The Teaching Community as the Driving Force in Resource-sharing Initiatives and Repository-building

Over recent years perceptions of digital repositories and the open educational resources (OERs) which they contain have been changing. There has been an important shift in focus away from the technical aspects concerned with uploading, tagging and storing of digital content to one where the needs of the user community are placed at the heart of repository development. Coordinated by the University of Southampton, several projects concerned with OERs and teaching and learning repository development have engaged, listened and responded to the views of a language teaching community in the UK. This has led to significant improvements in the design, development and operation of a repository for such users. This paper will describe how a community of teachers has driven repository change over successive projects by identifying some of the features and functionalities that repositories need to have in order to be attractive to their intended users.