RepRODUCE Blog

I’ve already been approached by publishers and related agencies looking for an involvement in this call. I have to be careful to say that JISC does not recommend or endorse any of these agencies, nor will it disclose details of your correspondence without your permission to other agencies.

So I have made this post, for commercial companies to respond to below, registering their interest in the call and readiness to adhere to the letter and spirit of the circular. If your project is interested in finding a commercial partner to work with, why not start with examining what those below can offer?

A few people have asked about the “percentages” of content from different sources that successful projects can use. For those who haven’t yet memorised the circular, this is paragraph 14, point 3.

“Use of identified materials. Projects must identify at least some of the materials they intend to use at the bidding stage. Materials should be sourced in roughly these proportions, however we hope to see higher percentages of external content used by successful projects:

• At least 50% external content These should be non-commercial materials produced externally to the institution and that do not have any connection with the institution leading the bid
• Up to 35% institutional content These should be materials sourced from other parts of the institution leading the bid and repurposed accordingly.
• Up to 15% new content These would be materials specifically generated for this course.”

Now, as I’m sure you will all have guessed, we have no way of accurately measuring the percentage proportion of content from each category. Rather, these figures are intended as a guideline to help you to see the kind of thing we are looking for. And in the assessment process, we will be using these figures as a guideline too, to remind us of the kind of thing we initially asked for.

But there will be no quantifiable metrics, not here.

This funding is HEFCE/HEFCW capital, which in layman’s terms means that it has to go to institutions that already receive funding from one of these organisations (either directly or via a partnership agreement). This has the unfortunate side effect of excluding the following groups:

• FECs not delivering HE
• anyone funded by the SFC (sorry, Scotland. But we will be cheering you on against Georgia tomorrow) or anyone else that isn’t HEFCE/HEFCW.

However, hopefully our efforts here will highlight a lot of issues that will be of benefit to you in whatever part of the education world you call home, and please do consider reusing and repurposing content whatever your funding situation.

[edit: I think Scotland vs Georgia is best not mentioned in this blog again]

The JISC Circular (4/07) has now been published, so we expect to be receiving questions and queries starting from about now.

Please feel free to leave queries as comments on this blog (which will be updated to answer them) and to see the supporting materials (so far we have a very good briefing paper there for you, and a set of links to useful JISC work) by clicking on the “contact” link above.

Thank you!

Our first questions regarding this call all started with the fragment above. And ended there, as we had to stop and correct a major misconception.

This call is not about you repurposing your own content. This is about bringing content in from outside the institution, and using it to revamp one of your modules (and about documenting the process, of course).

Yes, we know that is difficult, and that many institutions may find major internal blocks on this kind of reuse. But a large part of government thinking about content has been based around the idea of it being created once and reused freely. We’d like to identify and remove barriers (all kinds of barriers) so this can happen.