Timescale

April, 2009 - April, 2010

Key contact(s):

Kate Borthwick, project manager, LLAS.

Funded by:

The HumBox project is part of a wider Open Educational Resources initiative funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the Higher Education Academy, to showcase UK Higher Education by encouraging teachers within HE institutions to publish excellent teaching and learning resources openly on the web.

Visit the website

HumBox website
http://www.humbox.ac.uk

Project partners:

The HumBox project focuses on the Humanities and is a collaboration between four Humanities Subject Centres, and at least twelve different HE institutions across the country.

• Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies
• English Subject Centre
• Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology
• Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies

Project aims:

The HumBox project aims to publish a bank of good quality humanities resources online for free download and sharing, and in doing so, to create a community of Humanities specialists who are willing to share their teaching materials and collaborate with others to peer review and enhance existing resources. The resources published as part of our project will be placed in the HumBox, an innovative new online storage area for teaching and learning materials.

Our aims are:

• to discover, review and revise digital resources from a range of Humanities disciplines and to share them as open content
• to provide a trusted and sustainable community repository
• to create an expanding national community of peers committed to sharing and reviewing online resources from a range of subject areas in their own disciplinary contexts, which have a global reach
• to embed the culture of shared, open educational resources across the Humanities community fostering an increased awareness of and commitment to sharing Humanities resources
• to meet the need for a light touch process of peer review and quality enhancement in the delivery of shared learning resources
• to provide solutions to practical obstacles inhibiting the sharing of resources across the Humanities. In particular attention will be focused on metadata, licensing, copyright and intellectual property rights
• to create a robust model to sustain the further development of HumBox in the future

Outcomes:

We hope that our project will impact on teachers and learners in several ways:

• the opportunity for teaching staff to participate in a major sector-wide project
• access to and training in the use of the HumBox repository
• staff development opportunities in the area of digital resources and repositories
• the opportunity to showcase good practice in learning materials design
• playing a key role in developing a subject/interdisciplinary community for resource sharing
• access to a significant collection of peer-evaluated resources for the discipline
• institutional/subject collections for teaching and marketing purposes
• resources that are of publication quality

The HumBox Project: Final Report: (pdf file, 3.02Mb)

Achievements so far:

• 1300+ individual learning resources published to the HumBox repository
• An operational bespoke delivery platform
• Peer review process initiated and ongoing amongst project partners across 12 institutions
• An introductory leaflet produced for promotional purposes
• Active engagement of project partners with our blog, resource sharing and reviewing, and awareness raising across their departments
• Collaboration with other OER projects, particularly in the area of IPR and copyright
• Bespoke guidance on enhancing your impact as a humanities professional by publishing your teaching resources in progress. This guidance will include advice on IPR and copyright, how to get started, and the pros and cons of different open content websites (HumBox, iTunesU, YouTubeedu)
• Ongoing  evaluation of our processes at partner and project level
• Wider community awareness raising started

HumBox events:

• OER10, Cambridge, 22-24 March, 2010. Project coordinator, David Mossley, will give a presentation 'Opening Resources, Opening Minds' describing the experience of the HumBox project.
• Out of the Box: Using HumBox for Sharing and Showcasing Teaching Resources, University of Sheffield, 26 February, 2010.  The official launch of the HumBox!
• LLAS e-learning symposium, 28/29 January, 2010. Experiences gained from the HumBox project informed a workshop on publishing teaching resources and enhancing your professional reputation on day 1; while day 2 featured a presentation from one of our project partners on his innovative use of HumBox.
• IPR and copyright when sharing educational resources, University of Southampton, 14 December, 2009. A workshop and discussion day considering issues and proposing solutions around IPR and copyright when sharing educational materials.
• OER Conference, Nottingham, 25 November, 2009. Kate Borthwick (LLAS Subject Centre)presented about the project 'Lifting the lid: sharing in the humanities community using the HumBox'.

Links:

HumBox website
http://www.humbox.ac.uk

The HumBox final report (PDF file, 3.02Mb)

The HumBox project blog
http://www.humbox.blogspot.com/

A virtual poster about the HumBox project (Powerpoint 2007, 8.6Mb)

JISC OER programme details
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/oer.aspx

Tracking Reports

The JISC has funded the HumBox project to monitor how HumBox resources are being used. Three tracking reports will be produced over a period of one year: 2010-2011. You can find them below:

HumBox tracking report 1 (PDF file, 112Kb)

HumBox tracking report 2 (PDF file, 155Kb)

HumBox tracking report 3 (PDF file, 121.22Kb)

HumBox Impact Analysis(PDF file, 259Kb)
This report was produced as part of the JISC-funded HumBox Impact project.

Other OER projects

The DUCKLING Project (University of Leicester)
http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/projects/duckling

The DUCKLING project (funded by JISC) develops advanced delivery, presentation and assessment processes to enhance the work-based learning experience for students studying remotely.