Topic 5 How to organize a repository of educational digital resources

A repository containing educationally digital resources can be

• placed at different levels
• contain different resources
• organized/categorized in different ways
• use different technologies to store and present the resources

Placed at different levels

A repository can be (in starting point) build for your own use. When this is one the right way and maintained the right way it can be a great resource for you and save time as you fast and smart can reuse what you have already made

A repository works very well together with other peers as all participant can be inspired by each others. The levels at your college could be sharing at team level, department level or for the whole college.

Finally, a repository can be open for all by give online access to all interested – and giving all permission to contribute to the repository.  

Contain different resources

Most basically repository resources can be text files. Many cloud-based repositories provides possibilities to edit text files online. This have many advantages such as version control (there will be only one), sharing and cooperating on the text file and access to the files from any device.

Different types of media files (photos, audio, video files etc..) can be stored and organized in a repository. There can be some restrictions concerning storage size.

A repository can also be an interactive list of online resources contain links that leads to the resource – and a short description of the resource

Organized/categorized

Most teachers like to store recent and almost ancient documents. Some of these teachers have sometimes problems finding their documents later. When you share repositories with others this problems will escalate into chaos and confusion.

The solution is to decide a structure and more difficult stick to this structure

organized/categorized

When designing your folder structure, start with a broad category at the top level and split it into subfolders of more narrow subcategories. Each folder should have only one purpose.

Stick to a naming convention. Folder and document names should be clear, consistent.

Keep track on different versions – ideally edit files online, or delete older versions – or finally give each version a date suffix (“task5_verbs_30112020”)