A little structure goes a long way Some case studies from educational content

Dr Ian Piper Tellura Information Services Ltd.

Three case studies across 15 years

National Grid for Learning (NGfL)

Curriculum Online

The National Strategies

Some more recent work

Educational content - a familiar landscape…

There’s too much stuff, so it’s hard to find

There’s not enough structure, so it’s hard to parse

We don’t know where it is, so we may not even find it

We don’t know how relevant it is

We don’t know how good it is

We don’t know whether we’re allowed to use it

The National Grid for Learning (2001 - 2004)

A relational database of several thousand quality assured educational content providers including links to online presence

A search index (Inktomi Ultraseek) based on this database

A search index of the online presence (several million pages)

A categorisation scheme using the Inktomi Content Classification Engine

NGfL website UI

Categories from CCE

Results matching query

Link to website for resource

What worked well

Popular - usage of the site started high and stayed high

Relevant results - classification through structured records and of text content gave high degree of confidence in product

Fine-tuned results - smaller population of sites to search gave more specific answers

Quality - only quality-assured products were featured on the system

Performance - thousands of sites and fewer than 10 million pages

What we learned

Manually intensive and bureaucratic to set up subscribers

Loss of the serendipity factor in searching

Classification engine was limited; it relied on exact matching text strings in keyword metadata or web page body to a category

Some of the products weren’t websites, so couldn’t easily be indexed

Curriculum Online 2004 - 2008

A database of commercial and non-commercial content providers of educational products ranging from whiteboards to websites

Content providers had to meet stringent quality requirements (that’s right, they hadn’t learned from the NGfL experience)

Content discovery driven by relational database search of the provider’s record (no content from content provider websites)

Use of a range of controlled vocabularies (hurrah!) to enable multiple dimensions and levels of classification

Curriculum Online website UI

List items loaded fromcontrolled vocabularies

Feature items

What worked well

Gave a level playing field to non-commercial and commercial content providers

Allowed users to give feedback, which tailored search results

What we learned

Awful user experience (no user-centred design)

Performance problems and other bugs diminished user satisfaction

Some commercial providers gamed the system (tagged every content item with every vocabulary term) to try to get to the top of search results

Registration process was slow and very bureaucratic (maybe we hadn’t learned that well from NGfL!)

The National Strategies (2007 - 2011)

A vast collection of government educational content

Teachers required to use this content for teaching

Original site very unpopular :

Hard to find content

Publication cycle slow

Content and navigation structure too rigid and inflexible

Our solution

Centre the system on structured and tagged information objects

All content items stored as first-class objects (in Drupal)

All navigation and discovery via metadata tagging

Every content object tagged by experts against a range of controlled vocabularies

Controlled vocabularies developed iteratively based on experience

Controlled vocabularies built on open standards (Zthes and SKOS)

Controlled vocabulary manager

Linking content to vocabularies

What worked well

Very popular with teachers - massive increase in usage and satisfaction ratings

Very short content production cycle

Content surfaced dynamically everywhere it needed to, so far more flexible than before

Rules-based navigation could be fine-tuned without disrupting content

What we learned

Subject matter experts are vitally important to get effective tagging

Standards and house rules are important for consistency

Don’t over-tag content

Be agile, be prepared to iterate

Tag at the lowest (most precise) level possible

Even the most innovative design cannot withstand a new political vision (The National Strategies website was closed in 2011)!

A global publishing company (2013 onward)

A move from paper-based publishing to digital-first publishing

A need to improve content re-use capability

A desire to create a global knowledge network

An understanding of the potential value of tagged and aligned content, but no clear vision of how to make it happen

What follows is a work in progress…

(Some parts of) the solution

Create a better digital content architecture

A content model based on content objects and containers

A product workflow centred on re-use and multiple output channels

Create mechanisms for managing vocabularies and curricula

Focus content production on potential for re-use, by

Creating objects at the appropriate level of granularity

Aligning objects to vocabularies and curricula

Guiding principles

Standards matter more than tools; solutions must be product-agnostic

Architecture needs to work from macro to micro level

Need to align objects using a variety of classification schemes

On the web (we’re fans of the 5-star model!)

Available to the audience via simple interfaces

Content must be easily accessible via an effective API

Where we’re coming from

Where we’re going to

An improved content object model

An improved containment model

A model for linking content

A model for linking content

A knowledge network model

Early lessons

It’s hard work, but…

The potential is already evident

Technical solutions are not enough; people, culture and processes matter more

A little structure goes a long way!

Thank you