Engaging tutors in using e-repositories for learning and teaching

Universities which set up online repositories for the management of learning and teaching resources commonly find that uptake is poor. Tutors are often reluctant to upload their materials to e-repositories, even though the same tutors are happy to upload resources to the virtual learning environment (VLE) such as Blackboard, Moodle, or Sakai and also happy to upload their research papers to the university’s research publications repository. And a growing number of tutors are happy to upload teaching material to online systems such as YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare. Our paper suggests the reason for this poor uptake is that conventionally structured repositories do not meet the needs of tutors for their everyday teaching materials.