JISC

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This project created an institutional share for educational resources, called EdShare. This share was inspired in functionality and ease of use by web 2.0 sites such as YouTube and Slideshare.

Executive Summary

For some years, digital content has been stored in our VLE, but the VLE does not encourage sharing or re-use. EdShare is intended to act as the storage for the VLE, storing our everyday teaching materials such as presentations, hand-outs, reading lists, assignments etc., so that they can easily be viewed by others and re-used in whole or part as appropriate.

Important design principles of this share were:

• Ease of use The share should be open to anyone to access, whether logged-in or not; any logged in member of the university can upload resources and comment on others. The user interface should be simple to use and fully accessible
• Minimal metadata We acknowledge that requiring metadata is a barrier to use, and that search engines do a large part of the job based on free text. Web 2.0 style recommendations complement the search engines
• Permanent URLs Every share entered in EdShare, and the description of the resource, are allocated unique and permanent URLs, which can be used to refer to them from external programs – for example VLEs such as Blackboard
• Open Access to the descriptions, but user controlled access to the content. Anyone in the world can browse or search to discover what items are in EdShare (i.e. they can see the description), but the depositing user can control the visibility of the actual resource. The default is to allow visibility within the university, but it is possible to make the visibility wider (the whole world) or narrower (only my school, or even only the depositor and named collaborators)

A significant element of the effort in the project has been directed to academic engagement. We have engaged with existing networks and academic groupings (mainly Schools) to dispel outdated prejudices and to seek their active input to the design. Since EdShare has been available to the University the rate of resource upload has been four times higher than for the national learning and teaching repository, JORUM. The rate of downloads is 6 times higher – demonstrating the real benefits of this open information architecture.

The project has had significant benefits for the University of Southampton:

Communities of sharing

In the short period of time that the share has been available we are already seeing educational benefits in terms of the networking that has happened in its deployment and the communities gathering around resources that are being shared across academic disciplines.

Collaboration with academic services

The project has acted as a focus for a new level of collaboration between the key academic services and the educational community. In particular, the project has allowed the library to explore new modes of engagement with the teaching community.

Poking the copyright dragon

The ownership of educational resources and the issue of copyright of the resources stored in the VLE are complicated issues which until now the university has tended to leave unresolved. The EdShare project has facilitated the university in supporting staff in sharing their resources through appropriate licences and understanding reasonable behaviour when re-using the resources of others.

EdShare is already embedded as part of the university educational infrastructure:

EdShare has been implemented as open source software on top of E-Prints, and the team are committed to working with others in supporting other institutions, or cross-institutional disciplinary consortia, to make both the technical and educational changes that we have benefited from.

Report available electronically only

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