Discovering Open University Content from Other Online Resources

There is a growing base of open educational content being made available online. At The Open University, this currently includes 650 units of course material on OpenLearn and 3,800 audio and video podcasts. With such content available, discoverability of educational resources becomes a major challenge.

DiscOU is a resources discovery engine relying on a semantic index of Open University Open Content. It semantically analyses the content of an online resource, and matches it by similarity to other existing Open University content to retrieve the most relevant pieces. It currently works with BBC programme pages, as demonstrated in the video below, as well as from text entered/pasted in the DiscOU alfa interface.