Available online
KMi: Knowledge Media Institute
Officially launched in 1995, the Knowledge Media Institute (or KMi) was set up as a multi-disciplinary unit with the remit to carry out research and development into multimedia technologies that could aid teaching and learning.
It was intended from the very beginning to be “leading edge” (as Vice-Chancellor Sir John Daniel described it), and immediately gained a reputation as one of the most forward-looking and technologically-aware research departments at the OU. Developing and using new applications to allow students with disabilities to access materials was an area in which they excelled from the start.
In the audio clip on this page, you can hear Professor Marc Eisenstadt (the first Director of KMi) describing some of the earliest developments in the creation of the Institute.
In 1996, KMi launched KMi Stadium, an innovative multimedia platform that allowed webcasts and other online content to be accessed by many users. It is still used to this day to host video and audio content from lectures and events at the OU.
KMi were also greatly involved with the development of the Virtual Microscope, technology which allowed students to view simulated content in the absence of access to a physical microscope of the same technical standard.
In 2008 they were also a leading partner in the creation of an Open University channel on iTunes U (a dedicated area for educational content within Apple’s iTunes Store). Within its first year alone, iTunes U saw 10 million OU tracks downloaded.
In 2010, KMi created data.open.ac.uk, a Creative Commons database of linked data from a variety of institutional repositories in the OU, openly available for reuse. This was followed a year later by CORE (which stands for COnnecting REpositories), a collection of open access research papers from all over the globe. This repository has been incredibly successful, and is now the largest open access aggregator in the world. In 2019, CORE reached the threshold of 10 million active monthly users, making it officially the most-visited site connected with The Open University.
KMi continues to be very much at the forefront of technological research, and one of its most recent projects has been OpenBlockchain, which looks into blockchain technologies and how their application may be of value in future educational scenarios.
The image on this page features all four Directors of KMi to date, pictured at the 20th anniversary celebrations in 2015: (l-r) Professor Marc Eisenstadt, Professor Enrico Motta, Professor Peter Scott, and the current director Professor John Domingue.
