OER Commons

Project Outline:

Based in Half Moon Bay, California, ISKME is an independent, nonprofit organization engaged in a wide range of research, evaluation, and practical applications of knowledge management issues in education. In 2006, ISKME asked Six Feet Up to assist them with the implementation of additional functionalities to their existing Open Educational Resources (OER) Beta portal.

Powered by Plone and re-engineered by Six Feet Up, the new site allowed visitors to build their own "personal folder" where they could store and manage links of interest to them. The site also offered community tools such as tagging, rating, reviewing and annotating features. An advanced search page coupled with dynamic filters options made it really easy to search through over 10,000 items. Despite the large data and the sheer number of canned queries offered to visitors, the site stayed fast and reliable thanks to caching and other speed optimization mechanisms set up by Six Feet Up.

Six Feet Up then worked on the specification and the implementation of a data import automation process. The data was to be gathered by RSS or OAI-PMH or by uploads of XML or CSV data. It was then going to run through a process of validation and reporting and then be reviewed before publishing to the ISKME website. The project included a mapping system preventing duplicates or missing critical data. Six Feet Up was planning to use standards like UUIDs and URIs for global identification of the resources and develop an easy to use front end to ease the clients upload process.