Last week I presented a workshop on "Finding Online Instructional Resources" to faculty members at Eastern Oregon University. The workshop PowerPoint slides are available at the link for this posting. Of course I learned a lot by organizing and delivering the workshop.
Here are a few reflections and observations I took away from this recent workshop experience: 1) instructors are using online resources for teaching, but most still don't know about the availability of online repositories--even the biggest ones like Merlot and MIT's OpenCourseWare; 2) most instructors use Google and other general search engines but don't know about more specialized search engines (such as Scirus); 3) instructors rely upon bookmarks or favorites in their web browsers to store and organize the resource sites that they find on the web; 4) many of the resource sites that instructors use are subject-specific information resources rather than direct instructional resources; 4) some instructors put links to the Internet resources that they find into their courses within a web course managment system; 5) a few also construct an Internet references web page to accompany their courses; 6) hardly any instructors know about or make use of learning objects that they import into their own course modules.
Local referatories that teach instructors how to locate and use repositories are much needed. These referatories can be located in libraries, teaching and learning centers, instructional support centers, or even in departmental web pages. Wherever located, they need to show instructors how to efficiently and effectively find and download instructional resources and how to adapt them for their own instructional purposes. This support task will be made easier as more of the large-scale repositories add their own guideline sites (such as Merlot TWO and the RDN Virtual Training Suite) which include capabilities for users to save custom searches and obtain updated rss feeds for topics of interest.
Another important next step to facilitate the adoption of online instructional resources will be local installation and support of easy-to-use repository/referatory construction software so that instructors can construct their own local repositories and referatories for use with specific subject areas, specific courses, and specific instructional programs. This is a step that I want to undertake here at EOU. (A related step will be to use ePortfolios into which instructors can add a record of instructional tools/materials that they have developed themselves.)
There can be great advantages when instructors put their own learning resource links into local repositories and referatories versus leaving them scattered across bookmarks and web pages: 1) the resources can be much more easily categorized and browsed; 2) the resources can be updated regularly; 3) the resources can be searched, using key word and phrase search capabilities built into the repository/referatory software. Additionally, since repository/referatory construction software packages such as the Scout Portal Toolkit, Fedora, and LionShare contain built-in metadata tagging, the resources put into a local repository become accessible to a wider audience of potential users who may search for resources on the Internet. If the repository/referatory software is simple to use, instructors can even have their students construct repositories/referatories as part of the learning activities in the course (this is one step beyond having students share web resources in web pages, a practice that is already facilitated by web course management systems). Constructing repositories/referatories for a course provides a more enduring and comprehensive result than constructing a course Wiki, but both steps would be useful.
I agree with David Davies (see enclosure) that truly widespread use of learning objects among non-techies will not happen until an LO construction tool is released that makes the development of LOs as easy as using a word processor. However, even before that step occurs, instructors can be assisted to effectively locate and use resources that already exist on the net and to put what they find into local repositories/referatories. To achieve a much wider use of online instructional resources by the majority of the faculties across the world, much more effort needs to be expended on the support side, rather than having instructional technologists simply build more LOs. The construction and storage of instructional resources must be accompanied by an equal effort to teach instructors how to find, store, and use their own personalized collections of those resources.
9:13:56 AM 
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