Enhancing the sharing of learning and teaching resources at UTAS

The 2013 TELT White Paper on Technology Enhanced Learning and Teaching endorsed by the University of Tasmania provides a five-year vision for the university. At its heart, is an examination of how UTAS can use technology to extend its influence and contributions to teaching and learning locally, nationally and internationally through the sharing of learning and teaching resources. Principle 5 of the White Paper recommends the development of a high quality learning object repository.

The project’s rationale were to establish a culture of sharing learning resources through community development and to develop a Learning Objective Repository (LOR). Sharing learning objects across the University provides for an economy of scale in the production of teaching resources, quality improvement and the opportunity for communities of teaching practice to develop. However, to make learning objects available to various user groups requires active management of object rights, as well as cultural change within the university to encourage the sharing of teaching resources.

This Spotlight presentation will explore the main activities, deliverables and challenges faced by this project that was funded by the University of Tasmania, Projects of Institutional Significance Funding Scheme (mid 2014 through to 2015). One of the main deliverables was a repository framework for sharing learning resources, which was developed in consultation with key stakeholders including Faculty, Library, and ITS. The repository can potentially support teachers in providing high quality learning experiences to students. Additionally, an LOR is a powerful tool to make the work of academics more efficient and innovative. According to the project evaluation, Champions would like to have the repository as an ongoing resource for teaching and learning at the University of Tasmania. Sustainability has become a key challenge and planning is needed in order to maintain and continue development of such a repository.