Welcome all to the red carpet everyone, for the first unoffical OER awards! Which I just made up. So it’s very important.
So as part of our Triton Project we created Politics In Spires, with content created by The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Part of the Triton Project was to work on OER discovery and optimising the discover-ability of OER, and we implemented part of this via what we called “Dynamic Collections”.
Dynamic Collections function as a WordPress plug in, bring in RSS Feeds from OER sites and blogs, and then search these feeds for particular words before moving these items into collections. These collections can be created as simply as a WordPress post, and so gives almost everyone the scope to start building OER collections straight away. Once a collection has some content, it can be displayed to visitors to the site (normally as a “wider reading” style link at the end of a post on a particular topic) and we made sure to track how these resources are used. As well as showing as a WordPress page, the collections can also be seen as an RSS Feed (add ?rss_feed_collection=true to the end of a page), An Activity Stream – which will be handy for the Learning Registry (?activity_stream=true), or embedded into another page (?dc_embed=true) via some javascript.
So lets look at some stats / open an envelope!
European Politics and Society – http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/european-politics-and-society/
Plays : 770
Collections embedded : 62
International Relations – http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/international-relations/
Plays : 922
Comparative Government – http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/comparative-government/
Plays : 748
Political Theory-http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/political-theory/
Plays : 1041
RSS Subscribers : 164
Activity stream : 197
Barack Obama - http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/barack-obama/
Plays : 313
Ethics – http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/ethics/
Plays : 227
David Cameron – http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/david-cameron/
Plays : 207
Palestine – http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/palestine/
Plays : 117
So the winner of most popular dynamic collection is “Political Theory”, which also wins on Best RSS and Best Activity Streams, but “European Politics and Society” wins the coveted “Collections Embedded” award. Speech! Speech!
However, as these are OER lists, and we record how often each link is visited (we have almost 4000 contenders), and a user has the scope to like a link. So *drum roll please*, which is our most popular OER!
Rights and justice in international relations from the Open University! With 13 visits and 1 like!
Congratulations all round!