Institutions with an international, multi-campus structure, including the University of Nottingham, are being presented with the challenge to provide a standardised level of education and experience across a diverse and widespread set of users located on different continents.
Learners of today expect instant delivery of content, with rapid and seamless upload and download regardless of their campus location. For a University expecting high enrolment growth, it is essential to deliver a consistent user experience and ensure that identical course content and collections continue to be readily accessible across the University’s international network.
The University of Nottingham’s digital repository, powered by Equella, is designed to support usage in the UK (34,000 students), China (5,300), and Malaysia (4,300) and help facilitate rapid growth across the institution.
The University utilises the digital repository to host its teaching and learning collection that seamlessly integrates with Moodle across all three international sites.
Delivering the same teaching courses across three regional hubs, the UK, China and Malaysia, with a custom Moodle LMS integration for each hub was a key aim for the University as part of their approach to a standardised international learning experience. The Moodle module contains a total of over 1,300 items, which are automatically synchronised to all three locations. For users, content upload and download is regionalised, and content can be reused and shared by any users, within any module, at any campus.
The University of Nottingham’s multi-campuses have easy, local access to content, regardless of where it was originally uploaded. This new process enables teaching efficiencies and encourages further collaborative course development, as the continuous synchronisation enables an educator at one campus to build a course in the LMS using local content.
The content can then be shared and reused at the other campuses. Content contributed to the digital repository via the LMS is cloned to the other international campuses, where a user located at one of the international campuses can view the content via their LMS and download this from their local regional hub.
In support of the University’s other collection, Equella also hosts Fishbone; the global collection of archeological fish resources.
