RedFeather- resource exhibition and discovery: a lightweight micro-repository for resource sharing

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OERs) depend on being hosted in repositories so that they can be effectively viewed, managed, searched and indexed online. Content – especially multimedia content – that is not hosted in this way has no metadata and is effectively dark to the wider community. Similarly content that is not described properly, and with appropriate licenses, is of limited use. This is a challenge for small-scale contributors, such as individuals and small projects, as the overhead of setting up and administrating a content repository can be prohibitive.

In this paper we propose RedFeather, a micro-repository, as a solution to this problem. RedFeather is a simple and straightforward server-side tool that requires zero to little configuration, but that provides the core functionality of a fully-fledged OER repository, including: resource pages with inline preview, a resource manager with streamlined workflow, and views of the resource in OER critical formats (including RDF, JSON, and RSS). RedFeather is fully customizable, with a flexible plugin architecture and configurable templates, but also works without any customization as a single php script file uploaded to a web server. The goal of a micro-repository like RedFeather is both to enable small-scale contributors to easily join the OER community, and to act as a intermediate step for larger contributors beginning a collection, or requiring a temporary home for their resources while a more substantial repository is developed. Our hope is that by lowering the barriers to participation, RedFeather can help the OER community to take advantage of the long tail of small to medium sized content creators.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for David Millard: orcid.org/0000-0002-7512-2710

Catalogue record

Export record