EdShare

The EdShare learning and teaching resource and service was initially created by the JISC-funded EdSpace Project within the University of Southampton. The Project began in October 2007.

The Project was led by Hugh Davis, University Director of Education with responsibility for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), the Project Manager was and remains Debra Morris, a member of staff of the University Library. The Project itself was completed in April 2009. The work of supporting and developing EdShare further has continued since that time involving academics and technical team members in the School of Electronics & Computer Science, colleagues in iSolutions and a community of early adopters across the institution. The University is working with the repository as a central part of the educational infrastructure as envisaged in the institutional Strategy.

EdShare is built on EPrints software which also delivers the institutional research repository. EdShare provides for metadata, tagging, and semantic mark-up of stored items. Each resource has a persistent URL, enabling linking and sharing with continuous, and reliable access over time.  EdShare provides a way to keep resources that you really care about and use in learning and teaching, safe, and presents a range of content added by members of the University of Southampton both within and beyond the boundaries of the institution.  The resources presented on EdShare are retrievable both by searching within EdShare itself, and also by searching in Google.

EdShare is more than a simple storage service, though. It provides the locus for community development around curriculum renewal, optimisation of use for learning resources, a way for staff and students easily to access the full range of different resources: Powerpoints, quizzes, case studies, images, Word documents, PDFs as well as podcasts. EdShare provides the basis for a range of services and organisational activities to complement and enable our work in developing educational resources.  We are keen to explore the role that this service can play in developing mechanisms for providing evidence of success, esteem and achievement for our academic community in learning and teaching.

EdShare has attracted considerable interest and attention across the HE community in England and the EdShare development team in ECS are now developing plans with other Universities to support them in installing their own version of the software and understanding the strategic approaches, policies and practices that will enable this kind of service to flourish.

People

• Hugh Davis
• Debra Morris