JISC eCollections News

Encouraging use of JISC eCollections for teaching and learning

Over 160 institutions have now subscribed, which is a fantastic indication of the level of support for JISC eCollections in the community. Our next job is to make sure that students, teaching staff and researchers are aware of the content on each of the three platforms (JISC MediaHub, JISC Journal Archives and JISC Historic Books) – we want to help them see how the platforms would be useful in their teaching, learning and research. One way to help introduce faculty and students to the collections is to create some resources that show how the collections can be used to support teaching and learning. These might include sample lesson or course plans, lecture synopses, slide decks, discussion guides, example essay questions with associated research paths, and step-by-step guides to exploring JISC eCollections to these ends.

Exploring the collections through cross-disciplinary study topics

We have some ideas of disciplines, audiences and broad themes on which we should focus: for example, business and finance, or hard sciences. We’d like to find topics that might span different types of users’ interest, to show how each of the three platforms can support study – so these topics would ideally lend themselves to consideration from many perspectives, from scientific to sociological, from literary to economic. Examples will be varied – from delinquency, disease control and the space race to the Holocaust, engineering megastructures, or sporting events…

Over to you…

We would like your help in finding teaching staff and academics (perhaps you ) to help us create these teaching tools – perhaps lecturers who’ve already been enthusiastic about the content available via JISC eCollections, or who typically do create good teaching resources. At this point, we aren’t specifying any particular level that the resources should be aimed at. Creators can choose their own topic and audience – our only stipulation is that, as far as possible, they use content from all three platforms (journals, books and multimedia). We ask that creators spend some time exploring each platform to find content examples that support an existing or future study module, and then write this up in an appropriate format for sharing (we will help with polishing it up for publication). As a token of our appreciation for the effort involved, we would like to offer an honorarium of £200 for each approved tool.

Please send any suggestions for creators or topics to Charlie Rapple – she is a consultant helping us to organise this programme who will then work with potential creators to shape ideas and provide editorial support.

We hope that you will join in this challenge and help us show users how this content can support teaching, learing and research.

Caren Milloy
Head of Projects