Aggregation of End

User Data in Open

Educational
Resources

Mr. Subhasish Karak

Librarian, Panchmura Mahavidyalaya, Bankura,
Formerly Kendriya Vidyalaya No#2, Kalaikunda

A US News Paper Headline

NSA collected US email records in bulk
for more than two years under Obama
-the guardian

The documents indicate that under

the program, launched in 2001, a
federal judge sitting on the secret
surveillance panel called theFisa
court would approve a bulk collection
order for internet metadata "every
90 days". The collection of these
records began under the Bush
administration's
wide-ranging
warrantless surveillance program,
collectively known by theNSA code
name Stellar Wind.

The internet metadata of the sort

NSA collected for at least a decade
details the accounts to which
Americans sent emails and from
which they received emails. It also
details
the
internet
protocol
addresses (IP) used by people
inside the United States when
sending emails information
which can reflect their physical
location. It did not include the

"The calls you make can reveal a lot, but

now that so much of our lives are mediated
by the internet, your IP logs are really a
real-time map of your brain: what are you
reading about, what are you curious about,
what personal ad are you responding to
(with a dedicated email linked to that
specific ad), what online discussions are
you participating in, and how often?" said
Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute.
"Seeing your IP logs and especially
feeding them through sophisticated
analytic tools is a way of getting inside
your head that's in many ways on par with

Open educational
resources
are learning content or tools that
are offered free of charge under a
copyright license granting
permissions for users to engage in
the "4R" activities: reuse, revise,
remix, and redistribute. In essence,
open educational resources are
learning objects that use an open
source license.

Utility of OER:
These digital materials have the potential to give
people everywhere equal access to our collective
knowledge and provide many more people around
the world with access to quality education by
making lectures, books and curricula widely
available on the Internet for little or no cost. By
enabling virtually anyone to tap into, translate and
tailor educational materials previously reserved
only for students at elite universities, OER has the
potential to jump start careers and economic
development in communities that lag behind.
Millions worldwide have already opened this
educational lockbox, but if OER is going to
democratize learning and transform the classroom
and teaching, then it must move from the
periphery of education practice to center stage.

User of OER interacts online with it and

resulting
creation
of
residual
interaction data like web server logs
e.g.,
users'
browsers,
users'
IP
addresses, location, duration and
"social data" created during Web 2.0style interactions with resources e.g.,
tags, comments, ratings, favorites,
bookmark, forwards, downloads. These
interactions data may be very useful if
collected and analyzed.

OER search platform:

It collects metadata of OERs and
compiles them into a searchable
catalog that can be consulted by
users. Search platforms have no
way to access interaction data
since it is always use external links
which redirects to place where
users interact with educational
resources.

Aiming the K-12 students of India a

website www.aikvta.in has
added links to most useful schooling
OER providers in the tab resources
and it is being accessed by
thousands of users.

Now the point pop up in mind - so many users access

these OER, therefore can we know the activities of the
users?
If we provide a secure platform by using web 2.0 tools
lot of interesting data can be aggregated. Aggregation of
these end user data and analyses of it would be a unique
feedback in OERs quality improvement & ranking.
Interaction Data Aggregation:
Interaction data is data generated from an interaction
between a user and an OER. Any interaction between a
user and a resource (typically described in a metadata
record) can be modeled as a interaction between the
resource and its user. Instances of this interactions: "user
X viewed resource Y on Fri. Mar. 22, 2015 at 2:54pm",
"user Z tagged resource W with tag 'algebra' on Fri.
March. 22, 2015 at 2:55pm". They can include more or
less information about the context in which an interaction

Contextualized Attention Metadata

(CAM)that can be used to represent
atomic interaction data. The CAM
specification was originally proposed
for capturing behavioral information
about learners in learning contexts.
However, as shown in the examples
above, atomic interaction data is
personal data that requires some kind
of identification of both the user and
the resource.

In 2010, as part of their Stem Exchange

initiative, the U.S. National Science Digital
Library (NSDL) released a "paradata" data
model to "capture a user activity related to
a resource that helps to elucidate its
potential educational utility" (i.e.,
interaction data aggregated by resources).
The paradata model comes with an XML
binding. In a paradata record, a resource
can be identified using either an identifier
or its location, which allows for relating
paradata and metadata records that refer
to the same resource.

Portals connected to the OER if

offer Web 2.0-like functionalities
permitting users to personalize
their information retrieval
experience and interact with each
other. For example, users
bookmark and tag OER
descriptions, review, rating,
favorites, bookmark, and forwards
counts, downloads counts and
thus exchange their feedback with

Knowing that a collection is popular among target

audiences can be of great help in ongoing
curation and acquisition decision-making. There
are many ways this kind of information can be
used. For instance, interaction data makes it
possible for content providers and repository
owners to tailor the packaging and marketing of
resources for particular regions. It makes it
possible to track how current efforts to improve
OERs uptake are succeeding and in what regions.
Having interaction data for OERs makes it also
possible to identify the most popular OERs
(worldwide, continent, region, country, etc.)
relying on crowdsourcing to sift out the best OERs
from an ever-growing, global body of resources

Aggregation of these end user

data and analyses of it would
be a unique feedback in OERs
quality improvement & ranking.
Social data aggregation like
definite reviews, ranking would
attract the right users and
make the service providers
competitive, encourage to
sustain, upgrade the OER.

Any Suggestion Please?