MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Over the course of PublishOER, RIDLR and SupOERGlue projects we have been busy adding several new features to Dynamic Learning Maps. The past couple of weeks have been spent pulling together the new development work in order to deploy an updated version of the DLMs public demo website.

In addition to the features already blogged about, which have included a public API, OAI-PMH support, harvesting JLeRN resources and ePub integration, we have added the following functionality.

Integration with OER bookmarking resources

Dynamic learning maps has now been successfully integrated with the FavOERites OER bookmarking tool. The integration has two main functions and allows:

1. DLMs to retrieve OER bookmarks via an API, creating/updating DLM resource objects for relevant bookmarks and attaching the resource to relevant nodes within DLMs, the code also exchanges comments between the two systems.
2. Bookmarking of openly licensed DLM resources within FavOERites. You can view the results of the latest upload and also see a sample python script to see how it was achieved via the FavOERites API. 

Open Search

The Search function within DLMs has now been enhanced to include external resources as part of the results. This has been by combining API calls to SupOERGlue partner Open Tapestry and FavOERites. The combined resources are given a relevance score, ordered and displayed as part of the search results (see below).

Social Authentication

Social authentication has now been added to DLMs, allowing you to access the demo website via your Twitter, Facebook, Google and Yahoo accounts.

OAI-PMH harvesting of Learning Registry resources

The new OAI-PMH functionality has also enabled an alternate method of submitting resources to a learning registry node as part of the RIDLR project. Based on the learning registry OAI documentation, a python script has been created which uses DLMs OAI feed to submit resources to a node.

Upgraded DLMs to django 1.4

Dynamic Learning Maps uses the django framework for python as its main development tool. The version of django, which Dynamic Learning Maps runs on, has been upgraded from 1.1 to 1.4, allowing us access to many functionality updates and infrastructure benefits.