JISC

Background

The Department of Languages (DoL) at The Open University (OU) has been exploring for some time the benefits that would derive from using a digital repository for the management of languages teaching resources. The OU employs 350 part-time Associate Lecturers to deliver 15 courses in French, Spanish, German, Italian and Welsh (and Chinese from November 2009) to more than 7000 students. The courses are centrally produced and managed by a team of 50+ academics based in Milton Keynes and at 13 Regional Centres around the UK. Currently the University uses a Moodle platform through which Associate Lecturers can access teaching resources for the course(s) that they tutor, but tutors don't have access to resources for other courses, languages and levels.

Advantages

The main advantages of creating a digital repository open to all staff at DoL are:

• making all centrally-produced materials available online in a searchable platform to all new and continuing staff; 
• enabling Associate Lecturers to upload and share any tutorial materials they have created, thus providing the community with richer more up-to-date resources in terms of cultural and linguistic variety, for example; 
• allowing easy access to existing materials for developers engaged in course production.

Aims

The LORO (Language Open Resource Online) project aims to provide an integrated digital repository based on the Language Box (http://languagebox.eprints.org ), a lightweight languages repository developed by the JISC-funded Faroes team at the University of Southampton. The University of Southampton will be carrying out the technical development needed to customise the existing Language Box for DoL, aiming to have a pilot in place by October 2009 to deliver to our beginners language tutors tutorial resources for Elluminate, the audiographic conferencing tool that all OU courses will be using in future.

An important part of the project is interoperability between LORO and the Language Box so that there is the option of automatically sharing resources uploaded to LORO with the wider community of language professionals who might use the Language Box. As a significant quantity of high quality resources in a range of levels and languages, including lesser-taught languages such as Welsh or Chinese, is made available from LORO through to the Language Box, the project will aim to address one of the key problems that repositories encounter, that of achieving the critical mass of deposits that would make them attractive to potential users.

This project, which runs for 15 months, will provide an interesting case study for the wider JISC community on whether or not repositories can be used to strengthen a community of practice - as part of a distance education institution, OU Associate Lecturers are geographically dispersed and can feel isolated; it will also explore the impact on users of changes that result from the use of a repository in an institutional setting.

Lead Institution

• Open University