There is an increasing demand and a new opportunity for institutions to make their curriculum resources more accessible and to promote this access to a wider and increasingly diverse audience. Digitization is seen as the most important way to achieve this and is something that all institutions must consider as part of their strategic plan.
This section gives a brief overview of the benefits of digitization and the attributes of openness in the context of educational resources.
The video, A Shared Culture, brings together the concepts of digitization, openness and demonstrates the ways that we all can benefit from clearly licensed creative works that allow us to use them freely and openly.
A Shared Culture by Jesse Dylan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.
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Click the link to A Shared Culture. The web page describes how the video was made and shows the source images that were collected to create the video. Each of the images has its own Creative Commons (CC) license that specifies how it can be used.
In this case, the video and images can be used, reused and redistributed for any purpose, except commercial use.
Digitization is defined as being the conversion of analog items into digital format for the purpose of extending access and, where appropriate, to assist with preservation. Digitization also refers to the management of new materials created in digital formats.
Digitization has many facets and the following are among the main benefits:
To provide on-demand local, national and international access to courses, curriculum resources or collections
To open up collections that cannot always be accessed physically by users, e.g. fragile cultural materials
To enhance opportunities for increasing the number of potential students in courses or users of collections and to allow greater public interface with institutional assets
To use existing courses or resources in new or different ways
To further e-learning opportunities
To create innovative content packages in response to user demand
To build partnerships between institutions to improve the quality of digitization projects by sharing resources, adopting common standards and facilitating good practice and the exchange of information and expertise
To identify funding opportunities which require a collaborative element to be successful
To bring information about courses and resources that have already been digitized through federated search strategies
To raise awareness of the range of courses and educational resources available for study
To promote the use of both local and international OER to further study needs
Consider the benefits of digitization outlined in this section of the workshop. Which of these benefits is mostly closely connected to needs you may have in your work or teaching?
Select a benefit and match it with a need that you have to make your work more accessible or more malleable in an educational context?
Benefits of digitization | Specific need you would like to address in your work or context |
Creative Commons (2008). A shared culture. Available: http://creativecommons.org/videos/a-shared-culture