Digital resources

58 Digital resources

Overview

• provide the technical and cultural infrastructure to support digital resource creation, sharing,

Priority 3 places a substantial emphasis on digital

adaptation and re-use.

resources as a key vehicle for transforming education and addressing the personalisation agenda. While it

Implementation and uptake

identiies that much progress has been made in this Of the 125 respondents, 94% said their organisation area, it recognises the need to:

provided access to digital resources. The vast majority • increase the quantity and range of resources

provided access to digital resources for staff (91%) that are available to teachers

and students (90%). Far fewer supported access for • increase the quality of those resources,

parents or other members of the community (49%). which includes increasing the innovation of

For more details see panel 22 . their design so that it takes full advantage of

The 117 respondents who indicated that their the interactive nature of ICT and moves away

organisation offered access to digital resources were from content delivery

asked to specify the nature of those resources. The most commonly provided resources were locally developed or procured: ‘Access to institution/ department-level collections of digital resources’

22 Access to digital learning resources

(85%), followed by ‘LA/regional collections of digital resources’ (62%). A relatively small proportion of

When we asked respondents to identify which groups of users their organisations provided with access to

organisations were planning to provide access to digital resources, we found some variations across

additional sets of resources; the maximum being the respondent groups, which are shown in Figure

16% of respondents, who said they were planning 22.1. Most noticeably, all respondents from the

to provide access to the NEN resources. Panel 23 RBCs provided access for all three groups of people

(p59) shows a breakdown of the resources provided. (staff, students and parents/other members of the community). Commercial respondents were the least

Additional questions explored the extent to likely to provide access to digital resources for staff and

which organisations had implemented copyright students, and more likely to provide access for parents

management and/or resource standards management or the community than the post-16 or pre-16 sectors.

(for instance SCORM compliance enabling transfer Not surprisingly, the post-16 sector is the least likely to

of resources to other systems). Some 37% (of provide access to parents or the community. the 117) reported that their organisation had

Figure 22.1 Who is given access to digital resources?

implemented copyright management, with a further 25% planning to do so. And 46% of organisations had implemented resource standards management,

with a further 25% planning to do so. In the post-16 group these igures seem to relect the

lack of college policies on the re-use of e-learning

materials that is reported in the literature 94 .

centage of Per respondents 40%

As already noted (p20 Learning platforms:

Implementation and uptake ), a major focus of the use of learning platforms was on accessing content.

Access provided for

Given the patchy uptake of learning platforms, it seems reasonable to conclude that use of digital

Staff

Students

Parents/ community

resources in learning platforms is also uneven and generally low. This relects the reported position in FE

RBC (n=5) 100%

and sixth-form colleges, where for example only 13%

Pre-16 (n=52) 90%

of colleges using NLN materials reported that in 2005 their use was common practice 95 .

Post-16 (n=38) 95%

Commercial (n=10)

Other (n=20) 95%

All (n=125) 91%

Referred to in Digital resources: Implementation and uptake

Example 11 – Access to diverse commercial

23 Digital learning resources provided

resources via a single sign-on

Figure 23.1 gives a breakdown by sector of the

In one LA the use of a sophisticated portal

resources that are already being provided.

enables widespread use of digital resources from diverse commercial sources. This complements an e-portfolio system which is used for hosting

Figure 23.1 Digital resources provided, by sector

home-produced content. When Curriculum Online initially emerged, there 100%

was anxiety about the proliferation of URLs and

usernames/passwords, which the LA thought might

inhibit digital resource use. Primary schools in

centage of

particular felt overwhelmed, so the LA developed

Per respondents 40%

the portal as an easier starting point for schools.

The portal provides users with one central log-in to around 40 suppliers’ systems. The user can log in 0%

Resources

with the username and password that they have been given for the portal and can then access and cross-

search all the resources from any supplier that their

Regional

school has paid for.

Institutional/ Departmental

For the portal to work, the LA negotiated with

Local authority/

suppliers to gain access to the metadata for their

RBC (n=5)

digital resources. Merging all of this metadata with school purchasing information resulted in the ability

Pre-16 (n=48)

to cross-search material from different suppliers (so

Post-16 (n=37) 84%

long as a school had paid for access to that supplier’s

Commercial

data). This worked well but was dependent on the

quality of suppliers’ metadata. Initially this was a

Other (n=19)

problem, which meant that search results were dominated by those suppliers’ resources which had

All (n=117)

been tagged properly. Feedback to other suppliers that their resources were not coming up in searches encouraged them to improve their tagging.

This shows the following.

The system has been very successful both in saving • Commercial respondents were less likely than other schools money through aggregated procurement

sectors to provide access to collections of digital arrangements and also in usage levels. Around half

resources and, not surprisingly, where they were the schools in the LA are regular users of the system.

providing access to digital resources these would The main technical problem they have had relates to

be ones that they had developed themselves. systems from suppliers which track students’ activity

• NLN, RDN and FERL resources were most often in order to give them feedback on their progress.

used by post-16 organisations.

However, the LA has found ways to overcome this • NEN resources were most often used by RBCs, and from their perspective, though at least one supplier least often by commercial and post-16 respondents.

feels that the quality of the service they can provide • Regional collections were least often used by to schools has been reduced. The LA has also had post-16 respondents’ organisations.

problems because some teachers are reluctant to

• Pre-16 organisations were most likely to use

tell students their usernames and passwords as the internally developed digital resources. teachers want to keep the portal for their own use.