Blackboard, Midlands User Group, Northampton

Julian Beckton Blackboard, Technology , ,

Being fairly recent converts  to Blackboard, I’ve always thought that it would be useful to get involved with  the local user groups, and I have been to a couple of Midlands User Groups meetings.  So, I hired a car and took a couple of colleagues to Northampton University (Evidently, “local” these days is a fairly relative term!)

The usual format of the meetings is that there is usually a brief update from members on issues that are currently of interest, so the proceedings started with me being put on the spot! I discussed our experience of lumpers and splitters, which seemed to generate some interest – well,  some nods of recognition anyway! There were some questions about what our largest lumped course was, which I can’t answer yet, because we haven’t enrolled any students. But it seems that, based on other institutions’ experiences there are performance issues with large courses, specifically relating to archiving, copying, assessment and gathering course statistics.

There was a lot of interest from other presenters in Safe Assign  in particular as a competitor to Turnitin. The Blackboard representatives there were very cagey about what exactly Safe Assign could search. One reason given was that if students knew this they would know where not to copy from. Reflecting on this in the car on the journey home we thought that this was a bit odd – if students are that sophisticated in their plagiarism, that is, choosing and synthesising sources and rewriting them, they weren’t that far from doing proper academic work!  More pragmatically there was some criticism of Safe assign  on the grounds that it was a one-shot process, i.e. it doesn’t let you resubmit the same assignment

Northampton demonstrated  a blended learning course based on the e-tivities idea. Essentially it appears that they’re using wikis, blogs syllabuses and Scholar,  (Students upload their own work to this and link to each others’ projects). They’ve provided course material on how to use wikis and blogs (Students use the blog as a reflective diary)  There has been considerable interest in using this type of approach from other schools in the University.

It was also interesting to note that we have been comparatively fortunate in that we have been able to invest in a comprehensive package with Blackboard. One colleague reported that they were just piloting  the learning objects LX pack for distance learners for example, and another reported on their recent acquisition of the Content System.

Another interesting issue came from Cranfield University who had similar problems to us in some respects –  at least in terms of the splitters. All their taught courses are 12 months – teaching tends to all happen early on,  and then students go away to work on dissertations. It is obviously very difficult to integrate the gradebook in this context. So they were looking for a way to make gradebook easier to use for academic staff. They employed a graduate from a previous year to redesign the course with quite interesting results stripped down the navigation for example – quite dramatically in many cases. The view was taken that students did not need all the links that a typical course provided, which bears out my own view that we do tend to overengineer learning technology.  (Having multiple ways to do the same thing makes it a bit like those adverts that say “more information on our web site, and when you go there it’s exactly the same information)  They ended up merging courses into single sites (not unlike our lumping) One interesting comment was that many academic staff had no idea where in Bb to load content! They had a publicity drive on this but it had had very little effect. Although, I’m not quite clear what if any changes they made to the gradebook as a result of this.

Another theme that came out of the discussions was the extensive interest shown in the e-portfolio tools, for assessment, rather than for PDP purposes. We’ve hidden these because we want to emphasise Pebble Pad for personal development planning. I think PebblePad remains a much stronger product, for PDP but I wonder if we shouldn’t spend a bit more time looking at portfolios as an alternative assessment tool.

One of the strengths of these meetings is that they are attended by representatives from Blackboard and we were presented with a Blackboard Road Map. In truth I’d seen quite a lot of this before (at the Blackboard Users Conference at Durham) but there do appear to be some quite convincing reasons for moving to Blackboard v8.0 , not least because Safe Assign and Scholar, Blackboard’s social bookmarking tool are integrated into it.  We could have the latter as a plug in but it would seem more sensible to have a complete product rather than a loose association of tools. Of course, the counter argument is that we’ve hardly tested our current version of Bb in anger yet, so there’s a risk in upgrading. Having said that Blackboard 8.0 is largely a back end upgrade, so there shouldn’t be many customer facing issues.

Beyond that it was quite interesting to get a corporate perspective on higher education.  Some of the slides were quite interesting  one interesting phrase I noticed was “Education= Economic and social health”, which suggested a rather instrumental approach to education. (Nothing about the discovery or  production of knowledge, for example)

 Blackboard say that they’re “not so much about the technology but about how the technology is used” and their strategy is to focus on student achievement. So they don’t see themselves as just a software company. They focus on three strands, “learn”, “transact”, and “connect”. (Learn is our area) – but  Bb claim to be 100% focussed on education and about moving from e-learning to e-culture. An informed e-culture to boot! (That wouldn’t be 100% on education then!)  Which made me think that the leadership awareness of e-culture could be an issue for many insitutions.  How far are senior management realistically able to keep up with the cultural change that technological affordances bring about? Blackboard do seem to be aware of this and are working towards assessment methodologies, not only of individuals,  but also of institutions, programmes, and courses, and that this requires academic and administrative levels of engagement and assessment. They also showed an awareness of web 2.0 with a tool for integration with Facebook (although we tested this, and it didn’t work – In fairness that maybe because our firewalls are blocking it.)

They also mentioned EduGarage, which is their developer network. This seems to work on open source principles, which I’m all in favour of although I’m not entirely clear about the exact nature of licensing model. But if we have people who are involved in development work, we should probably get involved.

We then returned to the member’s upgrades. Alot of this was about institutional contexts. Leicester had merged MIS/CS into a single IT services department and had also had to merge their two VLEs into Blackboard. This was problematic because they had to integrate Question Mark into Blackboard – but  it transpired QM have no commitment to upgrading their connector to Blackboard. There’s maybe a lesson for us about tying into 3rd party tools there. Having said that Leicester have bought Wimba, (which gives inter alia voice discussion boards .) Turnitin and others. They’re also planning to integrate with Facebook – initially using the Bb plug in.

Blackboard pointed out that they can keep 3rd party tools up to date if need be, although this would inevitably come at a price.

There followed a bit of a debate about how VLE’s are being used and supported. One telling point was made about how Resource Allocation Models tend to see teaching as “standing in front of a class” Preparing a wiki for example, is not seen as valuable an activity in terms of resourcing. (Neither for that matter is preparing a Blackboard Course)

There then followed another useful update from Dudley College. They’re running  WebCT and have been for a while. They appeared to be more interested in e-portfolios, again, more for assessment than for PDP type activities. But of particular interest to us I think, was their model of staff development. They’re running a 2 week on-line course for academic staff – to showcase what sort of things can be done with the software. This will count  towards staff CPD – they have to log in for a couple of hours each day. They’re also producing a CD-ROM for staff  with video guides on how to do stuff and have also produced a selection of flash games, which can be edited by the simple expedient of editing a text file. THe intention is that staff can customise the games to the needs of their own discipline.

In the afternoon (after an excellent lunch!) an “award winning” Blackboard course on Plagiarism that had been developed by Northampton was demonstrated. (The award was a “Blackboard Exemplary Award” whatever that might be. I’m a little bit sceptical when I see the phrase award winning these days, because there appear to be awards for just about everything. – I’m waiting for the first “award winning awards ceremony”)

Anyway. The aim of the course was to to ensure that every student gets the same message about plagiarism which can then be refned and dealt with in a specific way and present plagiarism in a positive light (Is it a Development issue or is it a Disciplinary issue). They used the metaphor of a degree course as an academic journey with hazards being littered along the route – successful study is about knowing how to avoid them. The destination is related to the type of skills you need for a particular degree. There are also links to personal development planning.It’s essentially a linear course – students work down the buttons on the left hand side. Rightly I think they tried not to just focus on plagiarism – shouldn’t be too threatening – instead the focus is on academic integrity and why it’s important. Of course you can’t avoid talking about academic misconduct but this is introduced later on and is talked about in the sense of not being fair, or in terms of gaining an unfair advantage. Issues like helping a friend in a crisis were also covered. Is this collusion?   The course also includes interactive demonstrations of what plagiarism might look like and the course finishes with a chance for students to submit to Turnitin at the end.  But no tutor sees the originality report- which made me wonder how  feedback was given. The course was quite well received by students who have suggested that it be made compulsory.

This is the kind of idea that we might take forward with Bb. The Virtual Campus had a set of generic skills support materials involved, and Blackboard seems to have the potential to support more of this kind of work. The question is how can it be slotted in to existing courses. I’m a little wary of having a huge list of skills courses on the front page.

There was then another presentation from Blackboard on what is rather pretentiously called “Project Next Generation”.
Release 8 not a big interface upgrade but includes Safe assign, Scholar, Self and peer assessment tools, and an enhanced gradebook. Next generation (or “Release 9” to mere mortals!) still has the familiar tabs, but has some extra functionality, such as drag & drop capability on modules making it easier to redesign the front page. It also integrates Sakai and Moodle courses into a module – so if you’ve been working in Moodle, you can simply import your Moodle course into BB)

There’s also an instructor Dashboard which  has a traffic light interface – e.g. Red might show alerts about students  who have problems, yellow shows you things you should be doing in the next couple of days (e.g. notifying students about due dates) and green just shows you standard announcements. There is also the ability to create role specific tabs, so you could, if you wanted have a tab just for external examiners, that showed them the courses that they were marking. You can also have modules that are specific to your course. It’s also integrated with Facebook so that you can get Blackboard alerts when you’re in Facebook It also appears that frames have been replaced with modules – so a course menu might appear in another module. (I wasn’t entirely clear how this would work to be quite honest.) I did like the fact that it had an explorer type view available, which shows the icons for all your files.  (Interestingly this is known as the “WebCT view”  by Blackboard staff, which says something about the history of VLEs and how features move from one to another.)

The portfolio tool also looked much improved containing employer information, educational journal, reflective blog and a gallery. But on being asked for further and better particulars the presenter rather sheepishly admitted that what was being presented on screen was just a mock up and not yet available.

They finished with a mention of the Blackboard Ideas exchange, which appears to be rather similar to the developer community – This needs further investigation on our part, as I suspect it could be quite useful. Although I dare say we’d need to take some ideas ourselves!

The meeting finished with an Open Session at which people presented their wish list.

There was some discussions about Wikis – former WebCT users can’t use the Learning Objects LX plug in

A question was raised about the use of the peer and self assessment tool in group assignments – Apparently you can’t assign an assessment to a specific group. (or student)

 There was a request for a batch unenroll tool. This can be done in snapshot, but that isn’t a convenient method for many users.

Course test generation is apparently problematic on large sites, as is archiving courses. It seems that Bb is not really  designed for large courses, but we’d like it to be better able to cope with them. One solution might be to schedule complex tasks such as archiving for quiet downtime. It was also suggested that it would be useful to have some sort of warning that embarking on such a task will have consequences for system performance.

A request was made for the provision of section breaks in Blackboard pages. I didn’t really see why the syllabus tool couldn’t be used to achieve that though. 

Finally another request was made for more group functionality. It would be useful to make the group tool a little bit easier to use. Bb representatives talked about the community system as one way of communicating with groups, but I don’t think that was quite the point. On the other hand the group tool is very powerful, and I can see users tying themselves in knots with it as it isn’t terribly intuitive.

All in all a very worthwhile meeting, with a great deal of food for thought. In some respects I was quite impressed with how far we’ve come in such a short time, but of course we’re not really using it in anger yet. I think it’s definitely worth keeping up with the group, and I think all of us were slightly disappointed that the next meeting isn’t until Easter 2009

 

First picture!

Julian Beckton Blogging

Brayford Pool, Lincoln, The University on the RightI’m still finding my way around the blogging software and I got curious about inserting images. Seems easy enough to do, and this is just a test picture of the University of Lincoln next to the Brayford Pool. The Main University Building is the one with the twin concrete blocks on the right. I’m typing this from a position slightly out of shot, roughly three floors above the red narrowboat!

 

 

Julian Beckton Uncategorized

Attended the launch of our undergraduate research opportunity scheme today, which went very well. One of the speakers was a former student who had just completed his own MA. He gave us a nice quote which rings true. – “Research is about not knowing what the hell you’re doing” (Or something like that. I don’t remember the exact phrase) But it certainly felt like that over the past five years, (Still does!)

Well, actually no it doesn’t. I think I do know what I’m doing, although at the risk of sounding like an over eager Victorian curate,  I do have doubts all the time. I wonder, for example whether I can really make a convincing conceptual framework out of the functional, structural and behavioural models of the University. It’s just that there’s so much to write about in each model, and I can’t see how I’m going to get it all within the word limit. Or anywhere near. Yes, certainly, if a word, sentence or paragraph isn’t focussed on the research questions then get rid of it, but that’s still nowhere near short enough. I suppose the next thing might be to lose one or more of the research questions. But having spent so much time justifying why they’re important, I’m a bit reluctant to do that either.  Although of course, once you start writing you can lose focus and get carried away and start pontificating. That’s one reason why we revise academic work,  I guess. I suspect that the secret is to be patient and see what I come out with.

 

Edupunk

Julian Beckton Higher Education , , ,

We’re currently working on a bid under the recent JISC circular inviting calls for proposals to improve curriculum design processes and the reading around for this is throwing up some interesting material. 

When you start thinking about a higher education curriculum, you realise that the design process has been hijacked into a highly normative and deontic process. You must do this, tick that quality box, get your design validated by some external worthy at a day long meeting in preparation for which several kilograms of paper has been distributed. It’s not that quality assurance is a bad thing. Manifestly, it isn’t. But, I do think we’ve lost sight of why we have curricula in the first place.

Reading around for the bid I was very taken by some blog posts talking about the notion of “edupunk”. This is essentially the idea that education should be designed primarily for learners, not for institutions, and most certainly not for vote seeking politicians. This post in particular was quite thought provoking, (and has given me a nice suggestion for my next book to read)  – http://bavatuesdays.com/the-glass-bees/

Let’s not get carried away though. Not everyone is impressed. – http://www.dougbelshaw.com/2008/05/30/are-you-an-edupunk-im-not/

But, I do think that there is a danger of focussing so much on technology in HE, whether there for curriculum design or anything else that we lose sight of what it’s for.  And by “technology”, I don’t just mean computers – I mean techniques, processes, and procedures.

Remodelling Teaching, Rethinking Education

Julian Beckton Higher Education , ,

CERD organised a one day conference on this topic today, and it proved a very interesting day indeed. I’m not going to say too much here, because we do intend to provide much more information about the day, including papers from the speakers via the web. From my point of view, the first presentation from Professor Mike Bottery of the University of Hull, proved particularly interesting. He was talking about the deprofessionalisation of teaching, or more accurately how teachers are moving away from being regarded as professionals (with all the rights to set one’s own agenda that that implies) to “branded technicians” – essentially people charged with delivering a set of specific competencies to meet a particular demand for a particular type of education. As this is my blog I’m going to reflect on the relevance of is to my own work, which is that this is precisely my concern about what we were being asked to do in the old TLDO. The whole agenda seemed to me that academics were seen as failing to come up with the goods, whereas in my view they quite obviously weren’t. (Also nobody seemed to know exactly what “the goods” were!) and we were faced with pushing a lot of unconvincing agendas about PDP, and skills for example that relatively few people seemed particularly interested in.  The challenge for the EDU is to reclaim its credibility as a professional support mechanism, and I think we are now going some way to doing that by communicating more with our own clients than with external agendas. (Not that the external agenda has gone away, of course.)  The last speaker, Michael Apple also picked up on this. issue, but he was much more concerned with how educational institutions engaged (or rather didn’t) with their communities. He gave the example of how communities in Brazil had incorporated street gangs, (who previously had been excluded, not altogether surprisingly)  into local decision making processes. Clearly that’s an extreme example, but he did suggest that Universities tend to exclude a lot of people who are absolutely essential to their work, (building, catering, gardening, secretarial, staff and so forth) from decision making processes, and they might benefit from a more inclusive approach.  Coincidentally I had occasion to visit another University recently where I noticed that the development unit formally made provision for these staff, and the development programme was structured in the same way as it was for everyone else. Well, it’s not much but it’s a start.

The other two sessions, were a very interesting debate about Rethinking Higher Education presented by Professor Mike Neary, of Lincoln and Dr Glenn Rikowski from Northampton, and a session on workforce reform, social partnership, and the construction of consensus. This last was very much about the research into Trade Union involvement in workplace remodelling in schools, and in truth I didn’t feel I had, or have a lot to bring to this debate. (A deplorably instrumentalist attitude no doubt, but there you are!)  On the other hand, the Rethinking HE session was quite thought provoking, arguing that universities should be the sites of co-production of critical knowledge on the part of both of staff and students. I don’t disagree, but I do worry about the replacement of one orthodoxy with another. Mike was talking about the notion of Mass Intellectuality, or Marx’s notion of the general intellect. The latter gives me pause for thought. I don’t think Marx meant any sort of singular Orwellian “newspeak” or “new intellect” but it’s easy to be interpreted that way. I suppose the same goes for mass intellectuality, but at least that seems to me to accomodate multiple viewpoints.  I think I just have a natural antipathy to anything that smacks of mob rule, and am  rather uneasy with anything that  might facilitate it.

The other thing I was a bit dubious about was beginning with the quotation “We work but we produce nothing” which apparently comes from the student revolts of 1968. But that falls into the trap of believing that corporeality is an essential property of “something”. Work always produces something – even if it’s just a headache! In this case I find it hard to believe that the students’ work did not produce at the very least  a new sense of self among themselves.  (and that quotation, come to think of it!).  There’s a lot more to think about here, though, and I think I need to take it to my research blog for that kind of reflective consideration.

Where does CERD go. Well, we’ve taken some steps towards working with students. Perhaps we should start to give some thought to the needs of the wider university workforce. Let’s face it without the catering staff’s coffee the place wouldn’t run at all!

Data Collection has begun!

Julian Beckton Research , ,

Well, I did my first case study interview today – lots to note, and a huge transcription job to do over the weekend, but I do feel that I’ve passed a milestone. In truth I’ve been struggling a bit with my introductory chapters, but given the fact that actually visiting the case study involved a total of 6 hours on trains I was able to get a bit of reading done which helped me focus in a bit. I can’t say too much about the interview, and the field notes I took at the site as I have promised them anonymity, so I’ll be starting a private blog/research diary, where I can include photos and site related comments.

One of the things I can say, which came out of my reading rather than the visit was that perhaps I need not spend so much time trying to pin down the idea of the University. I’ve been getting slowly more convinced that there is no single idea of the University and that we have to work within a complex framework of multiple models. There were a few pointers in the interview that suggested that too.

The other interesting, and relatively successful feature of the day my use of digital recorders to record the interview. Previously I’ve used an ancient analogue cassette recorder but I bought a digital recorder some time ago, and was quite impressed, but didn’t realise at the time that files on that particular model weren’t downloadable to a PC.I have since bought a second which does have a USB port, and transferred the file to my PC in seconds (31mb, but there you go.) I had both recorders running in the interview and they both worked – nothing like belt and braces!  Interestingly when I did copy the file onto my PC it didn’t want to convert it to MP3 – which could be the audio cleaning software I’m using, but I’m too tired to investigate now.  I’ve been out of the house for 13 hours and tidying up work stuff and blogging since I got back, so I think it would be wise to sign off for now.

Digg

Julian Beckton Web 2.0

One of the things we do is look at various social bookmarking and web 2.0 sites that may have some potential for teaching and learning. Today it was the turn of Digg. http://digg.com.   This is one of the major social bookmarking sites, and you quite often see “Digg this” on web sites. The idea is that people submit sites they find interesting, and the most popular ones are revealed on the home page. But the real strength is that you can build a network of “friends” (a bit like Facebook) and you all share your favourite sites. You can also comment on stories, videos and podcasts.

There are some obvious applications for this in education. It would be easy to get a class to  work together to create a critically reviewed network of sites on a particular topic. Digg also offers the oppoprtunity to “bury” sites with broken links, inaccurate information and so forth.  That way the site is kept up to date with reliable information. The point is it’s all user generated – the wisdom of crowds I suppose. I haven’t done much more than join this morning, but I hope to be back with reviews later when I’ve had the chance to use it in anger!

Todoist. A useful time management tool

Julian Beckton Web 2.0 ,

I spent most of yesterday morning showing a colleague from the library round the various social networking sites, and while explaining about widgets that sites like netvibes and iGoogle use, I discovered todoist. (http://www.todoist.com) This is effectively a little to do list manager, which rather than just providing a basic notepad requires you to think in terms of projects – you then add tasks to each project, and the dates on which you’re going to complete them. The iGoogle widget then shows you a calendar for the next few days with the things you have to do.

The downside is that the interface is a bit clunky (very clunky actually), and everytime you update something you have to refresh the page- At least in the iGoogle widget you do. But I do like the way it makes you think about a whole project and what you have to do to complete it. I’m still getting used to it and as I’ve so many different projects on the go, it’s quite a job in itsesf to break them down into manageable chunks.

Some progress!

Julian Beckton Research

At last! Access to one of my research sites. Haven’t heard from the second yet, and the response to my request gave the impresssion that they hadn’t quite understood what I’d asked for, but still, let’s not get carried away. I can’t do too much too soon, and an “in” is an “in”. So I’m grateful for what I’ve got. Now of course I must knuckle down to designing my research protocol and really getting the questions I want to ask off pat.

Draw Project meeting, Worcester

Julian Beckton Repositories, Technology

I’m attending a meeting organised by the DRAW project, another of the JISC repository programmes. The main theme of the meeting is about the use of Repositories for learning and teaching materials, specifically discussing whether they’re different from research objects, how to increase the take up of repositories for storing such things and whether a different approach is required.

We started with a presentation from Andrew Rothery, Worcester’s project directory, outlining the differences between learning and teaching material (will update later)

Then I gave a brief account of our experiences, stressing the bottom up approach – we really have gone down the road of scratching a particular need, (i.e. architecture’s) and I think we’re going to have to do quite a lot of advocacy work with other faculties…

Then Steve Burholt from Oxford Brookes described the Circle project – http://mw.brookes.ac.uk/display/circle for more details. What was of particular interest here was the fact that they are using Intralibrary’s VLE plug in -This is the sort of thing we were hoping to have with E-prints, but haven’t been able to develop. Essentially you call up a repository resource and there’s an option to add it to the VLE. (although we actually wanted it to work the other way too.)

Sarah Hayes from Worcester is currently talking about the difficulties they are having with populating their L&T repository (Google Analytics shows virtually no-one looked at it in the last month) They’re responding by investigating what staff find useful – one option is that staff can choose who can see their materials, on the grounds that there appears to be some evidence that staff are less comfortable about sharing their teaching resources with the wider world. Another approach is for repository staff to upload student dissertations, course handbooks, podcasts, and possibly even external collections to make a useful resource for staff. She also talked about Web 2.0 Ideas, but hasn’t expanded. http://www.worc.ac.uk/drawproject

Next up was Sarah Malone from Derby’s Pocket Project (which I have to confess I’d never heard of) who explained what the Pocket project was about and asked for interest from other institutions. The project is about converting existing materials into Open content, and sounds very much as though we should investigate it, given our interest in Open Source

Then there was quite an interesting presentation from Helen Westmancoat who is working on a repository for York St. John University. Their approach is interesting because they’re populating their repository with existing content – for example there’s a fascinating sounding oral history project on the memories of women in East Coast fishing communities and they’re storing all the transcripts and audio files collected by the researcher. That sounds like a fairly conventional research approach admittedly, but there are two points here – Firstly, the researcher is committed to the repository as a means of attracting further funding, and more importantly, there is something to show other potential users, and this, apparently, has some effect in raising the repository’s profile.

Helen was followed by Phil Barker from JISC CETIS who asked a few provocative questions about what are repositories for and argued that if they were to take off, there needed to be some sort of shared understanding of their purpose in the HE community. He introduced another topic that became important that of “sharing”. Repositories are often seen as a “safe place to put stuff” but in fact their role in sharing teaching resources was as, if not more, important because it enabled staff to help each other. One relevant issue that was raised here was the situation where staff in the same faculty have to enrol in each others courses if they want to know what material they’re using on Blackboard. (Sounds familiar?) The repository could help with this – after all all you would need would be a set of links from the Content Store to the repository.

Then we had David Millard from the Faroes project at Southampton (No expense had been spared!) The most telling  point he raised was that there was a serious mismatch between what repositories were offering and everyday teaching life. For example most users aren’t interested in metadata, but that’s the first thing they see in many repositories. They’re working on something called PuffinShare  (There’s no web site yet, but that’s a link to a slide show that explains the thinking behind it)  Equally most users don’t know (or care) what a manifest file is, they don’t have digital resources to share, or at least not immediately to hand, so the PuffinShare project attempts to simplify. Among the attractive features are

1) Previewing online (well, up to a point, we’ve done that with our multimedia abstract) But it takes it a bit further because there is no need to download a resource – it can just be used in the repository.

2) Web 2.0 Style tools – e.g. commenting.  But the comments are structured, along the lines of “I would improve this resource by…” rather than just allowing open comments

3) Users have a profile – a sort of self authenticating idea, not a million miles from the seller ratings on Ebay (WOuld you trust a repository item deposited by this person?)

4) There’s a “promiscuous” search engine. (i.e. it searches everything)

The point of all this is that users need to be provided with a working space that meets their needs rather than just being a “dusty old repository” to use David’s phrase. That doesn’t mean it’s not a repository – rather that we shouldn’t be too precious about the term. After all MIT’s release of all their teaching material is in effect simply opening their repository to the public.

Well, I’ve finally got back, and now I’ve had time to reflect on what was really a very useful meeting, I think it was one of those rare occasions where something was actually achieved. We spent the afternoon session discussing what advice we’d give to some one who was starting up a learning object repository, and came up with this initial list.

  1. Decide what its for
  2. Look at other implementations
  3. Make it as search engine friendly as possible (Because that is how most people will come to it)
  4. Don’t obsess about quality control. Use the repository to promote good stuff over bad, but don’t reject stuff you think is bad
  5. Seed the repository with high quality content (An idea we might usefully adopt with material from each faculty)
  6. Build into new staff induction from Day 1 (I’m not so sure about this one personally, but then I’m sceptical about overloaded inductions anyway)
  7. Be very clear about your IPR and other policies & Procedures
  8. Stress both the hosting and sharing capabilities
  9. Keep it simple. Decide what metadata is for.
  10. Use what teaching staff are already doing
  11. Know your audience
  12. Digitise paper archives (see 5)
  13. Make early access decisions (Who can get access to it, who can’t)
  14. Think about incentives/rewards
  15. Don’t separate teaching/learning materials from research materials
  16. Start with a small manageable collection
  17. Make sure you’re solving users’ problems
  18. Make sure it works!
  19. Ensure successful interface and integration with other systsme
  20. Make sureyou have adequate staff resource
  21. Business model for the whole enterprise
  22. Think about your position with regard to liability
  23. Be prepared for a lot of hard work

Essentially it’s not just a matter of installing software and claiming you have a repository. It’s a matter of installing the software and starting work.

All this is going to be revised by the Draw team and  circulated, with a view to becoming a rather more authoritative statement than I have been able to come up with here.