[Sharing is a challenge] #14 How authors can make their OERs “discoverable” by Benedetta Calonaci and Alessandra Gammino

Open Education Week Share OE Week
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Today, we are delving into the world of OER repositories and metadata. If that may sound technical, this is a topic of great importance for retrieving OER efficiently. To talk about this, we are very please to welcome Alessandra Gammino and Benedetta Calonaci, both librarians at the University of Florence (Italy).

Thanks to their expertise, they shed light on the key points to bear in mind when sharing a resource online. As well as putting these various points into context and explaining them, they also provide us with a checklist to help make resources more discoverable.

How authors can make their OERs “discoverable” by Benedetta Calonaci and Alessandra Gammino

Discoverability… Now that’s a rather strange word. The starting point for our ‘discoverability’ challenge was the realisation that it’s very difficult to ask someone to share something if, for one reason or another, the course you’re sharing is hidden from view. In the so-called Global North, the challenge becomes doing things properly, optimising access to resources via search engines through the effective use of metadata. One might even imagine that the role of social media is not neutral. But in the Global South, the issue presents itself differently: the frustration of creating content and remaining invisible is constant. To discuss this, there is no one better than documentation specialists and librarians. We are delighted to welcome Benedetta Calonaci and Alessandra Gammino from the University of Florence (Italy) to this initiative.

Read the article:

A big thanks to Alessandra and Benedetta for this useful article!

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I definitely advocate the suggestion of relying on the expertise of librarians and those who manage large database/collections of information. The authors recomendations are sound, though most folks are not very excited about entering metadata. Even the word sounds offputting.

And given the distribution of so many varied repositories, the most sensible approach seems to be as suggested to add OER to ones that are regionally or institutionally relevant but also the ones that are then exposed to the federated style search if OERSI and others mentioned

I was intrigued but the little I saw and some I read about the efforts of Camerise Studio in Canada as a platform that used AI to help generate metadata for uploaded OER (see their event)

It might be a speculation about how important it is for an OER creator for their work to be discovered. I would think their initial focus is on developing the best OER that serves the needs of the learners near them. The fact that others can use, reuse, and improve is perhaps a nice to have. I get a sense of a sentiment of “why should I share if no one gives me credit” (and upcoming article there :wink:

And one of the other previous articles reflected to on the reusability of the OER by its format. There is not much one can do with a fixed format like PDF, though having access and being able to read is a gain. But the forms in which OER are shared seems important.

Much of discovery might be advanced or possible disrupted by the use of GenAI to help find, where the scope might be wider than fixed repositories.

Finally, there is more we call can do to aid discovery. Putting it “out there” or in a repository is one part, but we can advance discovery by the ways we as a larger community share them, write about them, reflect on them.