2. Sharing eContent

Best practices for sharing collections of electronic resources.

Requirements for authoring content to improve the exchange and reuse of content

Publish content on the web to attract potential (re)users.
Use open content licences, such as Creative Commons, if it is possible within your institution and if you have not reused non-compliant content yourself, to easily allow for legal reuse.
Give your resources and modules stable URIs to allow for globally identifying them and linking to them.
Make content retrievable by a good navigational structure within your own site, by offering a site-wide search functionality, by recommending further relevant resources to readers, etc. Also make sure that your content is retrievable with general-purpose web search engines.

Use collaborative authoring environments, such as wikis, to facilitate collaboration on your electronic resources, and, if desired, to invite contributions from your readers and from external visitors.
Make it easy for users to give feedback. There should be more lightweight interaction modes than directly working on the resources (see above). They should be better integrated with the original resources than, e.g., a separate mailing list would be.
- Discussion forums: Offer global and local discussion forums (e.g. one per course or general topic, but also one per distinct knowledge module), so that users can associate their feedback with exactly the topic they are concerned about. Allow users to classify their posts, in order to get an overview of open questions or [page:/node/1166 unsolved problems with the knowledge resources themselves].
- Rating: (to be done)

Use standardised ontologies for attaching metadata to learning resources:
- Dublin Core may be suitable for simple bibliographical metadata.
- Learning Object Metadata (LOM) defines a vocabulary for basic educational metadata
- For linking to general concepts for which you do not have a specialised ontology (e.g. when you want to say "this course unit uses the physical experiments of Galileo as examples" and you do not have specially formalised concepts for "physics" and "Galileo"), consider referring to standard upper ontologies like Umbel or dbpedia (a less formal but very rich ontology extracted from Wikipedia).