Online Instructional Repositories: Why They Are Important Now and Will Become More Important in the Future

My vision for the future of online collections of instructional resources is based, first, upon experiences I had decades ago as a freshman at Lewis and Clark College. That's when I discovered the value of reading more than one textbook for the classes I was taking.

When I was in high school I completed assignments, when I did them at all(!), by relying upon the designated textbook for the class. When I arrived at college I was more motivated to learn than I had been in high school. To help myself do better in my classes I stumbled upon the practice of consulting additional textbooks in the library whenever I had trouble understanding a section of the assigned textbook for a class. What might seem unclear in one text was often made clearer through the examples, explanations, and diagrams provided in a second text, or in a third text. At times I would consult five or more textbooks about a topic.

Of course I then discovered that what one textbook author said about a topic might be very different from what another textbook author said. Indeed, I found that the various textbooks for the "same course in the same field" didn't even include the same topics, the same concepts, or cite the same research studies. What one textbook author considered vitally, centrally, indispensably important, another might ignore altogether. How radical! How wonderful! I had discovered that subjects were not givens, but were constructed. That little discovery changed everything for me as a student; suddenly learning became not just learning what was prescribed, or given, or assigned. Learning became an effort to discern what was true, a concern about how best to understand and explain things. Learning became scholarship. And all that was before I knew about primary and secondary sources, about discoverers and interpreters, about schools and trends.

Online collections of instructional materials can become the ultimate instructional libraries, with unlimited opportunities to compare and select what a concept, topic, subject, or field is all about. My vision for online instructional repositories is that every student, and every teacher, will have complete access to every resource for learning.

My second formative experience occurred many years later when I arrived at the then-new campus of the University of California, Irvine with a fresh Ph.D. and a set of courses to teach. I had chosen to go to UCI rather than to a more established campus because I wanted exactly the experience of participating in the excitement of forming new curricula and designing new classes, without the weight of seniority and tradition to determine what was acceptable and what was not. Of course, the absence of the weight of authority could lead to innovation or to weightless floating and meandering. I had no ready file cabinet of old syllabi and lecture notes, and no professional guidance from senior professors to call upon. I did what many other junior faculty members have done time and again--I scrambled and scraped and relied heavily on materials from publishers. If I were in the same situation today, I could go to any of a dozen sites and pull together instructional resources without relying so heavily on publishers. I could learn from the best professors in the field, at a distance, as I tried to organize my own instructional efforts.

We've all experienced listening to one person explain an idea only to "not get it" and then listened to another person explain the same idea and have everything become clear. The passage from not getting it to getting it, from not knowing to knowing, from ignorance to understanding, is available to every student, or should be. No student should be dependent upon one teacher and, with the growth of online instructional repositories, no student needs to be narrowly restricted to one presentation of a subject. A student at Anywhere College can see how Calculus is taught at Everywhere University. An instructor at Anywhere College can examine the syllabi, quizzes, lecture notes, exams, learning objects, and teaching tools from colleagues around the world.

No instructor needs to be confined to one textbook or to one explanatory module; instructors can pick and choose from among the best ways to describe, illustrate, animate, diagram, organize, list, contrast, and so on. All the resources available for instruction can be drawn upon to teach more effectively--this is the importance of learning objects.

Even more importantly, students and instructors can gain access to the upstream sources of ideas, not just the downstream compilations and summaries. Instead of just reading, second hand, about what contemporary theorists, researchers, and scholars have to say about something, the student should be able to hear and see the people themselves through webcasts and archives of lectures and presentations. The hesitancies, uncertainties, perplexities, and vagaries will be heard along with the pronouncements and conclusions; style and process can be perceived along with content. This is the importance of exposure to learned, creative people.

Growth will be slow as long as instructional repositories are seen to be the special province of computer specialists, learning designers, digital librarians, and distance learning providers. Growth will be faster, going beyond early faculty adopters, when the recognition and use of repositories becomes more mainstream. One channel for that stream will be the sponsorship of repositories or collections by faculty centers for teaching and learning. To date very few centers provide much guidance for instructors about the use of online repositories to improve instruction. But there are some encouraging models and there will soon be many more. Teaching and learning centers can become referatories, linking both students and teachers to a range of resources extending far beyond the single campus. [See the Michigan State University TA Program referatory for Teaching and Learning Course Syllabi (http://tap.msu.edu/tnlsyllabi/index.html). Also refer to the Mount Royal College Academic Development Center's Guide to Content Resources on the Web (http://www.mtroyal.ab.ca/adc/lo/index.htm) and the outstanding What a Site! guide to finding and using online resources provided by the Maricopa Community Colleges' Center for Learning and Instruction (http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/show/what/). For a different model see the ADLCOLAB University of Wisconsin System "Objects of Learning" presentation, designed to introduce learning objects to faculty (http://adlcolab.uwsa.edu/lo/back.htm).]

So, even though instructional repositories are still developing and referatories are just beginning, they are already of promise for both students and instructors. As collections of learning materials grow and improve, and as the collections become easier to locate and evaluate, then their significance for learning and teaching will also grow.