Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration A Conversation with Nottingham Trent University’s SHARE Project

What is the SHARE Project?SHARE is an acronym of Supporting Harnessing and Advancing Repository Enhancement. It is a partnership project between NTU and D2L. The project wants to encourage staff to publish learning and teaching resources in the Learning Object Repository to enable the sharing of educational resources. The project is, also, looking at providing access to external learning repositories, such as MERLOT and JorumOpen….It is really a collaborative project.

Why do you call it a collaborative project?Well, all the decision making has been made in consultation with staff at the University, from scoping the requirements with respect to modelling and setting up permissions, to creating the metadata schema and developing training support.

That’s very impressive, how have you achieved this?We have a Development and Implementation Group to which all Schools and Services are invited to send a representative, this group discusses all aspects of implementation. We have, also, taken a web 2.0 approach we use a Wiki as our workspace and communicate via our blog. We have even had an academic managing one of our workpackages – the Requirements Analysis.

Encouraging staff to engage with an LOR is always a challenge how have you managed this?Yes you are right this is a challenge. Each School has an LOR and there is a University-wide LOR. To encourage staff to publish to the LORs the project has implemented a simple workflow, all staff have permission to publish and retrieve learning resources from the LORs and we have created an extremely simple metadata schema – all in consultation with staff.

I know it is early days but do you have any examples of good practice that you would like to SHARE – if you don’t mind the pun?Of course I don’t mind the pun – any pun is good publicity. Examples have included staff publishing student support documentation, academic writing skills and information literacy guidance, generic subject resources and activity templates.

What are your ambitions for the future – it’s always good to end on a tricky question?I would say a challenging question, and the project is not averse to a challenge. Well of course we want to further develop examples of good practice, but we would also like to encourage staff to engage in the open educational resources in general,

we have just revised our IPR policy to enable staff to license their learning resources using Creative Commons, if they wish, so I think we’re heading in the right direction

Supporting Harnessing and Advancing Repository Enhancement www.ntushare.org