Learning repositories should support better management and sharing of teaching and learning materials by individual lecturers. Feedback from consultation suggests learning material comprises two different sorts of content. Firstly a wealth of ‘day-to-day’ content produced by lecturers and uploaded to local institutional VLEs. Secondly quality assured material that is uploaded to repositories with more highly controlled policies.
Overall, there is agreement that it would be beneficial for closed content to be opened up. The existing national open access learning materials repository (Jorum) needs to be well populated with quality assured content. In parallel a UK network of institutional learning materials repositories could be established with common interfaces to support sharing and re-use in institutional VLEs and Open Educational Resources initiatives. This would assist discipline based access to aggregated learning material content. Data flow needs to be established between institutional repositories and Jorum.
It would be useful to have QAA good management guidelines for learning materials.This would contribute to establishing the role of the learning materials curator. There is an ongoing debate in relation to quality assessment of learning materials, curators of learning materials need to address QA within their policies.
A baseline survey is needed of where we are now. In common with other repository content types, metrics for measuring progress need to be established.
There is a need to articulate the open access agenda to fit with learning and teaching terminology, currently the OA vocabulary does not fit. There is a need to investigate the requirements for different types of learning material repositories. A recent JISC study1 reported on improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials, the intention being to develop business cases for sharing and re use of learning material, and to identify where there are gaps in this evidence base.
The relation between individual institutional repositories, as well as between IRs and national repository services such as Jorum and Intute is unclear. The recent JISC OER programme may address some of the issues around sharing and aggregation. Similarly the relation between learning materials repositories and recently emerging Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives needs clarification. There has been a lot of OER activity internationally e.g. OpenLearn at the Open University, MIT OpenCourseWare, Rice University Connexions as well as activity in China and Japan. The background to OER and details of these recent initiatives are outlined in a CETIS briefing paper.2 There needs to be consideration as to how repositories might support OER initiatives, and how ‘legacy repositories’ such as Jorum might be integrated with OER implementations.
There is little being done about discovery of learning materials. Learning materials repositories would benefit from guidelines on disclosing their content to search engines. Some OERs (but not all?) have open access policy enabling re-use see LabSpace3 enabling re-use of OpenLearn material at the Open University.
Thinking around the role of repositories in relation to learning material is less mature than that around research outputs. There is an underlying need to examine the case for curation of learning materials, whether management of learning materials offers benefits at the institutional and national levels. There has been less repository related activity within the learning community. A number of milestones emerged in the Review discussion, all of which could be investigated in more detail.
- Identify best practice for the management (including discovery, access and re-use) of learning materials at disciplinary, regional and national levels.
- Establish rewards and incentives for sharing.
- Set up measures for progress and impact.
- Integrate repositories with VLEs and e-portfolios.
- Work with QAA towards adherence to guidelines for good management of learning materials.
- Facilitate deposit of learning materials in repositories.
- Explore how different learning materials repositories might interact and in particular how Open Educational Resource initiatives fit with repository initiatives.
- McGill, L.., Currier,S., Duncan, C., Douglas,P. Good intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials, December 2008. http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/265/1/goodintentionspublic.pdf []
- Yuan,L., MacNeill,S., Kraan,W. Open Educational Resources – Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education. CETIS, 2008. []
- http://labspace.open.ac.uk/ []