using innovative social networking tools to foster communities of practice
DESCRIPTION
Authors: Yvonne Diggins, Ann Marcus-Quinn, C Bruen The National Digital Learning Resources Service (NDLR), funded by the HEA, is an open educational resource service, providing an open online repository and community portal, shared between the seven Universities and the fourteen Institutes of Technology in Ireland. The NDLR uses innovative technologies and social networking tools to foster over thirty active communities of practice.TRANSCRIPT
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NDLR, Communities of Practice, OER, Higher Education
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Authors
Yvonne [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
University of Limerick
Miriam [email protected] [email protected]
Trinity College
Using innovative social networking tools to foster communities of practice
The National Digital Learning Resources Service (NDLR), funded by the HEA, is an open educational resource service, providing an open online repository and community por-tal, shared between the seven Universities and the fourteen Institutes of Technology in Ireland. The NDLR uses innovative technologies and social networking tools to foster over thirty active communities of practice.
The NDLR, with the aim of promoting and supporting higher education staff in the collaboration, development and sharing of learning resources and associate teach-ing practices, has been a success on a national level for higher education in Ireland. It currently hosts over 20,000 open digital resources, developed by higher education academics and also contains a number for resources from Jorum, an open online re-pository in the United Kingdom. This paper provides an in-depth look at a selection of these resources and their use by participants.
1. About the NDLR Service
The The NDLR (Figure 1) is an open educational resource service, providing an open online repository and community portal (Figure 2), shared between the seven Universities and the fourteen Institutes of Technology in Ireland (NDLR 2011 a). The NDLR has been a success on a national level for higher education in Ireland, as it currently hosts over 20,000 open digital re-sources, developed by higher education academics and also contains a number for resources from Jorum, an open online repository in the United Kingdom (HEA 2009; Hunt 2011; IrlGov 2011; Jorum 2011). NDLR’s mission is “to promote and support higher education sector staff in the collaboration, development and sharing of learning resources and associate teaching practices” (NDLR 2011 a). Approximately 75% of the NDLR service budget directly funds local and national learning innovation projects.
Figure 1: NDLR Logo (NDLR 2011)
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The NDLR supports higher education academics and institutions in the following three ways (Figure 3):
1. Local Innovation Projects (LIPS). Each partner institution receives an annual allocation of funding to support local aware-ness-raising and development of the NDLR. In 2010, over 140 lo-cal Learning Innovations Projects were developed by higher edu-cation academics across all sub-ject disciplines.
2. Learning Innovation Commu-nity Support Projects (LInCS). A national call for NDLR funding is offered on an annual basis and encourages institutions to col-laborate cross-institutionally to develop open educational resources. From 2009, to date, there have been more than 30 successful LInC projects. A cri-terion of the national funding is
that the project proposes to collaborate with three or more higher educa-tion institutions. These collaborative projects are modelled on European projects, with a ‘lead’ in-stitution coordinating the project in partnership with others.
3. Sustainable, Man-ageable, Active, Relevant and Reflective, Targeted Communities of Practice (SMART CoPs). SMART CoPs are cross-institutional subject discipline related communities associated with locally funded institu-tional learning innovation projects (LIPS) and cross-
institutional collaborative projects funded (LInCs) (McAvinia and Maguire 2011). SMART CoPs are communities in dif-ferent disciplines and subject areas, corresponding with the
Figure 2: NDLR Portal (NDLR 2011 a)
Figure 3: NDLR Supports (NDLR 2011)
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International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) subject taxonomy, composed of staff interested in the use and application of digital resources and technology in the teaching of their subjects. Within these community areas higher education academics use social networking tools to collaborate and to share their teaching and learning experi-ences, practices and resources
2. Social Networking and the NDLR Communities of Practice: A showcase of the ‘Health’ SMARTCoP
A key impact of the NDLR service is to support greater collabo-ration in developing and sharing digital teaching resources and associated teaching experiences across all subject disciplines and communities of academics and to promote good practice use and re-use of existing resources (Jennings 2010). By being empowered by the support of NDLR online communities, aca-demics and staff from different disciplines can share effort and expertise as they raise the bar collectively for how they support their students’ learning, embed research in their teaching and potentially embracing partnerships with research and industry, both in Ireland and Internationally (NDLR 2011 a).
The NDLR community portal, which was developed using Ma-hara open source software, uses innovative social networking tools to enable academics to communicate and collaborate with each other. Currently, over thirty NDLR communities of practice are active. For the purposes of this research paper the ‘Health’ SMARTCoP has been identified as a case study. Through the use of the online NDLR portal the ‘Health’ community of practice has developed over one thousand open reusable learning ob-jects. In 2010 the ‘Health’ SMARTCoP successfully secured NDLR LInCS funding to develop a suite of reusable learning objects for two national funded projects; ‘Clinical Assessment Training’ and ‘The Principles of Infection Prevention and Control; the devel-opment of reusable learning objects’. Followed in 2011, by suc-cessfully securing funding for three national funded projects; ‘The development of e-learning tools for dentistry’, ‘Mobile re-usable learning resources for clinical assessment and technical skills training’ and ‘eLearn Psychological Medicine’.
The ‘Health’ SMARTCoP actively uses the following social net-working features to collaborate and communicate with commu-nity members. The ‘Health’ SMARTCoP set up an online ‘Group Web/Homepage’, which outlines what the group is about, links to their reusable learning objects outputs, along with research
interests. The SMARTCoP also has an online ‘Mem-ber Listing’ area, which enables members to view who is a member of the group with the facility to contact members with items of interest for ex-ample possible funding opportunities or collabo-rations.
The ‘Forums’ area is ac-tively used by members, an example of popular fo-rums would be ‘News and Events’; ‘Funding Opportu-nities’; ‘Learning Resourc-es Swap Shop’; ‘Collabo-ration Room’. Members can subscribe to forums and receive updates when new posts are submitted. Members can also set up
Figure 4: NDLR Health SMARTCoP Homepage (NDLR 2011 b)
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and edit multiple ‘WebPages’ for their community area and can add content and hyperlinks to resources and articles of inter-est for the community or embed videos from the ‘NDLR Vimeo Channel’, which currently hosts over two hundred and eighty videos developed by higher education academics in Ireland. Members can also ‘upload and share files’ with other members who can view the files or learning resources and comment on them. The ‘Health’ SMARTCoP also has a ‘Group Tweets’ facility, where members can post timely tweets about items of interest, for example funding opportunities or events, which go to the NDLR twitter page are also visible within the community ‘Group Tweets’ area. The NDLR also uses a Facebook and Twitter pages as mediums of communication, along with an active Blog and RSS feed.
3. Conclusion The NDLR actively uses social networking tools as mediums of communication and collaboration, which have successfully helped to foster and maintain over thirty active communities of practice enabling members to communicate with each other, collaborate on the development of reusable learning objects
and share best practice teaching and learning initiatives, which have resulted in the development of over 20,000 open and re-usable learning objects. The use of social networking features within the NDLR communities supports best practice in the de-velopment of quality education resources and facilitates nation-al collaboration, irrespective of the institutions that academics are representing. The community areas are self-moderated by community members, allowing academics to collaborate and work on their own initiatives in their own free time with other community members. Due to the support and success to the social networking aspects of the NDLR community areas, the NDLR will continue to develop and enhance existing social net-working features and technologies based on the needs of the NDLR community.
Figure 5: NDLR Health SMARTCoP Forum (NDLR 2011 b)
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ReferencesHigher Education Authority (HEA). (2009) Open and Flexible Learning HEA Position Paper. [online], available: http://www.hea.ie/odl [accessed 3 January 2011].
Hunt, C. (2011). National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030. http://www.education.ie/servlet/blobservlet/he_national_strategy_2030_report.pdf.
IrlGov. (2011). Towards Recovery: Programme for a National Government 2011 – 2016. http://www.labour.ie/download/pdf/labour_towards_recovery_report.pdf: Oireachteas Eireann.
Jennings, D. (2010). Content, Context And Consequence The Art Of Collaboration: The Reality Of Communal Practice. International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, ICERI 2010.
Jorum (2011). [online], available: http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ [accessed 6 September 2011].
McAvinia, C. and Maguire, T. (2011) Evaluating the National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR): new models of Communities of Practice. Link: http://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/39. AISHE-J: The All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Vol 3, No 1.
National Digital Learning Resources Service (NDLR). (2011 a), [online], available: http://www.ndlr.ie [accessed 10 April 2011].
National Digital Learning Resources Service (NDLR). (2011 b), Health SMART CoP [online], available: http://www.ndlr.ie/institution/health-smart-cop [6 September 2011].
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