EduArc – A FAIR and User-centred Infrastructure for Learning Resources

The willingness to share resources like research output, data and educational material led to the development of numerous infrastructures to support the searchability, findability and accessibility of relevant material. Single solutions might be inefficient for users because they either offer access to limited material (e.g. university repositories might store material created by their staff only) or are not supportive in foster sharing beyond single organisations. We are developing an infrastructure for open resources, with a focus on educational learning material like open educational resources (OER). The following contribution focuses on our user-centred approaches to improve OER retrieval and sharing with metadata, while considering FAIR principles.

We address the challenges posed by the dissemination of OER, i.e. enabling anyone to reuse, remix, revise, retain and redistribute openly licensed learning material [1]. We investigate a successful dissemination of OER beyond institutional borders in the decentralized ecosystem of higher education in Germany. In other words, we aim at establishing an infrastructure that allows users to find OER from diverse relevant sources like learning management systems, such as Moodle, and existing university repositories. Our research takes into account existing infrastructures, tools and their stakeholders. Our infrastructure will store the index and metadata for searching OER, while integrating established in standards like LOM [2] or LRMI [3] and supporting users’ needs and their search behaviour. Additionally, users will be able to add new resources, describe them via tags, comment on or rate existing OER. Although several repositories already offer diverse functions [4], still there are technical and conceptual challenges not only with the provision of OER, but also with their access in distributed repositories, especially in dealing with edits and versions.

We aim to investigate several functions that allow users’ communication and collaboration to fully support the idea of open education practices in higher education [5]. Therefore, we apply user-centred and participatory approaches like qualitative user studies (cognitive walk-throughs) on OER tagging functions and OER interface design, and participatory sessions with OER repository stakeholders and technical providers.

Findings (Figure 1) from our first two studies show the diversity in users and use cases, in which OER are applied. Moreover, users that seek OER or want to add their own resources need clarification on available metadata fields and their meaning. Besides standards fields, users prefer free tag fields to describing resources according to their needs. Concerning (meta)data fields and their handling within the system, we will comply with the FAIR principles [6], which ensures the findability, accessibility, interoperability (with diverse metadata systems), and reuse of digital assets. The poster will present the overall infrastructure design based on the findings from our studies, and our model to comply with the FAIR principles.