LORO (Language Open Resources Online): a languages repository for DoL

Carmen Tomas on behalf of:

Tita Beaven, Anna Comas-Quinn, Annie Eardley,

Christine Pleines and Hélène Pulker

Region 05 Staff briefing 23 Jan 2009

• To create an online repository, based on the Language Box• Created by the Faroes team in Southampton• It will allow course teams, tutors and staff tutors in DoL easy

access to tutorial materials for all languages and levels. Central teams to distribute materials to ALs easily.

• ALs to access materials for all languages and all levels.• ALs to store their own materials (and share them with others if

they so wish).• Staff tutors to access materials for staff development purposes.• All users to share resources with the Language Box, a

languages community repository (http://languagebox.eprints.org).

Some interesting results

I store my teaching materials…

on paper: 1%, electronically: 30%, in both ways: 69%

I modify what the OU provides to suit my group.

always: 18%, often: 79%, never: 3%

I often share my teaching materials.

yes: 26%, no: 74%

When looking for teaching materials for my OU group, I…

use materials provided by the CT: 89%; use the internet: 73%;

create materials from scratch: 95%, use lang. textbooks: 81%,

use materials from other ALs: 54%

• short term goals vs. long term possibilities

Future developments

Two main stages of implementation

1. Tutorial materials provided by Course teams are made available on LORO for each course and can be downloaded by ALs

2. ALs can upload and share their own materials (if they want)

The tool and the ALs• Accessing LORO and looking at resources

…at LORO (http://loro.eprints.org) but remember this is work in progress!

• Discussion (views, experiences, long-term goals)

Good eveningeveryone!

• Go to http://loro.eprints.org• Click on your course• Click on the “Resource” you are interested in• each Resource, e.g. L203Unit1Act2_Zimmersuche, contains the

documents related to one tutorial activity)• Preview the documents by hovering over them • If there are lots of docs. you will need to click on the arrows to the

left or right to scroll• Click on “download” (or “download this resource as a zip” on the

right-hand side)• Save the resource onto your computer• If necessary, unzip the zipped file (right click and “extract” or

“unzip”)• Upload the wbd or ppt files onto Elluminate

Accessing materials on LORO

For discussion…• Is LORO a good thing?

• What’s your experience so far (if any)?

• What’s LORO’s main advantage?

• Where would you like it to go in the long term?

Any further questions? Contact FELS-Repository@open.ac.uk

c.pleines@open.ac.uk