Buzz Lunch February 25, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , trackbackWe had our buzz lunch yesterday and it was very well attended, by colleagues from our libraries and learning resources, educational development unit, centre for academic standards and quality, Schools of Social Sciences, Art and Design, Law and Business. We had three presentations on the use of the learning object repository:
- Jon Fletcher – academic librarian libraries and learning resources – Jon is using the repository to share information literacy content within the School of Science and Technology. He is dynamically linking to generic content in the LOR within his courses, which means that if he makes any changes in to the original content within the LOR this is rolled out through all the courses which are using the content and he does not have to go into each course to make the changes.
- Hugh Miller – Lecturer School of Social Sciences – Hugh has created student guidance on accessing e-resources which he shared with colleagues within his School so that it could be repurposed and contextualised.
- Trevor Pull – Learning Resources Manager School of Arts and Humanities – Trevor has been putting a range of content in the LOR including student handbook materials; audio and web templates.
A number of interesting approaches with respect to staff engagement were illustrated, which included:
- Notifying colleagues when you put content in the LOR if you think it will be of particular use
- Providing guidance for colleagues on the best way to retrieve the content e.g. if it is content that may be updated regularly use a dynamic link rather than a fixed link
- Actively encourage staff to repurpose your content, for example if it is a generic resource they may want download the resource and add some contextual information (they may even decide to publish the recontextualised version)
Out of the discussions at the Buzz Lunch the following suggestions were made re: integrating the LOR in learning and teaching and also relating to staff engagement too:
- Drop the words learning object and just keep repository – we discussed this at our wider development and implementation meeting today and have agreed to do this. Given the phrase learning object is defined in so many different ways and for us it means any content that can be used in learning and teaching, the phrase in a way is unnecessary. This means another review of our terminology which we expect anyway.
- Notify staff when objects have been added to the repository – ideally it would be good if we could get rss set-up in the repository but this is not possible, instead we could run a monthly report which I could circulate.
- Provide more guidance on the stats that staff can access in the system – so that they can get an overview of usage of their content
- One person said it would be useful if crowd sourcing could be implemented if individuals could work collaboratively on content and change the details e.g. metadata – it may not be possible in the way that people expect it but there may be a work around.
So some good stuff here, some of which we can implement now. We also video captured the whole event, which we hope to chop up into manageable pieces and make available at some point.
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