OnCoRe Blueprint Webinar Series

As an ongoing part of the OnCoRe Blueprint Project, we will be offering a series of webinars that focus on some of the issues surrounding repositories and repository development.  These sessions will feature guest speakers with expertise in each topic.  The webinars will be conducted via Elluminate and all are welcome to attend.

Upcoming sessions:

Friday, November 21, 2008 @ 11 AM (EST)  
Topic: Repository Structure
Moderator: Elizabeth Johnson and Susie Henderson
Presenters: webinar participants 

Participants will discuss their underlying repository structure and the rationale for establishing that structure. Are there any challenges not met by this structure? If so, how did you solve those challenges? Who manages the repository administration and how is that working?

Friday, December 12, 2008 @ 10 AM (EST)  
Topic: Establishing policies that define repository administration
Moderator: Susie Henderson, Cathy Alfano, Marie Lasseter (University System of GA)

Planning for your repository policies and software customizations can help streamline your repository and keep down the administrative overhead.  This webinar will examine some of the issues and decisions that face repositories including questions regarding security concerns, collection development, content contribution, and others.

Addtional webinars will be added as topics are finalized. In addtional, feel free to browse our archive of past webinars below.

If you would like to suggest a webinar topic, please email the project coordinator at ejohnson@distancelearn.org

Click here for a list of possible upcoming topics.

Recordings of past webinars are archived below:

• Repository Content, October 24, 2008
• Change Management: Getting Buy-In, Upping the Ante, and Keeping Your Sanity, June 27, 2008
• Building the Infrastructure of Open Education: Legal, Technical, and Social Challenges, April 25, 2008
• Repository Funding: Sources, Strategies, and Challenges, March 28, 2008
• Sell Yourself:  Marketing Your Program, February 15, 2008

• Making Content Interoperability Work: Structured Practice January 18, 2007
• Cool Content: Highlights from the Orange Grove, December 7, 2007
• The North Carolina Community College System Repository Project, November 16, 2007
• Repository Models: A Web Tour of Key Repositories October 12, 2007

Repository Content, Friday, October 24, 2008
Presented by Elizabeth Johnson, OnCoRe Blueprint Project Manager 

Offering sufficient content to attract faculty to use a repository is a challenge that every new repository faces. In this session, we will explore content options. Do you provide basic content in many subject areas? What types of content are you targeting, if any? Do you offer whole courses or provide the component parts to whole courses? Are you licensing content to include? Are you federating or harvesting content? Do you target federal grant funded content for inclusion? Are you asking or requiring institutions or faculty to contribute content developed with state dollars? What are your success stories and your failures? Can you provide links to content or repositories that you believe is especially valuable? We can learn from each other.

Click here to view the webinar

Change Management: Getting Buy-In, Upping the Ante, and Keeping Your Sanity, June 27, 2008
Presented by Debbie Kell, Director, Virtual College, Mercer County Community College

This presentation offers insights into methods for planning and implementing new technology in an academic setting. The example is selecting and implementing a learning management system, but the planning and techniques can easily be apply to a repository or any large scale technology implementation.

• Click here to view the webinar

Building the Infrastructure of Open Education: Legal, Technical, and Social Challenges, April 25, 2008
Presented by: Ahrash N. Bissell, Ph.D.,Executive Director, ccLearn Creative Commons

Educational paradigms are changing. The pace of information creation necessitates new ways of managing and imparting content. New technologies exacerbate the information overload, but they also provide many potential solutions. In particular, the advent of the internet has profoundly altered the ways in which information is accessed and shared, and one would expect the impact on education to be revolutionary. While technological tools are being used in many classrooms to enhance instruction, one of the most exciting areas of development is in the creation of open educational resources (OER), which in their fullest form should be free, accessible, authoritative, and derivable. The availability of open educational content is growing exponentially, yet the usage of such content does not appear to be widespread. Worse, much of the OER currently being created is incompatible - legally, technically, and socially - with other OER.

Our presenter, Ahrash Bissell, describes the work of ccLearn in encouraging and facilitating the adoption of practices that will enable the fullest realization of the potential for OER to transform education. He will touches upon many of our longer term goals, including substantial community building, provision of educational access to underprivileged communities at home and abroad, and hoped-for changes in the culture of educational practice so that teachers have greater control over their classrooms and pedagogy, greater freedom to experiment, and a larger community for support. Fundamentally, the grand goal is to rise to the challenge and promise of technological and pedagogical innovation in such a way that access to and the experience of quality education is a reality for everyone, everywhere, at any time.

For more information on Creative Commons visit their website or view this short video describing their philosophy.

• Click here to view the webinar

Repository Funding: Sources, Strategies, and Challenges, March 28, 2008
Presented by: Members and Partners of the OnCoRe Blueprint Project

This presentation offers insights into many of the issues surrounding repository funding.  Representatives from The Orange Grove and the Kentucky Learning Depot discuss how funding has impacted the growth and development of their state's repository projects.  We will also explore how other successful repositories have addressed their funding needs through, grants, commercial endeavors, and other creative solutions.  All participants were invited to share and discuss their experiences including challenges faced by own their repository projects and the approaches taken to dealing with these situations.

• Click here to view the webinar
• Click here download the PowerPoint

Sell Yourself:  Marketing Your Program, February 15, 2008
Presented by: Nicki Hilliard, PharmD, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR

This presentation may be applied to a statewide repository initiative or any other education project in which you need to sell your ideas and services to a variety of people, including administrators, students, colleagues, industry, and additional funding sources.  Learn about marketing and advertising opportunities for your educational program and share ideas with your colleagues.  

This webinar shares experiences and resources of taking a local educational program offered at two separate universities and combining efforts to build a national online program that is a financial and educational success.  We discuss the components of a business/marketing plan and how to get buy-in from the top level of the university.   Learn how to promote your program to the profession via meetings, publications, eNewsletters, internet, and more.  Discover easy and inexpensive tools to increase your exposure.  Market yourself and your educational program and reap the rewards!

• Click here to view the webinar.

Making Content Interoperability Work: Structured Practice January 18, 2007
Presented by: Jeff Kahn and Ed Walker, CS4Ed

The key to making content mobile and usable is following a systematic approach to picking technology, identifying and managing risk, prioritizing objectives and developing criteria for deciding what to work on, what to wait on, and what to keep an eye on. This webinar will draw on the presenters' experience with successes, failures, and lessons learned about 1. Techniques (e.g., OAI, Dublin Core, LOM, IMS, OKI) 2. Implementations (e.g. iPod, iTunes, iTunes Univ, Kindle, Amazon, VitalSource, Follett, MyPearson, CourseSmart) 3. Organizations (Merlot, Sakai, ADL-SCORM) 4. Sea changes (the internet, multimedia, SOAs, open source)

• Click here to watch the Webinar in your browser
• Click here to view the PowerPoint slides from the presentation

Cool Content: Highlights from the Orange Grove, December 7, 2007
This webinar, presented by members of the Orange Grove repository staff and the OnCoRe Blueprint team, spotlights some of the high quality content available in the Orange Grove repository. 

• Click here to view the webinar
  

The North Carolina Community College System Repository Project, November 16, 2007
This webinar features Dr. Bill Randall, Associate Vice President for Learning Technology North Carolina Community College System.  He discusses their ongoing repository project including the request for proposals to select the repository software.

• Click here to view the webinar
  

Repository Models: A Web Tour of Key Repositories, October 12, 2007
This session, conducted by members of the OnCoRe Blueprint Project Team, provides an overview of some of the unique features and interesting aspects of several different repositories.

• Click here to watch the Webinar in your browser
• Click here for a list of URL's visited during the webinar

Upcoming Sessions
Other planned sessions will be held monthly on Fridays at 10 a.m. Session dates and topics will be posted as soon as presenters and details are finalized. Upcoming topics will include: 

• Metadata
• Harvesting/Federation: Content Acquisition Strategies
• Strategic Planning for Repositories
• Marketing and change management strategies
• Copyright and re-use issues
• New developments in repositories
• Inter-repository policies and architecture

Sessions are limited to 65 participants (each computer logged into the system counts as one participant).

We hope that you will join us in this exciting forum to share best practices, discover effective strategies to address repository issues, and explore what the future holds for this dynamic and rapidly expanding field.