Realm Final Report
The aim of the project was to repurpose publicly created content from the NLN, UK Archives, and materials created within the South West Wales E-Training Network for the following subject areas: Business and Management; Leisure and Tourism; Performing Arts and Art and Design in HND and Foundation Degree programmes.
The objectives were:
- To create a minimum of 200 repurposed and 50 reusable, interoperable and accessible electronic resources from the aforementioned data sets through:
- Establishing a clear, efficient and documented work-flow process for disaggregating and repurposing digitised content
- To develop quality materials that improve the teaching and learning through reuse and repurposing
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the materials and identify ways for improving development and delivery
The Actual Deliverables are as follows:
- 500 assets, these assets have been deposited into Jorum during the project’s extension
- 115 Learning Objects that have been deposited into Jorum
- Resources used:
- NLN Materials,
- DART,
- South West Wales E-Training Network (SWWETN)
- UK Data Archive,
- StarUK
Due to an unexpected amount of material being created and extrapolated, along with unforeseen technical difficulties with Jorum, the project was extended by two months until July 2006, so that all work could be completed.
The overall approach of the project was to share, amongst the partners, the process of extrapolation, whilst giving technical support to practitioners where needed; after the process of extrapolation was complete, learning object creation was undertaken by practitioners. The quality of the materials produced was assured through regular working group meetings; student and peer evaluation and where necessary re-work. The results of the project, based on feedback, is that reused and repurposing of existing materials is an effective way to make use of existing materials. Also, it was found that by adding appropriate aims and objects and questioning to ‘chunks’ or ‘chapters’ of existing material, the level of the material was successfully raised from level 2 to level 4.
Our findings suggest that there is a need for readily-accessible tools to facilitate this process and that the free technology that is currently available is too much of a technical barrier for many to overcome. Also, the ability to disaggregate down to constituent parts made reused and repurpose much easier, as assets then could be much more easily contextualised into a new subject area, level etc. Technically, the findings of the project are that much more work needs to be done to existing tools, such as RELOAD and Jorum, to make them accessible to all staff.
- Demonstrate effective reuse of a minimum of 75 electronic resources
- Deposit in the Jorum repository a minimum of 50 reused interoperable and accessible electronic resources.