P2Pu has been working with the LRMI (Learning Resource Metadata Initiative) project for some time, to help make online OERs more discoverable. We’re proud to be profiled in a case study by LRMI’s Lorna Campbell. A lot of projects whose OER work we admire have been part of this initiative, and we’re tickled pink to be listed alongside projects like Curriki, MERLOT and Jorum.
This is a report of the original case study by Lorna, which you can also find, along with other case studies, here.
LRMI Implementation Case Study: P2PU
Team leader: Dirk Uys
“P2PU is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. Learning for the people, by the people. About almost anything.”
P2PU’s main focus is on community; by providing content creation tools, users are enabled to create open online courses. Tools include the Mechanical MOOC, which enables users to create large open online courses on a “shoestring budget”; course creation tools, which bring together groups of peer learners; and badging tools which enable learners to create and award badges. P2PU courses are primarily aimed at continuing education and all are openly licensed under the CC BY SA licence.
P2PU Courses
All the tools developed by P2PU are open source and hosted on GitHub. The tool under discussion is Lernanta, which started as a fork of Mozilla drumbeat’s Batucada project.
Metadata is added to courses as they are created by users. All courses have basic LRMI metadata; title, author, description and language. Course creators also have the option to add additional metadata. The amount of metadata recorded for any given course is dependant on the course creator. Some fields are populated automatically from internal data, e.g. it is implicit that the ‘author’ is the creator of the course. All metadata is held in a MySQL database. P2PU does not use any metadata other than LRMI and Schema.org. The code for P2PU’s LRMI app which enables users to enter additional metadata is available on GitHub: lernanta / lernanta / apps / lrmi /
P2PU has implemented all LRMI properties, but most are optional.
Mandatory:
- learningResourceType – course
- useRightsUrl – CC BY SA
Optional:
- educationalAlignment
- educationalUse
- timeRequired
- typicalAgeRange
- interactivityType
- isBasedonUrl
- educationalRole
educationalAlignment is an optional property, but it is infrequently used as there are few appropriate vocabularies to align to. The only properties P2PU provides vocabularies for are educationalRole and interactivityType.
Example of P2PU LRMI markup
The following schema.org properties have also been implemented:
- name
- url
- image
- description
- about
- dateCreated
- author
- inLanguage
Going forward, P2PU plan to encourage people to self publish their own courses in their own places, and are working on a Jekyll course template for running open online courses: jekyll-course-template. The intention is that these self published courses should still carry LRMI metadata. LRMI could also potentially be used to index these courses. P2PU are also interested in implementing LRMI for badges, but have not taken this forward yet.