Repositories
Digital repositories are ways to store, preserve, catalogue, and distribute digital material, such as learning objects, through a shared database.
When I first started living on my own, I copied a couple of favorite recipes from my mother’s collection and kept them bound together with a rubber band in a kitchen drawer. My collection grew to the point where it started to span different recipe boxes, notebooks, magazine clippings, and cookbooks. I knew there was a recipe for a chicken dish that used basil but couldn’t remember where to find it.
Thank goodness for recipe computer programs where I can enter my recipes complete with descriptive information—maybe even pictures—so that I can find what I’m looking for. I have my collection of recipes in a recipe repository.
Similarly a learning object repository is a collection of learning objects with descriptive information (called meta-data) in a database that users can more easily search and find appropriate teaching material. Sometimes the learning objects are stored in the repository and sometimes just their location is stored there. When it only provides links to learning objects, it is commonly called a referratory. While it would be possible for students to use the repository, usually it’s faculty that are trying to locate, select, and use the learning objects they find in their courses.
Repositories can be within your own department or institution or they can be shared more broadly through a central server or by connecting a number of servers together across the country or the world.
A lot of great online content is not being shared because no one can find it and access it. Repositories are a great way to preserve, catalogue, and share learning objects among faculty, departments, and institutions.
Anybody out there have a recipe for Merry’s Mum’s Chocolate Pudding?
Learning object repositories
HEAL - Health Education Assets Library
The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is a digital library of freely accessible, web-based multimedia teaching materials that meet the needs of today's health sciences educators and learners.
MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected here along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments.
This project is sponsored in part by The Fund for The Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education.
This project is made possible by support from the UW - Madison School Of Nursing
