information and actions Activate, Deactivate, Execute and Edit. Clicking on 'Edit' opens cron-job configuration with settings for schedule and target category for OER listing.

Notice: If a new UI element for selecting repository items is available when implementation starts, this element will be used instead of existing ID input form.

Metadata Administration

Activation of OER Harvester cron-job is mirrored by 'Copyright Settings' in Metadata administration. "» Edit Cron-Job" link leads to cron-job.

Metadata Settings in File Object

Quick Edit section in Metadata tab of file object gets a new sub-select "Ignored by OER Harvester" if cron-job is active. Default status of option is not enabled. Check-box needs to shown always under activated CC licence.

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

No new UI elements suggested.

4 Technical Information

{The maintainer has to provide necessary technical information, e.g. dependencies on other ILIAS components, necessary modifications in general services/architecture, potential security or performance issues.}

5 Contact

• Author of the Request: Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]
• Maintainer: Meyer, Stefan [smeyer] for Metadata and Schmid, Fabian [fschmid] for file object
• Implementation of the feature is done by: {The maintainer must add the name of the implementing developer.}

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• ILIAS-Verein

7 Discussion

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], Oct 23, 2017: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for 5.4. We would like to use the ilRepositorySelectorInputGUI instead of an ID input.

SIG Content Sharing, 15 NOV 2017: We highly appreciate this feature request and are sure that it is a good improvement for content sharing in ILIAS. We hope that the Category for Huge Amount of Data will be implemented for 5.4, too. This would improve the handling of such a category with OER in ILIAS. Additionally, we would like to have two additional options (see also Metadata interface for querying by referatories:

1. The OER harvester should distribute the metadata information of CC licensed objects to external referatories, too. This would allow to publish information about CC content in an ILIAS installation in general and worldwide accessible OER registries, too. Preferred formats for data exchange would be OAI and JSON LD (both formats should be offered).
2. In a second step, it should also be possible to provide the file to a referatory as well.

8 Implementation

• Instead of copying files under a CC license to the predefined category as described in the Feature Wiki Entry, the OER harvester links CC licensed files.
• Of the optional features, only the Ignore Content feature has been implemented (Screenshot below). 

Test Cases

Test cases completed at Sep 19, 2018 by Zenzen, Enrico [ezenzen]

• C24721: OER Harvester aktivieren
• C24723: EInstellungen des OER Harvesters bearbeiten
• C24726: Datei ignorieren
• C24727: OER Harvester manuell ausführen
• C24739: OER Harvester automatisiert ausführen 

Approval

Approved at 29.10.2018 by Kruse, Fabian [Fabian].