Shareability

I’ve just been talking to colleagues about sharing learning resources and I suggested that we could try to describe what attributes make a resource more easily shared. I’ve been using the set listed below in discussions relating to several projects I’ve been involved with over the last two or three years, but I don’t think I’ve ever put them down clearly on their own rather than embedded in some presentation on a specific project. Mostly they were first suggested by Charles Duncan at the 2005 Eduserv Symposium, but the first two are my own addition (Charles probably thought them to obvious to mention).

So here for clarity and ease of reference (but certainly not novelty) are six attributes of a resource which I suggest will make it more likely to be shared:

High quality

Pretty obvious that most people want the good stuff, the difficulty is defining and measuring what we mean by good and communicating the result. I believe that this probably depends on what subject the resource is about, and I also believe that there isn’t much high quality stuff about.

Licensable

The IPR ownership and the terms and conditions under which the resource can legally be used need to be clear. It helps if these are readily understood and not onerous, so something like Creative Commons helps.

Discoverable

If people don’t find it they won’t use it. This has implications for resource description and exposure to Google etc.

Editable

It helps if the user can tailor the resource to meet their needs, maybe changing notation, cutting stuff that is too difficult or irrelevant to them, adding links to related resources that they know and use. This has implications for licensing and for technology–so for the web, do as much in plain HTML as possible and where you do need to use, say, Flash for an animation, don’t put the text that explains the animation in the Flash file.

Repurposable

We took this to refer to reuse in a different context, say for teaching the same topic in different disciplines or at different levels, or using different pedagogies or in a different learning environment. It’s fairly obvious that this increases the breadth of appeal of the resource, but it’s not so obvious how to do it. Keeping the units small and editable helps.

Portable

This refers to the ability to move the resource between systems, e.g. from development tool/server to a repository (or other dissemination environment) to a VLE, and relies on the use of standards (open or proprietary). This helps make resources easily editable, and also allows the user to take responsibility for ensuring the availability of the resource.

I admit to having no empirical evidence to support any of those assertions, and I certainly wouldn’t like to suggest that they alone are sufficient to ensure that learning resources get reused! I would be very interested in hearing any evidence or other comments about whether they seem to be on the right track.