Hi Les,
A lot of cash has been poured into this area around the world for the
past decade (itself building on theory and practice of resource-based
education and CBT going back as far as the 70's) with very few things
still left standing; there have been massive projects in the EU, US,
Canada, Australia... most of them have failed, and for reasons which
are perhaps not at all obvious from an ePrints viewpoint. They also
mostly all started from the same "obvious" business case/value
proposition you've just rediscovered!
Sadly most of this hard experience is simply not documented, and the
same mistakes keep getting made over and over again.
Don't take this the wrong way, but don't think bringing in ePrints
will make the slightest bit of difference. The problem isn't the tools
for sharing learning materials, it goes way deeper.
S
On 22 Feb 2009, at 21:34, Leslie Carr wrote:
>
> Having had the experience of working with a couple of JSIC learning-
> oriented repository projects in recent months, I have become
> convinced that this area (teaching and learning) has an enormous
> potential for the development of immediately useful services that
> can be delivered by a "general purpose" repository such as EPrints.
> The reason that I think teaching/learning might be such a fruitful
> domain is that there isn't an all-consuming paranoia about the right
> to use your own teaching materials, whereas copyright worries still
> stifle the development of research repositories. And if there's
> reusable content, then there's a whole range of possibilities that
> open up.
>
> I'm just beginning to realise that there are lots of interesting
> activities that repositories (teaching-style quasi-open-access
> repositories) could help educators with. For example - creating
> slides and other kinds of collections, managing their evolution over
> a number of years, finding interesting examples or illustrations and
> then obtaining permission for their use and then documenting that
> permission and then sharing the material with a local or
> international community of scholars.
>
> I don't think that "research repositories" have all the answers -
> even for research! But I do think that there are activities in
> teaching and learning for which they could be really useful.
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