MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Following on from my initial investigation into the Learning Registry I have spent a little time looking into how we could use learning registry resources within the Newcastle curriculum mapping tool Dynamic Learning Maps (DLMs).

In order to redisplay resources within DLMs we decided it would be best to store a local copy of the node data within DLMs rather then querying the node on request, both for performance and to enable us to perform further processing on the data, which is not yet available via the learning registry API.

Harvesting resources

In order to harvest the resources I wrote a python script within DLMs, which utilises the learning registry slice API. Currently the code:

1. Queries a learning registry node using the slice method, with a list of DLM topics as keywords.
2. Filters out any none Dublin Core elements for the time being.
3. Iterates over the returned documents and saves to DLMs: If the resource is a duplicate (based on doc_type, submitter and signer) the record is updated, otherwise a new resource is created. 
4. Creates DLM connections to the topics used as part of the slice method.

Results in DLMs

Running the harvest script with a list of sub topics from the 'Urinary Tract' topic in DLMs resulted in the 116 new resources (see the json via the learning registry). I have included a few screen shots below of a development version of DLMs, which shows how the resources are redisplayed.

Resources connected to the ‘Kidney’ topic:

Viewing a resource shows basic details about the resource and in the image below you can see the resource is connected to the jLern topic and the Kidney topic within DLMs.

Learning registry entry for ‘Kidney tutorial’ (see this resource via the learning registry API):

Searching DLMs for ‘Kidney’ returns both curriculum content and resources from the learning registry:

What’s next?

• One caveat is that the resources returned might not be in the context you expect, some additional checking would need to be put in place, such as a list of trusted publishers/sources.
• Add in the harvesting of activity data (comments and ratings).
• Modify the publish code I previously worked to push open DLM resources and activity data to the Jlern node.
• The aim is to set the script to run as a scheduled task on the public version of DLMs as an initial demo.