Abstract:

Institutional Repositories (IR) and Learning Management Systems (LMS) are two consolidated types of platforms that are used in a large number of Higher Education Institutions (HEI). The first is generally used to make available the products of higher education, such as theses & dissertations, monographs, senior projects and technical reports. The second is devoted to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) supported learning, either to enhance traditional face-to-face courses, to offer blended learning (b-learning) classes or to host distance learning (e-learning) activities.

There are many commercial solutions for either case, including free and open source platforms. Two examples of the latter are DSpace (www.dspace.org/) and Moodle (www.moodle.org/), popular solutions for IR and LMS, respectively.

This is quite different from the traditional situation – libraries are integrated to universities (schools). Students can access not only the books and references that faculty recommend, but all other items of the collection. At the same time, faculty and students are contributors to the collection, since they create new content. When reference textbooks are recommended by faculty, they are not brought to the classroom; students access them at the library.

A solution has been implemented that integrates on a single platform the IR and the LMs. All functions that are available on either solution are available on this integrated model – there is no loss of functionality. The LMS also offers access to a Remote Lab and to simulations that run on Scilab; both have been integrated to the platform.

The main features of the solution are:
▪ There is only one ID for the system and faculty, and students can “move” from one environment to the other after logging in.
▪ All contents are described and become part of the collection; this includes courseware. Courseware are not stored in folders of the classes, they are on the IR. This yields an extra work of technically describing and uploading contents; these tasks are performed by librarians.
▪ When faculty organize their courses, courseware shown on the classrooms (support of traditional courses), on the Virtual Rooms (b- and e-learning) and on the Remote Lab. But courseware are not “locked” in the folders; the environments point to them on the IR.
▪ There is no replication of courseware when many classes use them at the same time. This also yields less work and minimizes errors when upgrades or corrections are necessary.
▪ Students activities on the LMS are mapped to accesses to contents.
▪ Students can access theses & dissertations, monographs, senior projects, research data, etc while they are using the LMS functions.
▪ A large number of learning objects are made available in Open Access (OA), as well as employed in courses.

This platform has been operating for over two decades and is in its fourth version. The total number of digital contents is higher than 20,000. There are almost 250 learning contents in OA.

More details will be presented in the full paper, with examples from two subjects in the Electrical Engineering undergraduate course: Signals and Systems and Electric & Electronic Circuits.

Keywords:

Institutional repositories, learning management systems.