JISC

See a 30 second video introducing this project

The OneShare project will create a Deposit-Once methodology, where students and practitioners can use a Virtual Learning Environment, Community or Institutional Repository as part of a single system, knowing that a deposit made into any one of those systems will be propagated to the others.

Overview

Imagine a scenario where a teacher is working in their institutional VLE, and uploads a resource. Instead of depositing the resource into the VLE, the system will deposit the resource into their institutional repository, leaving a link to the resource in the VLE. A small dialogue determines if they wish the item to be visible outside of their institution. Using knowledge the system has about the user and their context, the item might be marked up automatically and made world visible – so that search engines will discover it. Or it might be copied or linked into their subject community repository allowing subject specialists working within their own repository to find it.

To achieve this, three challenges must be overcome:

1. Community Attitudes to copyright and ownership need to be understood and supported in order to build practitioner confidence and encourage a change of culture towards open content. 
2. Institutional Policy needs to be developed in order to support practitioners in sharing their materials, and to incorporate repository use into institutional practices. 
3. Technology Integration needs to be enabled between Virtual Learning Environments, Institutional and Community Repositories, so that users depositing resources in any one of these systems will be able to see them through the others.

The OneShare project will tackle these challenges, using the Language Box and EdShare Southampton as exemplars to develop guidance materials, EPrints software extensions, and a Deposit-Once architecture that can be repurposed at other institutions.

We will explore some interesting questions about users’ behaviour and attitudes in Web 2.0 style educational repositories. Should all functionality be available to all users – both students and teachers? Should students be able to upload resources and comment on the quality of other’s resources, as they can in YouTube? Will this lead to an improvement in quantity and quality of resources or will it clutter the search space? How open will teachers be to comments on their efforts – from other teachers or from students?

Our objective is for the Deposit-Once methodology to help teaching and learning repositories gain greater acceptance with users and institutions across the UK, supporting efforts to allow teachers and lecturers to share their materials, and create a public library of open content.

• University of Southampton