{"id":247,"date":"2012-08-29T14:23:49","date_gmt":"2012-08-29T14:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/?p=247"},"modified":"2012-09-27T10:31:37","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T10:31:37","slug":"information-architecture-or-what-will-the-oer-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/2012\/08\/29\/information-architecture-or-what-will-the-oer-look-like\/","title":{"rendered":"Information architecture or what will the OER look like?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although our OER is broadly based on an existing taught course at Sussex, materials for which sit on the University’s Virtual Learning Environment, the addition of a huge quantity of primary sources means we need to rethink its structure. \u00a0Like many of the apparently ‘simple’ steps in this project, this turns out to be a more complex process than we first thought. \u00a0We’re now creating a teaching module on Moodle which needs to serve both an internal student audience with fairly specific requirements, and an unknown external audience.<\/p>\n

This immediately raised another copyright issue. \u00a0The current module offers internal students pdfs of key reading, usually journal articles or extracts from books, controlled and managed under the University’s copyright licence. \u00a0So how do we continue to provide these to internal students without making them available to external users and falling foul of copyright restrictions? \u00a0Ideally we want them simply to be invisible for external audiences as it could be deeply frustrating to someone to see a pdf but not be able to access it.<\/p>\n

We kicked around a few options –<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Do we need to create two versions of the module – an internal one and an external one? (No – that would duplicate work and seems counter-intuitive).<\/li>\n
  2. Do we create special sections within the module which are just for the external audience? \u00a0(No again, as that seems equally counter-intuitive).<\/li>\n
  3. We finally settle on a rather clunky work around in Moodle which should allow us to restrict the visibility of the journal article pdfs to a manually created internal group. \u00a0This does mean remembering to create that group and changing it for each new cohort which studies the module, but it enables us to continue with just one version of the module.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For the non-technically minded, our E-learning guru, Stuart Lamour, has been a godsend. \u00a0Witness his easy to understand explanation of how we link various types of content to the Moodle site and his cut and paste method of helping Dr Lucy Robinson and me establish a workable structure for the various sections of the module.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a>This too involves more thinking.<\/p>\n