Rewarding teachers: a review of current practice

An integral part of the Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project is the design of a reward and support scheme that provides suitable recognition for the contribution of items to a repository of teaching and learning materials. A repository is a managed environment having the benefits of: providing a central store for the sharing of resources, enhancing access to items, and helping to preserve the outputs of a university for the long-term. The project will pilot a reward and award scheme as part of the demonstrator repository service at Loughborough University. This repository will hold some examples of good quality teaching materials produced at this institution, resources for use in teaching, and case studies of innovative practice. The repository service will include provision for support channels to encourage and assist content creators and depositors. Rewarding staff for their efforts in creating good quality teaching and learning resources is seen as a way of recognising their work and encouraging innovation. A number of National and Local initiatives for rewarding staff are already in place. This report introduces some of these schemes and outlines the context within which such reward schemes operate. The project’s reward and support scheme will be designed to meet the needs of contributors to a repository of materials to support teaching and learning. The need for suitable awards, support and recognition were identified by a national survey (Bates et al., 2005), and in interviews with teachers and support staff at Loughborough University carried out by the project team

Ways of evaluating the chosen rights solution

Our motivational survey highlighted that easily available support would be a motivator for depositors to contribute their teaching materials into a repository. Support with rights issues is particularly important because of the confusion over rights that exists within UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). We have identified possible support that depositors and end users could receive. Some potential evaluation criteria have been identified to assess the licences that we have put in place. We aim to evaluate the experience of the depositor and the end user and assess each licence in terms of suitability and accuracy

The Rights and Rewards project: teaching resource repository infrastructure

The sharing of resources for use in teaching and learning within higher education institutions is one of the issues that the Rights and Rewards projects seeks to address. Through survey and interviews the project has identified a willingness, on the part of academics and other staff groups, to engage in activities that result in greater exposure of their teaching resources and expertise. The mechanism that the project proposes to put in place to facilitate sharing across the sector is an institutional repository. This teaching resource repository will be established as a demonstrator, which will be available until the completion of the project

Digital lifecycles and file types: final report

The Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the Digital Repositories Programme. This represents a cooperative venture between the Department of Information Science (DIS), the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (engCETL) and the University Library. The two year project aims to establish a single Blended repository to meet the teaching and research needs of this institution. It will address the motivational issues facing depositors of teaching materials with a focus on the associated Rights and Rewards. This digital lifecycles study will identify the most appropriate materials for submission to the project’s demonstrator repository. This takes into account factors like: granularity, persistence and multimedia types that can be supported for both teaching and research materials. It also documents the existing lifecycles of these items and the tools and specifications needed within a repository frameworks to support these lifecycles. For example, it will identify appropriate granularity of teaching resources and appropriate methods for content packaging. The results of the study will help to identify which types of files are currently in use, which formats should be supported by the repository system ultimately selected for the demonstrator repository. This information is likely to be of benefit to other projects and institutions in the process of setting up an Institutional Repository (IR)

Proposed rights solution: final report

This study aims to investigate and deliver a suitable rights solution for a teaching materials repository. It aims to provide depositors and users with appropriate licences to cater for their respective needs. We examined licences currently being used by repositories containing research and teaching material and compared these to responses to our survey, which explored rights issues associated with the sharing of teaching materials in a repository

Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project

The Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the Digital Repositories Programme. This represents a cooperative venture, at Loughborough University, between the Department of Information Science (DIS), the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (engCETL) and the University Library. This two year project which started in summer 2005 aims to establish a blended repository service to meet the teaching and research needs of this institution. It will address the motivational issues facing depositors of teaching materials with a focus on the associated rights and rewards

Copyright ownership of teaching materials

In 1998, JISC commissioned a Senior Management Briefing Paper on Copyright (JISC, 1998, p.4), which recommended that “all members of HEIs [Higher Education Institutions], whether staff or students should be educated about the basics of copyright and what is acceptable practice”. A later study, also in relation to copyright in HEIs, stated that “there would seem to be a considerable gap between the legal position and what academic staff believe are their rights” (Weedon, 2000, p.16). Although this is not a recent study, the difference between the actual situation and the perceived situation amongst academics in terms of the ownership of their teaching materials is still unclear. Project RoMEO (2003), which focused on author attitudes associated with research outputs, surveyed participants and investigated who owned the copyright of journal papers that these authors had produced. Under one third (32%) of participants did not know this, which is concerning. It is no surprise then that Cornish (2004, p.12) believes the “ownership of copyright is complex”

A comparison of academics' attitudes towards the rights protection of their research and teaching materials

This paper compares two JISC-funded surveys. The first was undertaken by the Rights MEtadata for Open Archiving (RoMEO) project and focused on the rights protection required by academic authors sharing their research outputs in an open-access environment. The second was carried out by the Rights and Rewards project and focused on the rights protection required by authors sharing their teaching materials in the same way. The data are compared. The study reports confusion amongst both researchers and teachers as to copyright ownership in the materials they produced. Researchers were more restrictive about the permissions they would allow, but were liberal about terms and conditions. Teachers would allow many permissions, but under stricter terms and conditions. The study concludes that a single rights solution could not be used for both research and teaching materials

Rights and Rewards Project: Academic Survey - final report

As part of the JISC funded Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories project, a motivational survey was undertaken. A questionnaire addressed to all academic staff in UK Further Education (FE) institutions and to specialists in the field of Teaching and Learning (T&L) was available online. The aim of the questionnaire was to gather views on the use of an institutional repository (IR) for the deposit of teaching and learning materials. Two of the main areas of interest were: • What ‘Rights’ would individuals expect to exert over the teaching materials they deposit into a repository? • What ‘Rewards’ would motivate them to deposit their teaching materials? This report outlines the activities undertaken in the preparation of the questionnaire, including brief notes on the pilot studies. It also details efforts to advertise the survey and provides a analysis of the responses

Workflow mapping and stakeholder analysis: final report

The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR, 2006), shows that there are 69 Higher Education (HE) Institutional repositories in the UK, with 60 of these being devoted to research material. There are very few institutional teaching and learning material repositories in the UK, and these repository types seem to exist on a much wider scale at present. An example of which, is the JISC’s Online Repository of [teaching and learning] Materials (JORUM). There is a clear need for investigation into institutional repositories that contain teaching material. According to the Digital Repositories Road Map, which represents JISC’s vision for 2010, we need to carry out analysis of existing business processes, workflows and dataflows; identify opportunities for innovative inter-working between repositories and between repositories and other applications (Heery & Powell, 2006). The Community Dimensions of a Learning Object Repository (CD-LOR, 2006) project team have already been looking into workflows with regards to learning objects and the Repository Management and Metadata (RepoMMan, 2006) have been investigating research output workflows. We are looking into workflows related to teaching material