This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Better metadata for Stellar materials
Classes from Stellar can be imported into OCW. OCW uses a different nav bar. That caused a problem: On the imports the OCW workers had to figure out how to sort a big pile of Stellar 'materials' into their categories of kinds of documents.
To help solve that problem we made the 'kind of document' metadata options for each document added to Stellar match OCW's categories. But instructors weren't bothering to change the default - "readings" - so the problem wasn't solved.
We then made it possible to use the OCW nav bar in Stellar. This presents a usability problem though - students have too many places to look to see if new materials are added. Not a problem in OCW, because the sites are static. But a Stellar user needs to visit the site regularly, and they shouldn't have to comb through many pages looking for the new stuff (the new Stellar RSS feeds will help solve problem). Instructors again chose to stick to the Stellar default.
Last semester we started requiring instructors to pick a 'kind of document' when adding something to materials. There is no default, so they have to choose. I felt a little bad about this, because it slows them down. But guess what? It works!
I just picked 5 Stellar classes at random (admittedly not a big sample when there are 383 class websites for Spring 2005 but I have other work to do).
- 3.044 - Materials Processing
- BE.010 - Intro to Bioengineering
- 9.02 - Brain Laboratory
- 12.007 - Geobiology
- 11.432/15.427 - Real Estate Capital Markets
Each of these classes marked their materials quite nicely. They have a nice diversity of 'kinds of documents.' 9.02 had mostly readings, but on inspection they really were readings. Check this out: every single one indicated which document was their syllabus. That's a big win right there.
3.044 was the only one to use the OCW nav bar, but interestingly they also use the all-inclusive materials page. I'm not sure that's a great solution for usability (that nav bar is way too long) but perhaps they feel they are getting the best of both worlds. I don't think they classified their documents any better than the others. They all did a good job.
Just little user-generated-metadata success story.