[ARCHIVED] Faculty Repository Ideas

[ericwhitmer]

I was wondering what other institutions do to provide a central repository to share links, videos, to the others within a department (Humanities, Sciences, et al) or institution wide scenario?

Your ideas would be appreciated.

Thank you.

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @ericwhitmer  

At the school where I am the Canvas admin, we create Canvas course shells (on request) for programs to use as repositories available to all program faculty. We then manually enroll the program faculty as teachers so that they can upload, create, manage and copy shared resources.

I teach for two other system colleges who do the same.

We do not use a college-wide repository, but only because no-one has asked for one.

Kelley

[ericwhitmer]

Kelley,

Would you think that would be a good idea so that faculty across disciplines can share their resources for others to use or would that be overkill? I personally think that would be a good idea because someone in a Spanish class can share something that worked for them with someone who is in the hard sciences or the VoTech areas for example.

[kmeeusen]

Eric:

I guess it would depend on the school, and maybe even its faculty and culture.

Ours is a small tech school, with a close, friendly and collaborative culture where such a puppy might work - we would happily make such a resource available if anybody asked for it. I don't see it working at a university or large college; and am not even sure it would be a very good idea except maybe for schools within the college.

While writing this I thought of one mitigating potential use for a larger school, and that might be to makes various non-instructional resources available campus-wide through a Canvas shell. However, larger schools always have some kind of document management system in place, and I think that managing the shell and its content could prove to be a nightmare.

I don't know........................... just winging it off the top of my head, and mostly talking out my .........................!

Kelley

[ericwhitmer]

This is how some of the best ideas are made and delivered. Just winging it.

That being said, we are a state college that has 3 campuses that serves 3 counties that are all about 40 miles apart from each other with faculty who do not see each other very often except big department meetings and the professional development days which is true for most of the departments bar one (one department their faculty travel the distance to serve the classes there).

[kmeeusen]

See................. depends on school and culture!

I think it could work; but where I really see potential is at the department level for your school.

You also said that faculty only get together for Professional development day, and that got me thinking (ouchie, that hurts). How about a org-wide PD Shell, organized around departments of schools with each having it's own dedicated module. You could even make department groups where folks could collaborate. Might be a bit challenging to set up, but you could pawn-off the management job onto Department Heads (or the reality of the admin assistants). More I think about it, the more I like it.

You could poll stakeholders and see what they think.

Kelley

[Bobby2]

Great question  @ericwhitmer .

We have created a few Canvas staffroom templates that a lot of schools are using for a repository, THEN branching out to using it more collaboratively with Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), or teaching teams. This has been a great way to model Canvas in action with staff so they can use the collaborative ideas with their classes.

Then lots of schools are using Microsoft Teams for more secure files etc. 

Microsoft Teams – Group Chat software 

[mmoore1]

At our community College and within our district we allow departments to request shells for sharing materials.  It seems appropriate at that level.  Not all departments use this service.  Within those shells we have seen file sharing, module sharing, blueprinting of courses, and asynchronous communications that help their challenging meeting schedule time.  We have also used it for special professional development opportunities such as our DE Summit, OER Workshop Day, Diversity Festival, and Faculty Academy.  We created separate terms that have no end date for this also and separate sub accounts so they don't lose access after a term.