Digital Resources

Online, instructor-facilitated, 35 hours over a designated seven-week period. Optional 90 minute face to face orientation on first day of class

Course Summary

This course will provide an overview of learning repository technology, standards, access issues, copyright issues, usability and reusability, creation of learning objects and appropriate meta tagging. A special focus is on how teachers may access and contribute to repositories, especially the CBE learning repository. There will be an emphasis on best practice re: the contextualization of learning objects and appropriate use with learners.

Audience

This course is intended for all educators who:

  • Are looking for strategies to locate and implement existing digital resources in their work with learners.
  • Desire to learn about searching specific repositories for content to support curricular outcomes
  • Want to share their own content and learn how to tag their resources for submitting to learning repositories
  • Have created content and wish to explore intellectual property issues, such as how to use private rights to create public goods.

Learner Outcomes

  • Understand resource development standards and interoperability
  • Appropriately utilize established repository resources within the educational environment
  • Assess time commitment, skills required and value to students, when embarking on digital resource implementation
  • Examine advantages and disadvantages of commercial and public digital resources
  • Gain an understanding of “reasonable copyright”, such as the Creative Commons vision of balance, compromise, and moderation in our copyright system.
  • Markup media utilizing repository tools, such as Reload, using the most popular fields from the CanCore metadata schema.

Requirements

Skills

  • General knowledge of Windows, word processing and basic computer operations (e.g. saving files, creating folders etc)
  • Basic Internet navigation
  • Previous work in implementing web-based resources with learners (e.g. WebCT, Teacher web pages, etc.)

Optional Prerequisite

Hardware & Software

  • While no special hardware or software is required, you may wish to check the Technical Requirements Document to ensure that you have everything you need.

Time

  • Optional 90 minute face to face orientation on first day of class
  • Plan on spending 4 to 5 hours per week over the 7-week duration of the course