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• Virginia Content Repository
• Overview

The JMU NETS•T Certification Program is supported by a generous gift from Microsoft Corporation

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JMU Partnership for 21st Century Skills

Virginia Content Repository

Overview

The Virginia Content Repository (VCR) is an innovative repository of digital content to support teaching and learning by Virginia PK-12 teachers and students. The VCR combines learning objects technology with social networking and web 2.0 features to help teachers and students identify only the very best and most relevant content for their needs. Content referenced by the repository can be uploaded to the repository itself or linked to existing content (permission allowing). The repository also supports teacher- and student-created content, leveraging a constructivist approach and theme-based content creation contests with the need to actively manage the content collection, ensuring that any gaps in content coverage are addressed. Finally, the repository supports meta-tagging by teachers using industry-standard schema and includes a mechanism to ensure that content that is rated poorly (i.e., below a defined cut-off criterion) does not reflect badly on its author.

The network of people to support the VCR fall into two roles: Author and Publisher. Authors identify and/or create content to be considered for inclusion in the VCR and can be either students or teachers. Publishers review the content submitted by authors, make sure the description is complete (e.g., that it is properly meta-tagged) and, if the content is found to meet the submission guidelines, submits the content to the VCR.

Once the content is published to the VCR, it then becomes subject to ratings and reviews provided by other teachers and students across the Commonwealth. Note that no ratings are displayed until a content object has received a minimum number of ratings (e.g., 20). Once the minimum number of ratings is achieved, the average rating is calculated. If the average rating is determined to be less than a given cutoff criterion score (e.g., 4.2 on a five-point scale), then the content is simply not displayed, and essentially disappears from the system, saving the author the potential embarrassment of poorly rated content.

Finally, VCR users provide their own reviews and ratings for selected content of interest, as well as utilize collaboration features to help they and their colleagues recommend content of particular interest or merit. These features include a friends function (email a colleague to recommend content), a buddy list (to form an informal group of colleagues to assist in disseminating content of particular interest to the group), and RSS feeds to help users stay up to date with content in certain niches (e.g., fourth grade science technology use).

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