A Place to Find Things

How does your organisation help users to access e-Learning resources?
An e-Learning repository contains digital resources that can support learning. It differs from a learning management system in that users do not usually need a password and there is no management of individual learners or records of achievement.

It is simply a place to find things.

Some resources may be restricted to those with a password and username or only be available on N3. By allowing repositories to be accessed by anyone via the Internet removes some of the barriers. This is not always possible because of licence conditions.

One or Many?

There are some national repositories such as the National Library and the NLMS also contains e-Learning content. There are public places go find generic e-Learning content as well. YouTube for example contains some useful videos.

It is possible to provide some large centralised repositories that have a comprehensive set of resources but it is very unlikely that there can ever be a single place to find everything.

Repositories can be joined up by letting them talk to each other using agreed query and search methods. This makes it easier for the user to search across repositories without having to go to each one individually.

Some repositories only contain the information about the content rather than the actual resource. They can still help people identify things that are useful but then point them to the place where to get them from.

It is tempting to have several copies of an e-Learning resource in different places. This can lead to duplicate search results unless the resources can be identified uniquely.

Some ideas for helping users find e-Learning content:

• provide links to the most useful e-Learning repositories
• avoid putting resources in multiple places
• harvest or query information across repositories to simplify searching
• provide RSS feeds so that people can see when new resources are adde
• make searching and browsing easy and relevant

Related Resources

•  
  e-Learning Object Repository
  

  The e-Learning Repository is a project with the aim to provide an extensible search and discovery platform to support the discovery and sharing of e-Learning objects and resources held both within the repository and at external locations

  http://www.elearningrepository.nhs.uk
•  
  Catalogue of Local Content (CoLC)
  

  A project that produced a catalogue of local e-Learning resoruces that can be shared. These resources are now part of the e-Learning Repository.

  http://www.elearningrepository.nhs.uk
•  
  Health Information Resources
  

  The NHS Evidence Health Information Resources website (formerly the National Library for Health) will continue to run in parallel to the NHS Evidence website.

  http://www.library.nhs.uk/