Creating advanced repository for long term storage anddissemination of teaching material

Lavius MotlengUniversity of Cape Town

18 University Avenue RondeboschCape Town 7700, RSAmtllav001@myuct.ac.za

ABSTRACTThe amount of teaching information and material is exponentiallyincreasing every year. Most of it is born digitally and it is not pre-served. Valuable teaching resources get lost or no improvement ismade on them. A solution to this is using Institutional reposito-ries for the preservation and dissemination of teaching material.However many digital libraries are perceived as user unfriendlyand this creates a barrier to get scholars to use them due to thispreconceived notion. As a result, an exploration is done on IR andhow they facilitate access and storage of data so as to deploy themas a platform to disseminate and preserve teaching material. Theintegrability feature of IR makes them a good tool/system/archiveto use for the dissemination of teaching material.

CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Information storage systems;

KEYWORDSDigital LLibraries, Institutional Repositories, Learning managementsystemsACM Reference format:Lavius Motleng. 2017. Creating advanced repository for long term storageand dissemination of teaching material. In Proceedings of ACM Conference,Washington, DC, USA, July 2017 (Conference’17), 3 pages.https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn

1 INTRODUCTIONMany universities are using learning management systems (LMS)to support learning within their institution [4]. These LMS consistsof an integration of variety of different applications including dis-cussion forums, chat, file sharing, e-portfolios, weblogs and wikis[4]. However, most of the use of LMSs is towards administrativepurposes and has very little impact on teaching [4].

Universities are under pressure to offer increasingly flexible andrelevant learning material [3]. However, most of the information inLMS is being born digital but then has a short life span, it disappearsor access to it is removed. Thus, instead of the centralized andintegrated LMS, a faculty department can focus on a decentralizedPermission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citationon the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).Conference’17, July 2017, Washington, DC, USA© 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).ACM ISBN 978-x-xxxx-xxxx-x/YY/MM.https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn

(department specific) repository for the dissemination of teachingmaterial to minimize replication and encourage the reuse of existinglearning/teaching material [8]. Learning and teaching material canbe categorised as follows : raw assets (e.g a video), learning asserts(annotated/edited video) and exercises [8].

Institutional repositories are quickly becoming a standard of-fering of academic libraries as a service for the management anddissemination of digital materials produced by the university andits community members [1]. Digital libraries can be broadly definedas an extension and enhancement of information storage and re-trieval systems that manipulate digital data in any medium (texts,images, sounds; static or dynamic images) and exist in distributednetworks [10]. Institutional repositories have become a platformfor a vast array of digital collections [1]. They provide open accessand preservation of the institution’s scholarship.

The aim of this review is to explore existing literature, in orderto understand how institutional repositories, facilitate the access,management and storage of teaching materials/resources. A majorfocus of this review is to look at how IRs are designed to supportusers and their work, to apply these techniques to build a user-centered institutional repository for the dissemination of teachingmaterial. The following topics and reviewed and discussed: DigitalLibraries and Institutional Repositories, Tools and services usedto set-up IRs, Open Education Resources and a critical review ofexisting IRs.

2 OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Figure 1: MIT Opencourseware (OCW).

Current techniques of disseminating teaching material includethe use of open educational resources. Open Access is the free,online copies of peer-reviewed articles [6]. There are no licens-ing restrictions on their use by readers [6]. They can therefore be

Conference’17, July 2017, Washington, DC, USA Lavius Motleng

used freely for research, teaching and other purposes [6]. Openeducation is about expanding educational opportunities worldwideby facilitating the sharing and re-mixing of educational resources.Institutions and individuals are increasingly sharing digital learn-ing and teaching resources over the Internet without cost . Theseare known as âĂŸopen education resourcesâĂŹ. Open educationwebsites include an array of resources such as curriculum mate-rial, lesson plans, classroom activities, lectures, homework tasks,assignments and quizzes [2].

OERs were developed to assist teachers in developing countriesto access timely materials to support their teaching materials [5].However, teachers are finding it difficult to incorporate OERs intotheir own curriculum [5]. Other issues that arise include the modi-fying of a resource with intentions to reserve personal ownershipand control over that resource [8].

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication ofvirtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available tothe world and is a permanent MIT activity. This OER supportsbrowsing of material by grouping it according to department, topic,collections (videos, audio, e-textbook etc). Included in the reposi-tory also are past tutorial assignments and memorandums to thoseassignments.

3 DL AND IRGiven the issues at hand with regards to usage of public OERs, itmakes sense to develop an institutional repository dedicated tothe faculty specific departments for the dissemination of teachingmaterial as many academic staff do not wish to give away theirlearning resources by uploading them to a public place but they maybe prepared to describe the resources (objects) and retain controlover their use [8].

3.1 DefinitionAn institutional repository is a set of services that a universityoffers to the members of its community for the management anddissemination of digital materials created by the institution andits community members [1]. The electronic resources may includebut not limited to: eBooks, journals, bibliographic datasets andcitation management tools. It should also include access to onlinereferencing and to a live librarian [7]. Another distinction is that arepository should adhere to principles of Open Access . What thismeans is that a scholar produces original thought in a publication,another ensures its quality and another utilizes it to produce moreknowledge thus completing the logical cycle. This is crucial forthe improvement of learning resources as curriculum continuouslychanges .

3.2 Institutional RepositoriesScholars are putting their works in a variety of places. Traditionallythe main repository was the publisherâĂŹs repository. However,scholars are finding more and more repositories to use for theirresearch outlets. These includes their own websites, school reposi-tories etc. But now institutions are building outlet to express andpreserve their intellectual work done in their institution. Thus insti-tutional repositories are now used for the archiving (preservation),availability and integrity of the institutionâĂŹs research outlet [1].

Figure 2: Open UCT, an open access IR of UCT.

Figure 1 shows OpenUCT, UCT’s IR that contains scholarly outputsproduced at UCT organised into collections according to the insti-tution’s organisational structure. Stored in the archive specificallyare journal articles, book chapters, technical and research reports,and open educational resources.

The repository is divided into three canvases. The right canvas,canvas and middle canvas. The top bar contains the search bar, theright canvas contains options to filter search results according toauthor, date etc and lastly the middle canvas contains UCTâĂŹsfaculties in blocks to allow browsing information in that faculty andalso used to display search results. Included in the search results isthe links to videos on Youtube and document files.

However, it is hard to locate teaching material in this repositoryor very little is uploaded. The only types of files stored are documentfiles. There are no videos, images etc.

Figure 2 below shows the UCT computer science documentarchive. This archive is built to store department’s research output,past honours projects and other documents. The standard taskssupported are: browsing projects, searching and uploading docu-ments. The UI supports this by grouping documents/informationaccording the year using the search box to allow users to searchfor fast retrieval.

Figure 3: UCT Computer Science research documentarchive.

Creating advanced repository for long term storage and dissemination of teaching materialConference’17, July 2017, Washington, DC, USA

3.3 OAI protocol for metadata harvestingThe OAI-PMH is a metadata harvesting interoperability framework[9][11]. Shown in table 2 is a list of queries supported by the pro-tocol [9][11]. Open Archives Initiative (OAI) uses has a protocolfor Metadata Harvesting, which provide the technical structureto support the repositories and enable their interoperability forsearching purposes. Interoperability comprises persistent naming,standardized metadata formats, and a metadata harvesting protocol.

3.4 IR’s Tools, Features and ServicesThe following is a list of tools used to build repositories: CDS In-venio, DSpace, EPrints, ETD-db, Fedora Commons, Greenstone.DSpace, Fedora and Eprints are similar in storage as they all pro-vide support for Dublin metadata and store it in the database. Thesethree repositories are all Interoperable in that they support dis-tributed repositories. Fedora provides more storage capabilitiesthan all of them as it allows for the storage of complex objects.With regards to services, all three softwares are OAI-PMH compli-ant, allow extensible plugins and support web services. However,Fedora offers more in that it also provide support for URI.

4 DISCUSSIONAll IR software support integrability which makes it easier to inte-grate themwith existing IRâĂŹs and learning management systems.Out of all of the platforms, DSpace and Fedora seem to offer betterfeatures than all of them with Fedora being on top.

Students primarily use academic DLs for textual resources [11]and turn to the openWeb for multimedia resources [11]. This meansthat DLs must provide very relevant information on search i.e theymust have efficient search techniques, they must be user friendlyand provide and enjoyable experience to users to encourage themto keep on using.

There are two factors that hinders the use of DLs and these per-ceptions are: (a) Library systems are not viewed as user-friendly,this discourages users and potential users from using or even try touse DLs provided by academic libraries [11]. (b) Academic librariesare known and perceived to be places of primarily textual resources;perceptions of usefulness, especially in regard to relevance of con-tent, coverage, and currency, seem to have a negative effect on userintention to use DLs, especially when searching for visual materials.

5 CONCLUSIONSThe integrability feature of IRmakes them a good tool/system/archiveto use for the dissemination of teaching material. Integrating IRwith LMS will make it easier for educators to use them and facilitatethe access and storage of these material. Fedora amongst all of themis a good software to use a it provides storage to complex objectsunlike the rest.

IRs are complicated to setup and as a result some Institutionsprefer to go with cloud-based services to store their scholarly out-puts and teaching material as they are easy to setup and requirenot form of skill or expensive or complex hardware to setup.

IRs support peer review and as a result will enhance the quality ofteaching material through assistance and critique from peers. This

makes them a suitable platform for the dissemination of teachingmaterial.

A HEADINGS IN APPENDICESThe rules about hierarchical headings discussed above for the bodyof the article are different in the appendices. In the appendix en-vironment, the command section is used to indicate the start ofeach Appendix, with alphabetic order designation (i.e., the first isA, the second B, etc.) and a title (if you include one). So, if you needhierarchical structure within an Appendix, start with subsectionas the highest level. Here is an outline of the body of this documentin Appendix-appropriate form:

A.1 IntroductionA.2 OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCESA.3 DL AND IR

A.3.1 Definition.

A.3.2 Institutional Repositories.

A.3.3 OAI protocol for metadata harvesting.

A.3.4 Tools, Features and Services.

A.3.5 Tools, Features and Services.

A.4 ConclusionsA.5 ReferencesACKNOWLEDGMENTSREFERENCES[1] Ann E Austin and Roger G Baldwin. 1991. Faculty Collaboration: Enhancing the

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