Kritikos article

I've written a short piece about Kritikos, entitled Identifying resources for students, by students for a JISC blog.

Kritikos is a customised search engine for visual media relevant to Engineering education, aimed at reducing the time required to find useful resources for study and for teaching. To achieve this goal, we:

• Use the power of Google Custom Search™ by using asearch engine dedicated to engineering education
• Present the results visually as a gallery of thumbnail images
• Overlay information shared by other students and teachers relating to the usefulness of the resource in their subject.

This project was initially funded as part of JISC's Content Programme 2011-13 and developed by the Engineering and Materials Education Research Group (EMERG) at the University of Liverpool.

MeLT provided consultancy for the technical development of the Kritikos site. We also developed a video explaining the backround, aims and outcomes of the project.

JISC-CETIS 2009 Conference

MeLT attended the JISC-CETIS 2009 Conference in Birmingham and came back with plenty of good ideas to enhance the CORE-Materials project.

There was some useful stuff from Charles Duncan at Intrallect on the automatic generation of metadata from texts, which we think can help us reduce the time it takes to manually catalogue our resources. During the session, we also met John McNaught from the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), who also offered sage advice on the same subject.

Chris Clarke from Talis gave a very good overview on the use of machine-readable data to build linked open courseware.

We also learned from Russell Stannard from the University of Westminster about the successful use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to 'broadcast' the release of new OER content to followers.

CORE-Materials

MeLT is to be a major partner in the new CORE-Materials project, based at the University of Liverpool. The one-year project, funded by the JISC, HEA and HEFCE, aims to make a significant number of open educational resources (OERs) in Materials Science and Engineering freely available online under a range of Creative Commons licenses.

MeLT's role in the project is to design and create the database and web-based repository necessary to host the resources, and develop a search engine that will allow users to easily find resources relevant to them. We will also advise on uploading resources to fileshare sites like YouTube, Flickr, Scribd and SlideShare.