On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 12:00:02 -0000, N.L.Scantlebury
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Hi Jon
>en our sector needs also to fully engage with the contexts you propose
here. As we know there are currently many Rights "constraints" around the
use of resources and many cultural barriers that we need to overcome before
we move towards "sharing" in any scaleable way. Even within organisations
the notion of "sharing" can be a challenging one. Access to library
resources within a "shareable VLE" such as you propose would require a
considerable amount of negotiation with suppliers and would require the
participating institutions to agree a sustainable business plan.
>
At the lowest possible level of sharing a VLE there needs to be no
coordination between participating Universities at all. Their courses could
be entirely private, access to library resources could be entirely through
campus based system etc. The benefit would be a cost saving and increased
reliability - because one hardware system is capable of dealing with many
universities' of students, one well staffed help desk is more efficient than
numerous sparcely staffed desks and commercial hosting services have dozens
of spare servers which can be set up to replace faulty equipment in a matter
of minutes, even on a sunday.
A greater level of cooperation between universities at a department to
department level need not turn the universe upside down. Under the CTI and
TLTP initiatives many CDs of educational software were shared with no money
changing hands. Now we have the Internet and VLEs there are new possibilties
for sharing - a new educational tool can be accompanied by a self help
discussion board, self test assessments and perhaps even a bit of support
from the author. This package need not be itself a course module but can be
a 'unit' within a number of institutions' modules, each with their own
private resources.
There's absolutely no need for all the instituions to communely subscribe to
third party resources such as on-line journals. That's the point of
Shibboleth - your access depends on your affiliation with a subscribing
organisation. If the student formally enrolls on a module offered by another
university, then they will be a student on that university, which
constitutes an affiliation with that university and they will automatically
gain access to appropriate resources for the module. If on the other hand a
student is informally allowed access to the module and once there follows a
link to a 3rd party resource which their home organisation has not
subscribed to then they don't get access.
An interesting feature of Shibboleth is that academic departments can so
easily and cheaply subscribe to on-line journals etc. for specific small
numbers of students and staff that they might start to wonder why they need
a library to do that job. Librarians might end up just looking after the
books again.
Jon Maber
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