Opening digital doors through communities of practice

Abstract

This poster illustrates an Irish Higher Education sectoral initiative, the National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR). Many repositories for sharing educational resources or publications (JORUM, MERLOT) have been established in recent years to enable access to educational materials. Similarly the NDLR was established in 2004 in Ireland to enable the sharing of digital learning content across Universities and Institutes of Technology in Ireland. The NDLR mission is "to promote and support Higher Education sector staff in the collaboration, development and sharing of learning resources and associate teaching practices". (NDLR 2009) The project provides an online repository to support sharing of teaching and learning digital resources. A major enterprise of the project has been the instigation of twelve communities of practice (CoPs) to support the development of shareable and reusable resources.