KeepIt Course module 1 for EdShare

KeepIt course module 1, Southampton, 19 January 2010
Tools this module: DAF, AIDA
Tags Find out more about: this module KeepIt course 1, the full KeepIt course
Presentation referred to in this blog entry The AIDA toolkit: Assessing Institutional Digital Assets (Slideshare)
Presentations and tutorial exercises course 1 (source files)

As Manager of EdShare, the University of Southampton share for learning and teaching, my attendance at this 5-module training programme is both to review the relevance of the modules to the work of EdShare, as well as its potential relevance to managers of educational repositories in other institutions.

EdShare is one of the exemplar repositories in the KeepIt Project – a software package based on EPrints. The focus of EdShare is the educational (learning and teaching) content produced by the University of Southampton, rather than the research outputs of the institution.

Work for EdShare began back in October 2007, and we launched our service gradually during the summer and autumn of 2008. So, EdShare has some recent experience to draw on in working across an institution to achieve organisational commitment to the implementation of a “repository” as well in investigating the range and limits of “eligible” content for an institutional, educational “repository”.

You can see I use inverted commas around the “repository” word – we try not to use the word at all in connection with EdShare, because of many of the assumptions which have developed around the term, as well as in order to break away from the “passive”/”lodged” aspects of the term. We have always intended that EdShare be an active space on the web in which collaboration, re-use, sharing and creative processes will be supported.

From my EdShare perspective, Sarah Jones’ and Harry Gibbs’ presentations on The Data Asset Framework captured the investment that EdShare had put into the crucial activities of advocacy and engagement. Indeed, “advocacy and engagement” was the title of one specific work package within the Project to build EdShare. This decision was informed by the approach already taken during the development of the University’s institutional research repository by members of Library staff. Indeed, two existing members of University Library staff were employed on the work for EdShare, to lead advocacy and engagement, since the Library’s reputation in this area has historically been very strong. So, the DAF approach has actually been a cornerstone of work for EdShare right from the outset. The success of EdShare has been significantly determined by effective collaboration between the Project Team and (other) academics involved in education. We have only been able to achieve this by having a sound understanding of what the academic curriculum and syllabus is about, and by developing an appreciation of how everyday learning resources created by the people who do teaching in the University, support the curriculum.

The AIDA toolkit: Assessing Institutional Digital Assets, Ed Pinsent, University of London Computer Centre – This toolkit struck me as very reminiscent, in approach, to Stephen Marshall’s eLearning Maturity Model (eMM). The eMM was the model that was used at the University of Southampton to undertake the eLearning Benchmark Project supported by the HE Academy during 2007-2008. This was a significant piece of work that we undertook as an aspect of our institutional Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy. This Benchmarking Project was led by Hugh Davis, as University Director of Education responsible for eLearning. The process gave the institution a way to understand the ranges of capabilities across the University – Schools, disciplines as well as specialist service groups, to provide eLearning both operationally, managerially and strategically. It provided a snapshot of where the University of Southampton was in terms of delivery, planning, definition, management and optimisation of elearning at a specific point in time, as well as providing a benchmark for comparison with other Russell Group institutions which participated in the Project.

Hugh Davis then became the Director of the EdSpace Project, building EdShare. The EdShare team included other people who had also participated in the eLearning Benchmarking work – Dr. Su White (academic in the School of Electronics and Computer Science); and myself, Debra Morris (University Library eLearning lead). Our collective experience in this eLearning Benchmarking work meant that we were able to draw on the understanding, insights and foundations of the benchmarking work for the identification of relevant, exemplar Schools and subject disciplines to work with during the early stages of developing EdShare and identifying relevant content and partner teachers. The one activity created the foundations for the other so that we derived benefit from continued collaboration with specific academic groups as well as developing continuity in a thread of work that we built consistently over more than 2 years. From this starting point, my view is that we established early engagement with the concepts and approach supported by AIDA.

Debra Morris
EdShare Manager
University of Southampton