OUseful Info

Further Reflections on OU Search

A couple of people got back to me about the New OU Search Tools post including an interesting exchange with a current OU student who mentioned how useful it would be to be able to search over the materials from previous courses.

I hadn't thought about this in the context of the new search facility, but it's absolutely spot on.

To be truly valuable, our courses should not just provide scaffolding for teaching a particular topic. They should also serve to act as a useful reference work; and for students embarking on a degree, being able to refer back to earlier course materials to reinforce the teaching of topics that are covered in later courses is exactly what we (as educators) want them to be able to do.

This is not necessarily how it works either in practice, or in principle.

For courses delivered as print material - yes, for sure, students retain access to these materials (unless they sell them via University Book Search) - but they're often inaccessible, stored in the attic or the cupboard under the stairs.

For courses delivered electronically, access to online materials is cut off 2-3 months after the end of a course. The materials are not searchable via the library, even for registered students, and for the HTML delivered courses, it's not necessarily the case that PDF or easy download bundles (chm or zipped archives) are made available, (though I've described elsewhere how it's possible to use the Firefox Scrapbook extension to download OU online courses).

What this means is that students effectively don't own their course materials on the electronically (HTML) delivered courses, whereas they do own the print materials.

PDFs of print based course materials are now increasingly available for download - which as I've pointed out before means students get two permanent copies of print course materials (the print copy itself and the PDF download), and no permanent copies of HTML delivered materials.

I'd heartily recommend students to download these materials whenever they get the chance, and store them in a single OU course materials directory on their computer that is indexed by an effective desktop search tool (such as Google Desktop or Copernic Desktop Search). In this way, you'll build up a searchable archive of OU course materials. Do the same for HTML courses - grab the materials with something like Scrapbook and archive them on your own machine.

There are apparently all sorts of policy issues that are being thrown up by the federated search tool, so it will be interesting to see how they play out...

Reflecting on how the system might be used against itself (trying to lock down ownership of the course content - especially for people who PAID FOR IT - is not going to work folks...) I wonder how personal archiving of materials by be possible within the e-portfolio?

For example, will students will be able to save copies of their course materials as their stuff? (The working name for the e-portfolio is currently My Stuff - check out Guy Carberry's design blog for screenshots. The My Stuff name is - apparently - not much appreciated by students...)

Several things immediately came to my mind simply by asking this question:

1. will students be able to lodge PDFs - indeed, any arbitrary file types - in MyStuff? Something like elgg is agnostic, I think, as to what you care to lodge in your portfolio;


2. will students get a MyStuff results tab on the search results page when MyStuff is up and running and federated search integrated with it? I think this was hinted at at the VLE Briefing on Tuesday, but I deleted my notes before I got to post them (oops...)


3. will students be able to search within PDFs using the MyStuff search tool?


4. should we be looking at providing an e-book reader with embedded study support tools, such as annotation tools, for use within the e-portfolio? O'Reilly Safari U e-books can be viewed using an interesting looking reader from Fourteen40


5. how long will students retain access to content stored in MyStuff? Again, I think it was suggested at the VLE briefing that students would retain access to their portfolio for two years (2 years after what, I don't recall... completion of their last course, perhaps?) In addition, it was stated that access to the portfolio would continue between course presentations. Which seems sensible, if students haven't stated whether they are on a degree profile or not.


6. how much storage space will be made available? will it be free? secure? backed up? Support for third party storage APIs and export-to-desktop is something that has been mooted, I believe, but is not guaranteed. I have heard from several people that the amount of storage that should be provided is causing concern, which concerns me somewhat. I watched the Gmail landing page counting up the megabytes of free storage that's available to users on Gmail today, (I just watched it tick over 2.8 gigabytes), and reckon I must have access to well of 20 gig of free storage round the web, as well as my Amazon S3 account, which I must have spent all of 20p on last month (it was a heavy month ;-). And I also note that online office app providers are starting to work with online storage providers (like Zoho and Omnidrive, for example).

The idea of gaming the portfolio also came to mind - by which I mean students using the portfolio to store electronic copies of course materials - exactly those materials to which student access is cut-off from after 2-3 months.

Alternatively, it may make sense to have an area of MyStuff that automatically stores copies of course materials from presentations the student has studied, (maybe without a bulk export option even). This material could then linger in MyStuff while the student still has access to their e-portfolio. Or maybe, if the student has stated an interest in pursuing a degree programme (rather than one or two courses) this statement flags the retention of course materials within their portfolio. The student's ostensible commitment to a degree programme then provides the 'perk' of legacy course materials within their portfolio.

Breaking the problem of (search) access to course materials down a little further, I think we can identify:

1. course materials for courses the student is currently studying (or has recently finished); the time at which course materials become searchable is also related to this. Do students gain access when they register for a course, or a week or two before the course start date (why not 3 weeks in advance, or 4?), or on the actual start date itself?


2. course materials from courses the student has previously studied; this is partly addressed in the discussion above relating to preserving access to previously studied materials via the e-portfolio;


3. materials from courses the student has not yet studied; preventing students from studying these materials means they cannot skim the materials for a course online, even if they are considering taking that course. Google booksearch and Amazon both support limited browsing of books, so why can't we do the same for our materials. Especially when it's not necessarily the course materials that represent the OU's value proposition.

The easiest way of handling search over these three classes is to let registered students search over all of them - forgetting about access permissions and seeing this as a usability issue - and then provide obvious search limits/filters for previously studied courses and currently studied courses. Maybe inspection - or download - of materials outside these limits needs to be restricted? I don't know...

One final question to think about - if students could search over the whole OU course corpus, and a student studying a level 2 course turned up something relevant from a related level 3 course that they used to improve their understanding of the topic being studied, would we be happy or sad? If they found a level 1 treatment of the subject (in a course the student had not studied) that clarified for the student a misconception about, or unstated assumption in, the level 2 material, would we be happy or sad?

Related to this - are students more or less likely to take follow on courses if they stumble across materials from those courses while researching topics covered in lower level courses?

Posted by ajh59 at January 26, 2007 11:14 PM