Community Dimensions of Learning Object Repositories Peter Douglas

CD-LOR project Funded by the JISC (June ) Lead by the Glasgow Caledonian University (Prof. Allison Littlejohn, Dr. Anoush Margaryan) Collaborators: –University of Strathclyde (Dr. David Nicol, Dr. Colin Milligan) –Intrallect Ltd. (Dr. Peter Douglas) –8 Associate partners –18 national & international collaborative partners

Project Activities CD-LOR was interested in enablers and barriers to successful uptake of LORs: –Desk Study –Survey of Repository Users (and PRMS Survey) –Community Consultation: Elicit barriers Develop Use Cases Trial and Implement Outputs –Guidelines for Curators and Managers setting up new repositories –SRU client (Open Source) –Recommendations (for policy and further work)

Barriers Socio-cultural Pedagogic Organisational & info management Technological Norms of sharing & collaboration Size and scope of community Roles and hierarchies Diversity in approaches to learning Discipline-specific resources Curriculum standardisation ICT skills and information literacy Incentives and rewards IPR, DRM, metadata Quality assurance of resources User friendly interface Effective search, storage, preview Interoperability standards

Community Dimensions Purpose - shared goal/interest of the community Dialogue - modes of communication, e.g. online, face-to-face, or mixed Roles and responsibilities Coherence - whether the community is close-knit or loosely confederated/transient Context - the broader ecology within which the community exists, e.g. professional bodies, governments Rules – e.g. ground rules of conduct, rewards and incentives mechanisms, control of access and use of resources Pedagogy of the community - for example, problem-based learning, collaborative learning.

Repository Dimensions Purpose – e.g. for sharing audio-files, or for preservation of institutional educational resources Subject area – e.g. social work, medicine Scope - departmental, institutional, national, or international Educational sector - school, higher education, further education, lifelong learning Contributors - teachers, students, publishers, support staff, JISC-funded projects Business model - business, trading and management framework underpinning repository

Structured Guidelines A “how to” guide to implement a repository which meets the needs of your users and their communities (or evaluate existing repository) Ask the right questions Consider the likely answers Understand how ‘Community Dimensions’ inter- relate. Know how to interpret the answers you get Take an iterative approach

Recommendations Better alignment between repositories and communities LORs should only be introduced if they are a solution to a problem meaningful to users Appropriate user support strategies should exist Product innovation should involve process innovation Curators should try to build multidisciplinary teams

Recommendations LO Repositories would benefit from: Stronger integration with institutional systems in particular VLEs –‘the easiest place to put my stuff’ –Integration into personal workflows Web 2.0 type capabilities, which would facilitate: –Personal management/tagging –Recommendation and usage

Relevant links Structured Guidelines for Setting up Learning Object Repositories Recommendations for future research and development in the area of Learning Object Repositories Peter Douglas: Anoush Margaryan, Allison Littlejohn Colin Milligan

Community Building Approaches How do you define/identify your communities? Existing communities vs. Building new communities Single community vs. Multiple communities Communities changing repositories/repositories changing communities Introducing new communities Open vs. closed repositories External tools vs. internal functionality What can Intrallect do? –More services/Tools integration/Additional functionality?

The questions! Question 1. Why are you setting up a learning object repository? [R- Purpose] Question 2. How many communities do you serve? [C-Composition] Question 3. What is the purpose of the community that the repository will serve? [C-Purpose] Question 4. Who are the key actors in the community and who, of these, will contribute to the repository? [C-Roles and R-Contributors] Question 5. What is the pedagogic approach of the community? [C- Pedagogy] Question 6. How coherent is the community? [C-Coherence] Question 7. What are the modes of participation and communication within the community? [C-Dialogue] Question 8. What is the ecology of the community? [C-Context] Question 9. What is the business model of the repository? [R-Business model] Question 10. How do you envision the evolution of your LOR?