I was asked by our Flexible Learning Manager to write a short article about our E-Library and Teacher Resource Centre at Goulburn Ovens TAFE. While happy to do so, I would like to stress at the outset that I am not putting our system forward as the ultimate solution to the issues of document publishing and control. I am sure that most Institutes would have something similar in place, either purchased as a commercial product or constructed in-house to meet their needs. This is simply about how GOTAFE dealt with the issue given our circumstances and funding arrangements. If your particular Institute has not yet provided this kind of functionality, some of the ideas here may be useful in your planning exercises.

What we wanted
This project arose out of the idea of providing a simple way for teachers, and other staff members to publish resources to an online environment to make them accessible at any time from any location. These resources needed to be available on all of our key information delivery systems; our staff intranet, student intranet, in classroom environments, or from the student intranet. We also wanted to ensure that security was applied at the individual resource level so only the designated person(s) could access the material.

We had already built an Intranet and public website infrastructure which could be used as a platform, but needed some method of devolving the publishing responsibility while at the same time keeping track of the documents, so we had the ability to provide an audit trail which satisfied the growing requirements of our quality control system (AQTF framework). We wanted to empower people so they could publish and be responsible for their own resources, without having to go through a third person like a webmaster or other control gateway. We also didn’t want the publisher to have to learn any new software program or have to make web pages to publish this content.

The project we came up with to perform these functions was the concept of an electronic library (E-Library). Fundamental to this project was the premise that every resource would be registered at the point of publishing to enable accurate searching by a search engine.

Documents or resources published by teachers are placed into a subcategory in the E-Library called the Teacher Resource Centre. These resources are published at the teacher’s discretion and consist largely of personal teaching notes or exercises that a teacher uses for his/her program delivery. We also allocated an amount of space on the web server so teachers with more advanced IT skills could build teaching support web sites if desired. These sites are automatically registered in the E-Library at the point of publishing for searching and audit purposes.

A further category within the E-Library has been created for controlled documents allied to curriculum. Examples include documents requiring maintenance via AQTF principles such as training package details and assessment guidelines, that are relevant for any teacher teaching that particular module or unit. All teachers, can access this ‘master file’ to use as a resource when teaching courses for the first time.

Design Principles
With these concepts in mind then, the following key outcomes were achieved after completion of the E-Library.

• The E-Library is (will eventually be) the single repository for all documents or resources published at GOTAFE. Documents produced by outside agencies can be easily added to the E-library and made available for staff to access

• All resource types (documents, media files etc) are supported providing the user has access to the source program.

• Resource publishers enter in metadata at the point of publishing, enabling a full text key word search to be performed. Searches return any resource making reference to these key words.

• Results returned by searches or by the inbuilt navigation system are sortable by title, reference code, author and by the date the resource was last modified.

• A navigation system is incorporated into the E-Library, enabling users to intuitively find resources within defined categories, and to visually show them their position within the E-Library structure.

• Full document descriptions entered at the time of publication (synopses) can be made viewable at the user’s discretion.

• Resources are tagged with a review date and on expiry of this date, the resource is automatically flagged as being under review and its access link is greyed out. The resource is still available to the user however.

• On expiry of the review date, the resource author is automatically emailed with a reminder that a particular resource should be reviewed.

• For internal auditing purposes a review mode is available so that quality control initiatives can be implemented. The review mode shows only those resources up for review. All sorting and navigation features are maintained in this mode.

• A quick search feature is available on each E-Library page at all times. A link is also present which enables the user to select an advanced search mode to include some specific resource filters.

• Each published resource can be published selectively to any or all of the following web sites: Our public web site, staff Intranet, student Intranet, or suppliers extranet.

Teacher Resource Centre
The teacher Resource Centre (TRC) was incorporated into the overall infrastructure. Teachers by default are able to publish their documents to two locations. One is the staff Intranet (which is compulsory) and the other location is to the student Intranet. This second location is only accessible to students by a protected login procedure. This ensures that students are enrolled before being able to access learning materials.

The teacher resource centre also caters for those staff members that have more highly developed IT skills and would like to publish their own teaching support web site. The site is registered in the E-Library automatically at the time of publication and then becomes available as a fully searchable resource. The individual files that make up the site are not registered; just the site itself, because we didn’t feel there was much value in storing information about every individual site image or file.

The web site can be created using any technology the teacher likes, and can be located on any system hard drive. To publish the site, the teacher uses a WinZip compatible program to zip the site up, and the publishing application in the E-Library simply points to the zip file and uploads it to the teacher-defined area for their site. On upload the site is automatically unzipped and can be accessed by a link from within the student intranet. After initial publication, teachers can edit the files in the web site, create and delete files and folders etc. All these tasks are performed using the web based interface. No user accounts are maintained on the web server at all, which reduces the maintenance required for the system.

The student intranet displays a list of modules the student is enrolled in and the next stage of development of this system is to link directly to the support resources provided by the teacher when the student clicks on the module name.

Examples
The E-Library can be seen in operation from the user perspective at the following url.

http://www.gotafe.vic.edu.au/elibrary/home.cfm

This link takes you to those documents available from the public web site only, which is a subset of the whole range of available resources.

An example of the type of information that could be made available to students from the TRC can be seen by looking under the teacher’s resources category in the E-Library. You will find a sample teacher called Craig Mathisen, who has made a selection of files, available for you to look at. These include documents, audio and video files, images, PowerPoint presentations, web sites etc. For convenience they have all been published directly under his name, but subfolder levels are available to help provide a logical structure to the resources. The direct link is:

http://www.gotafe.vic.edu.au/elibrary/CatDisplay.cfm?type=Teachers%20Resources&cat=CRAIGM

Try out the links on the pages for yourselves to get a feel for how the user interface works. Suggestions are to show and hide the descriptions, check out the status information etc.

Back end update application
The back end application allows designated staff to update the E-Library through a simple web browser interface. This approach reduces software requirements and subsequent training issues, and problems with accessing the E-Library offsite are overcome.

Some of the key principles behind the design of the E-Library update application are:

• The security of the E-Library is tightly integrated with that of the staff intranet and access is dependant on staff logging in to the Intranet.

• Designated staff can be allocated rights to particular publishing sections of the
  E-Library tree. Individual staff will have rights to publish or edit a library resource within their allowed publishing categories.

• The results of any resource publication are immediately available in the E-library without staff having to create further links to documents.

• The Intranet administrators have predefined the publishing categories. They have access to create resource-publishing categories and allocate publishing rights to staff. Staff with sufficient access can create subcategories under their designated publishing path.

• Teaching staff can also publish resources to their own web site space so that they can easily make online materials available for the students. This feature has been included as part of the Teacher Resource Centre and is tightly integrated with the E-Library. By making the E-Library the preferred publishing application for all resources we can ensure that issues of quality, copyright and audit ability are manageable on these web sites.

The back end update application is only accessible from our staff intranet, which requires a GOTAFE login, so unfortunately I can’t provide a link to show you how this works. If anyone would like further information however I would be most happy to help.

Ian Kitto
Online Development Coordinator

Technlogy Industries
Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE