Earlier this week an official announcement was made to the COPPUL (Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries) Regional Consortium introducing an idea that's been in the works for almost two years - The COPPUL Animated Tutorial Sharing Project. In a nutshell, this is an attempt to share the source code for screencasts that have already been developed, with the idea that if University X has built a great tutorial on Academic Search Premier, why can't College Y grab the source code, change the title screen and be off to the races? We originally planned to just offer .qvp (Qarbon ViewletBuilder) files, but there's no reason .avi files from Camtasia or Captivate couldn't be used as well.
The source code is housed in DSpace here at the University of Calgary, information about the project is at Brandon University in Manitoba, and a wiki allowing people to take ownership of verious products is housed at the University of Winnipeg- truly a distributed approach if ever there was one! There are guidelines to follow for those who choose to participate.
Will it fly? Who knows, but if it does I'll be sure to keep you apprised. Big kudos to my COPPUL colleagues Carmen Kazakoff Lane for putting together the project website, Bill Badke for primarily developing the guidelines, and Karen Hunt for getting us started on the UWinnipeg Wiki.
Technorati Tags: screencasting, DSpace, sharing, libraries