If you’ve been following the Talis Incubator for Open Education project, you’ll know that we’ve been extremely excited by the project, and by the many applications which have been made. Through the Incubator project, Talis is providing Angel Funding and support for projects that further Open Education. The review board has been working through the various proposals, and we are happy to announce 8 finalists. As Talis’ Education programme manager, Chris Clarke explains:

“Each of our finalists has demonstrated that they care about and understand the growing impact of Open Education. I’m thrilled by the prospect that, through the Talis Incubator open source funding model, we can assist in helping them make a significant contribution to new innovation in this area in an inclusive, and most significantly, open way that’s directly relevant to the spirit of this movement.”

So, here is a round-up of the finalists with a bit about what they are proposing to build through the Talis Incubator for Open Education.

Drawtivity

Webducate’s “Drawtivity” project would bring reuse of images the the fore by giving an interactive level to static images. The Drawtivity interface would allow a user to indicate the path of a particular part of an image (for example, tracing the anatomical entity mentioned in a question), and provide feedback. They point out that many web-based resources are difficult to re-purpose or adapt, leaving them static and only really useful for their original intentions. Drawtivity would allow for other electronic resources to integrate with it, leading to many drawing-based learning activities through the web.

Improve Content Transport, Reuse and Dissemination with OCW/OER Materials

EnPraxis’ entry would be a web-based service that would allow the publishing, editing and conversion of Open Education Resources in a variety of formats. This would let anyone working on a wide variety of projects on different platforms to share resources and for institutions, students and teachers to pull their chosen format. They also plan a local version, which works when internet access is unavailable.

Moodle Course Repository

Joseph Thibault and his team comprising freelance developers and local software companies plans to build a repository of every Moodle site ever made. Moodle is an Open Source Virtual Learning Environment with over 33 million users, and Joseph and his team would create a Moodle module which would allow course creators to easily open up their content, turning them from “closed” learning courses into open education resources which can be used much more widely. The Team behind this course repository would also ensure no personal data would be opened (such as user information), so that the resources could be shared safely.

OER Starter Kit

Unobtanium Labs, the company behind the project “Knotebooks” plans to develop a scalable framework for publishing Open Education Resources via a standardised OER platform. The framework would allow developers to hook together their various resources via an API into a wide network of connected courses and material. The framework would also include an “OER Starter Kit” to help resource creators quickly become part of an interoperable network. The open framework and Starter Kit would also be based on the existing Knotebooks platform.

OER Link

Dr Björn Haßler has brought together an NGO, a university, initiatives and Open Education projects together across Zambia for the OERlink proposal. Building on existing networks and projects, OERlink seeks to address many of the most pressing hindrances to Zambian open education. Although computing devices are becoming increasingly common across Africa, the connectivity needed to share resources is far from reliable. By applying current successful technologies (such as Peer to Peer sharing and podcast-like offline usage models) to educational resources, OERlink plans to encourage further development of local educational resources and support the projects already available.

OPACPress

Joss Winn and his teams from the University of Lincoln and Plymouth State University propose OPACPress: turning WordPress MU (multi-user) into a semantically-rich OPAC (online public access catalogue) platform. By bringing together tried technologies such as the Scriblio WordPress-based CMS and OPAC and the Talis Platform, Winn’s team would essentially turn library catalogues into blogs, which can be easily published and cross linked with one another. The linked nature of the information within OPACPress would allow it to act as a platform for millions of library records to be accessed and used through established tools such as facetted browsing and search. The use cases outlined for OPACPress include non-academics searching for hobby or work topics, and being introduced to complimentary information at local library branches or academic institutions.

TwHistory

The TwHistory project looks at the world’s events through the eyes of twitter: short messages conveying the essentials of historical occurrences from a number of participants. By assigning historical figures (such as leaders at the battle of Gettysburg) twitternames, the reenactment can be followed live as the characters tweet events drawn from texts, letters and accounts. The TwHistory team proposes a new web-based application which makes the twitter-retelling of history a more streamlined process. Allowing users to follow the entire event through a simple interface, for example, would make it easier to follow more stories and by building a framework around characters and scheduled tweets, more historical events could be retold.

Learning foreign languages based on Wiktionary

Andrew Krizhаnovsky, a researcher from St. Petersberg would like to let people learn foreign languages using the community-powered nature of Wictionaries. Wictionary (one for each language), like Wikipedia, allows for crowd-sourcing of word definitions and meanings. By turning this data into a machine-readable dictionary, Andrew is planning to build a web-based tool which lets people play interactive games to learn languages and play with words based on the open knowledge of wictionary. Games would let people learn through selecting definitions, synonyms and even translate from one language to another—all on the back of openly-available and human-powered word definitions.

What happens next?

The review board is now finalising which of these projects will be funded. We will be announcing the winners on this blog next week, and reporting over the next few months on the progress of the winners.