Community Dimensions of Learning Object Repositories (CD-LOR): Deliverable 10, Recommendations to JISC for Future Research and Development

The Community Dimensions of Learning Object Repositories (CDLOR) project was funded by JISC in June 2005-May 2007 to identify and analyse the barriers and enablers that influence implementation and use of learning object repositories (LORs) within a range of learning communities. Such communities include those based in individual and federated institutions and those that exist across institutions (regionally, nationally and internationally), e.g. discipline based communities, or communities coalescing around use in teaching and learning of particular formats, such as sound files.This report summarises the key recommendations to JISC for future research and development. The recommendations draw upon and are a synthesis of the following main activities and outputs of the CDLOR project:1. Desk research and consultation with project partners and repository research and development community aimed at reviewing current LOR and community models and practices, as well as elucidating the pedagogic, sociocultural, organisational and technological barriers and enablers to the implementation of LORs within learning communities (focusing, in accordance with the remit of the project, on the former three groups of barriers and enablers). The deliverable from this work is the Report on Learning Communities and Repositories.2. Investigation of LOR users’ perspectives, aimed at exploring the specific community dimensions and teachers’ and students’ views on barriers and enablers to the implementation of LORs. The findings are summarised in the Report on Interviews with LOR Repository Users.3. Survey of personal resource management strategies of members of teaching and learning communities. The aim of the survey was to explore how individuals in teaching and learning communities find, create, store and share their educational resources and how they collaborate on the development of these resources with colleagues in their departments, subject area and beyond. The deliverable from this work is the Report on Personal Resource Management Strategies.4. Prioritising, developing and testing a range of potential solutions to barriers. This work was carried out in collaboration with CDLOR Project Associates. The outputs from this work include Scenarios of LOR Use, which were prioritised by repository curators and users and developed into full Use Cases. Based on these use cases, repository functionalities aimed at solving some of the identified barriers were developed, tested and evaluated within a range of LORs. The results of these evaluations are summarised in the Report on Testing and Evaluation of the Use Cases.5. Developing structured guidelines for setting up LORs. The Structured Guidelines are based around a set of key questions, aimed at eliciting the relevant community and repository dimensions, and key enablers and barriers for various types of LORs and communities. The recommendations are divided into two sections. Section 1 outlines the recommendations for future development and Section 2 lists recommendations for further In accordance with the remit of the project, the recommendations are focused primarily on addressing socio-cultural, organisational and pedagogic issues. These are by nature complex issues and cannot be solved in a straightforward way. The recommendations reflect this complexity. We would like to urge JISC to take forward the more difficult recommendations rather than considering only the technical recommendations.CDLOR, http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/cd-lor/Margaryan, A., Currier, S., Littlejohn, A., & Nicol, D. (2006). Learning communities and repositories. CDLOR Deliverable 1. JISC, UK (52 pp.). Available from http://academy.gcal.ac.uk/cd-lor/learningcommunitiesreport.pdfMargaryan, A, & Currier, S. (2006). Report on interviews with LO repository users. CDLOR project deliverable on Workpackage 3.1, public version. JISC, UK. Available from http://academy.gcal.ac.uk/cdlor/CDLORdeliverable_UserInterviewsReport.pdfMargaryan, A. (2006) Report on personal resource management strategies survey. CD-LOR Deliverable 7. JISC, UK. Available from http://academy.gcal.ac.uk/cd-lor/CDLORdeliverable7_PRMSreport.pdfCDLOR Project Partners, http://academy.gcal.ac.uk/cd-lor/ppart.htmlLOR Use Scenarios, http://academy.gcal.ac.uk/cd-lor/UseCaseScenarios.pdfExtended LOR Use Cases, http://academy.gcal.ac.uk/cd-lor/extended_usecases_v1p0.pdfMargaryan, A., Milligan, C., & Douglas, P. (April, 2007). Structured Guidelines for Setting up Learning Object Repositories. CDLOR Deliverable 9. JISC, UK (17 pp.). Available from http://academy.gcal.ac.uk/cdlor/documents/CD-LOR_Structured_Guidelines_v1p0.pdfDeliverable 10. Recommendations to JISC for future research and development research in the area of Learning Object Repositories