A possible solution might be to have the standard legalese jargon “Privacy Policy” page followed by a succinct, human-readable version (similar to Creative Commons). I think the gesture towards transparency would be welcome.

The fact that you are concerned about student privacy tells me that you are on the right track.

May I suggest (probably too late of course, but…) some perspectives that may help, probably more in thinking about how future effort might build on this work but some may be useful now. My understanding is that you are making an early approach to answering the question, “Have OERs been reused on the web in other contexts?” and not the follow-on questions related to derivatives, methods, observance of attribution etc etc. On that basis the approach you are taking is consistent with other similar work and seems just fine. Until it’s done and some data are available it is only guesswork as to what method is most effective but I suspect that the different methods people are trying will yield slightly different insights, which in itself is good.

Throught 1: Reuse is closely aligned to the same problems associated with federation and original discovery. Reasonable?

Thought 2: It is in the interests of all OER initiatives to establish the case that OER’s bring benefit, and being able to point to good data on reuse is exactly what is needed. Given that, it should be possible to coordinate common effort on minimal changes to all content to support that. Difficulties will arise due to “non-friendly” content formats
even for textual materials, and also in communication between content stores, however, these factors will probably be part of the long term solution, assuming that funding allows anyone to take a long term view.

Thought 3: The only way to _really_ track reuse, especially in relation to derivative works, is to include a few bits of metadata to achieve that outcome.

These three thoughts considered together may contribute to a reliable solution for harvesting the data required. Some initiatives can actually do a reasonable job of working with existing metadata within their own space to answer some of those questions because their content formats allow it. Others do not and will not be able to unless they revise their Content Strategy (assuming they have been allowed to have one). Good data on reuse (adoption and/or adaptation) will not be available until repositories in OER initiatives and institutional OER instances actually talk to each other.

Not sure if any of this is of use to you and it may be history rather than news but it might help someone somewhere…

Thanks

I know that there are lots of DSpace downloads but I am curious if they take the source code and modify it to brand it for their site or just use it as is.
If I read your post right, I could see if any derivative works were being made… That would be very cool.

Connexions here. We have three forms of tracking on Connexions through Google Analytics (GA) and one locally hosted Web Analytics tracking which is available at http://cnx.org/stats for the overall site, and also available for content by choosing the “statistics” view for any search, or by looking at any author’s profile.

We chose Google Analytics because of robust support, comparability with other sites using analytics, and to avoid a lot of “analytics” analysis which is not our core focus.

The three GA codes we track are 1. A Hewlett sponsored GA code they use to compare all the OER sites they have helped launch, 2. A Connexions wide code that tracks views and artifact downloads (but doesn’t travel with those downloads) and 3. Authors can insert their own GA code so they get reporting on their modules.

Kathi

As for anyone getting irked about the usage being tracked, well, that would be completely out of keeping with the spirit of OER to my way of thinking. The more data we get about reuse the more case there is to support it and the greater the benefit to everyone.

Best of luck with the work.