ECS Intranet:
EdSpace - An Educationally focussed Repository for the University of Southampton
A copy of the original EdSpace proposal (with CVs and letters of support removed) can be found at http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/hcd/EdSpace_final_short.pdf and the original JISC call can be found at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/capital/circular0107/appendix_g_0107_institutional_exemplars_call_final.doc
VLEs have proved to be useful tools in facilitating staff in organising educational resources and activities in a hierarchical structure representing the structure of programmes and modules. However, while they are excellent vehicles for delivering materials, they are not in themselves ideal mechanisms for managing and curating materials. What we require is a repository of educational materials that can be used to populate VLEs.
The University of Southampton has taken the strategic decision to develop a repository for educational materials using its well established EPrints research repository software as the framework. The reason we have chosen this route is embedded in our understanding that excellent technical specifications alone will be unlikely to facilitate the cultural change necessary throughout the institution; it is the co-design process of specifying and implementing the details of the system that will be most important in ensuring community and uptake.
The EdSpace repository will be a central part of the educational infrastructure as envisaged in the recently implemented e-Learning Strategy which focuses on enabling student centred research-led learning, inclusivity and employability.
The EdSpace repository will be a social site allowing staff and students to share resources; it will provide for metadata, tagging, and semantic mark-up of stored items. A range of local and external tools will access the repository using services interfaces. Between the tools and the repository are service layers to allow users to annotate items according to an educational ontology or according to other metadata schemas, to set the access policies which will apply to items, and to create and access versions of items.
The University seeks funding to accelerate the process both in implementing the technical changes to the EPrints interfaces and providing the personnel to engage academics and students in the co-design process. Both the University of Southampton and the wider JISC community will benefit from extending EPrints into the educational domain, and from the case study of the institutional change and integration.
Homepage: http://www.edspace.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
Type: Normal Research Project
Research Groups: Learning Societies Lab, Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
Themes: ELearning, Platforms and Tools, Digital Libraries, Reusable Learning Objects
Dates: 1st October 2007 to 30th April 2009
Partners
- ISS
- The Library
- LATEU
- Student Services
- The EPrints team
Funding
- JISC
Principal Investigators
- hcd
Other Investigators
You can edit the record for this project by visiting http://secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk/db/projects/editproj.php?project=450
