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SHARE Newsletter January 2011 February 14, 2011

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Quick Update

The project has now entered what will be a very busy final three months. We will be hosting a free national workshop in March “I fought the Learning Repositories and the Learning Repositories Won”. We are also liaising with our colleagues from Information Systems and the Centre for Professional Learning Development, with respect to handing over the system administration and training activities that we have been managing during the project. In addition, we will be liaising with colleagues in the Centre for Academic Development and Quality regarding the integration of our training material in their new technology enhanced learning and teaching resources. The project continues its work engaging staff with sharing learning resources with University colleagues and beyond via incentive projects, as well as moving towards making resources open and presenting webinars to colleagues.

SHARE Workshop Registration Open

I reported in the last newsletter that the project will be hosting a free national workshop on learning repositories, on 16th March 9:30-4 at the Nottingham Conference Centre. This workshop will have presentations from a range of speakers that are involved in learning repository development within higher education. For further workshop details and to register visit http://www.ntushare.org/national-workshop/

Movement Towards Making Learning Resources Open

The project is developing a process for making learning resources in the learning repository open to colleagues outside of the University. This includes testing within NOW and making sure colleagues have the appropriate support documentation for publishing open resources, which includes details on attaching a creative commons license as well as the workflow for doing this. We hope to have sign-off by the University for this by the end of the project.

Incentive Projects

In the previous newsletter it was reported that some funding had been set aside for Schools and Services to illustrate engagement with sharing learning resources using the learning repositories. I am pleased to report that nearly all the Schools and Services approached have been able to demonstrate how they will do this and more details will be provided in the project’s final report.

Webinars

On 13 January we ran the first of a series of 30 minute webinars based around learning repositories, using Live Meeting. The theme was An Introduction to Learning Repositories and was lead by our Project Officer Anna Armstrong.  I took the role of moderator, answering questions from the participants. It was good fun and well attended.  We recorded the webinar which can be viewed in the Learning Repositories and Sharing Content learning room in NOW.

We will be hosting three more webinars over the next  two months using Live Meeting:

§        10th February:  Open Educational Resources,  9:50-10:00 – Vicki McGarvey

§        10th March:  Creative Commons,  11:15-12:00 – Lisa Warburton

§        31st March:  The Benefits of Using Learning Repositories, 11:00-11:40 – Anna Armstrong, Vicki McGarvey and guests

If you are interested in any of the above please contact vicki.mcgarvey@ntu.ac.uk.

SHARE: Spreading the News at Conferences

I am pleased to announce that we have had presentation proposals accepted for the NTU Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, and for the Open Educational Resources 2011 conference. Again this will give the project an opportunity to share our experiences with the wider higher education community.

Bright Idea of the Month

Learning repositories can provide you with fresh and varied content for your students.  It makes it possible to improve the quality and range of resources offered to your students by building on other people’s work and making the resources available to your students through your NOW learning room.  And why not share your new work with colleagues through the learning repository?  Learning repositories can supplement your content where your technical skills are weaker, for example, by providing audio and video material that has been created and shared by others.  The result is that students get a wider and more interesting range of resources to use.

NTU Learning Repository Resource of the Month

YouTube for Students: Introduces the educational benefits of YouTube to students. Created by Phil Wane, in the School of Social Sciences, this contains screen shots and a classroom video and is suitable for self-completion by students. To find this resource go to the NTU Learning Repository and enter the term YouTube.

Web Sites of the Month – a selection from SHARE Project web site

Monthly Stats

NTU Learning Repository = 1781

Schools Learning Repositories = 2193

Total = 3974

Evaluation February 14, 2011

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During the last few weeks we have been focusing on the evaluation of the project. We have already held a focus group with early adopters which focused on workflows, usability and policies for sharing. We are devising a questionnaire to compliment this which we share with a wider group of people. The outputs will feature in our final report.

Webinar – Introduction to OER February 14, 2011

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Last week we had our second webinar, an Introduction to OER run by myself with my colleague Anna Armstrong, SHARE project officer moderating the questions. We had a good turn out and some interesting conversations took place in the usual areas such as quality and attribution. We used live meeting and with this being our 2ndwebinar we did not encounter some of the hiccups we had with our first one which was an introduction to the learning repository. We find that it is best if one person does the presentation and manages the slides and another person moderates the questions as we  go along, it’s much easier to keep track and it also helps to establish a rapour  with the participants. Our next webinar will be run by Lisa Warburton our copyright advisor and it will be on creative commons.