Steve Loddington

A case study of the development of WebPA: An online peer-moderated marking tool

Peer moderation of group work in higher education is rapidly advancing through the use of technological developments and is increasingly being informed by pedagogical research. The highly successful WebPA online assessment system has gone through a number of development phases over its 15-year history and has now evolved into a relatively mature and flexible tool for facilitating group work. This paper presents a case study of the approaches that have been used in the systems development from the technical perspective, and describes how the scope of the project has massively expanded and that the development has been continually backed by a sound and wide-ranging pedagogy. The benefits of using the online system are shown to be underpinned throughout by examples of good practice in the supervision of academic group work. A critical evaluation of the tool and surrounding pedagogical practices highlight future areas for technical expansion.

Attitudes to the Rights and Rewards for Author Contributions to Repositories for Teaching and Learning.

In the United Kingdom over the past few years there has been a dramatic growth of national and regional repositories to collect and disseminate resources related to teaching and learning. Most notable of these are the Joint Information Systems Committee’s Online Repository for [Learning and Teaching] Materials as well as the Higher Education Academy’s subject specific resource databases. Repositories in general can hold a range of materials not only related to teaching and learning, but more recently the term ‘institutional repository’ is being used to describe a repository that has been established to support open access to a university’s research output. This paper reports on a survey conducted to gather the views of academics, support staff and managers on their past experiences and future expectations of the use of repositories for teaching and learning. The survey explored the rights and rewards associated with the deposit of materials into such repositories. The findings suggest what could be considered to be an ‘ideal’ repository from the contributors’ perspective and also outlines many of the concerns expressed by respondents in the survey.

A comparison of academics' attitudes towards the rights protection of their research and teaching materials

This paper compares two JISC-funded surveys. The first was undertaken by the Rights MEtadata for Open Archiving (RoMEO) project and focused on the rights protection required by academic authors sharing their research outputs in an open-access environment. The second was carried out by the Rights and Rewards project and focused on the rights protection required by authors sharing their teaching materials in the same way. The data are compared. The study reports confusion amongst both researchers and teachers as to copyright ownership in the materials they produced. Researchers were more restrictive about the permissions they would allow, but were liberal about terms and conditions. Teachers would allow many permissions, but under stricter terms and conditions. The study concludes that a single rights solution could not be used for both research and teaching materials.

Analysis of Academic Attitudes and Existing Processes to Inform the Design of Teaching and Learning Material Repositories: A User-Centred Approach

The last couple of years have brought a rise in the number of institutional repositories throughout the world and within UK Higher Education institutions, with the majority of these repositories being devoted to research output. Repositories containing teaching and learning material are less common and the workflows and business processes surrounding these types of repositories were unclear. The user motivations to contributing to and downloading from repositories were also unknown. This article reports on two studies: a wide-scale survey carried out with HE staff to identify barriers and incentives to contributing to teaching material repositories; and interviews carried out as part of a workflow study at Loughborough University, to identify existing practice in the creation and sharing of teaching material. Confusion is reported with regard to the difference between a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and a repository. However, many different purposes of a teaching and learning material repository are highlighted. This article discusses how repositories could successfully interoperate with other institutional applications and highlights the benefits of teaching material repositories to the user, through scenarios. Recommendations relating to the key aspects of the design and implementation of a repository service are outlined.

Analysis of academic attitudes and existing processes to inform the design of teaching and learning material repositories: A user-centred approach

The last couple of years have brought a rise in the number of institutional repositories throughout the world and within UK Higher Education institutions, with the majority of these repositories being devoted to research output. Repositories containing teaching and learning material are less common and the workflows and business processes surrounding these types of repositories were unclear. The user motivations to contributing to and downloading from repositories were also unknown. This article reports on two studies: a wide-scale survey carried out with HE staff to identify barriers and incentives to contributing to teaching material repositories; and interviews carried out as part of a workflow study at Loughborough University, to identify existing practice in the creation and sharing of teaching material. Confusion is reported with regard to the difference between a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and a repository. However, many different purposes of a teaching and learning material repository are highlighted. This article discusses how repositories could successfully interoperate with other institutional applications and highlights the benefits of teaching material repositories to the user, through scenarios. Recommendations relating to the key aspects of the design and implementation of a repository service are outlined.