I've been working on this EduResources Weblog for nearly a year, since October 2002, and opened up my EduResources Portal (http://sage.eou.edu/SPT/) in June of 2003. During that time I've read innumerable articles and examined hundreds of web sites. Like most people who become absorbed in a topic of study, I'm initially surprised whenever I encounter colleagues who know nothing about the availability of online instructional resources, people for whom a "learning object" is a piece of chalk or a pencil, people who think that "repositories" be must archeological museums containing vases, shards, and mummies.
Of course the growth of online instructional repositories is still a relatively new phenomenon. MERLOT and MIT's OpenCourseWare sites may be casually familiar to professionals in the field of instructional design but they are not everyday terms for most faculty in higher education. Most instructors are now familiar with Online Writing Labs (OWLs) and regularly refer their students to the services of the OWLs on their campus and OWLs from other campuses, but ten years ago OWLs were little developed and little known. We are in the same position with Web Instructional Repositories (WIRs). Most Centers for Teaching and Learning at most institution of higher education make no mention of WIRs, provide no links to WIR sites, and offer no assistance to instructors to encourage them to locate online learning resources that might be useful in their courses. Similarly, most university and college libraries are just beginning to become aware of WIRs and of the need to assist their faculties in finding and using WIRs.
One important step toward the greater use and awareness of WIRs will be through the construction of referatories: repositories contain collections of learning resources, referatories contain guidelines for locating and using repositories. Repositories contain learning objects; referatories are gateways. Another important step will be the design of local guideline sites that specifically take instructors through the steps or using referatories and repositories, and also teach instructors how to use rss feeds to keep up with additions to repositories in their areas of interest. Instructors also need to be shown how to efficiently apply general purpose search engines and discipline-specific search engines such as Google (http://www.google.com/) and Scirus (http://www.scirus.com/about/) to track what's newly available in their disciplines.
Both MERLOT and OCW have recognized that it's not sufficient to simply open a repository and then step back with the expectation that instructors will find their own way through the best use of the resources. MERLOT has added MERLOT TWO (http://www.merlot.org/Home.po?discipline=TWO) to provide instruction to potential users about how to best utilize the resources that MERLOT contains. MERLOT is also providing rss feeds so that users can easily keep up with additions to their interest areas within the repository. OCW provides the OCW Newsletter (http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ocw-mail) to which users can subscribe to learn about updates and to get information about using the OCW resources.
I began the EduResources Portal to serve as a gateway to online instructional resources that I had located from all over the web. It took months of searching while on sabbatical to locate, evaluate, and categorize various repositories. It was apparent to me that most instructors would not have time to do their own explorations and searches without being provided a map of the territory and a gateway into the variegated new world of WIRs. The map that I came up with for the EduResources Portal (http://www.eou.edu/~jhart/sitemap.htm) shows one way of mapping WIRs, but it is only one way and perhaps not the best way.
Part of the task of assisting instructors to use WIRs is to help each person form her/his own map, a map that fits a particular set of academic interests and needs. There are, then, at least four important levels to consider when exploring WIRs: the repository level, the referatory level, the guideline level, and the individual user's level. The interfacing among these levels poses special challenges to those who create learning resources, those who collect learning resources, and those who assist faculty to locate and use WIRs.
11:09:37 AM 
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