Personal and Team Development

Colleagues from a range of curriculum areas at City College Norwich (CCN) were contacted as a source of collecting teaching materials at the researchers’ college of employment. The repository was organised into three discipline areas: research methods, work based learning and management/professional issues and within that by curriculum areas Business and Finance, Computing, Construction, Education, Engineering, Health, Nursing and Early Years Education and Hospitality. The repository was subsequently made available to teaching collegues from across the regional collaboration.
The technical approach was to adopt Blackboard, the CCN Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). This enabled the project to benefit from the powerful technologies of a Networked Learning Environment (NLE).
Throughout the project the researcher worked closely with the CCN Information Learning Technology (ILT) support analyst with special responsibility, for the academic year commencing September 2005, to establish Blackboard as the VLE at CCN. This working partnership was to ensure that it was technically feasible to implement the project, (i.e. to share teaching materials, to set up search facilities and a discussion forum across the regional collaboration).
A survey was created within Blackboard as a means of measuring and hence evaluating the effectiveness of the repository as a source of teaching material to teaching colleagues both at CCN and the regional collaboration.
Both the background reading and this project found that a repository was a resource that was welcomed by teaching practitioners but that not all practitioners welcomed the opportunity to contribute to their material. This was for three main reasons:
•Concerns that not all sources had been acknowledged, leading to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and copyright issues.
•Concerns that material was not good enough for scrutiny by peers.
• An unwillingness to share material.