1. Designing Digital Repositories: User Centered Design Thinking and Sustainable Professional Development
- Author
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Banat, Hadi Riad, Palese, Emily, Gill, Hannah Morgan, Staples, Shelley, and Dilger, Bradley
- Abstract
Learning to teach writing remains challenging for both student instructors and the experienced faculty, staff, and other professionals who mentor them. Many institutions have created local repositories of teaching-related materials such as syllabi and assignments, and some national efforts have also attempted to facilitate sharing resources to support instructor professional development. However, the labor-intensive nature of building digital resources has reduced the long-term effectiveness of these archives. Interdisciplinary approaches to building professional development resources can address these difficulties, creating more sustainable repositories and similar professional development resources. In this article, we describe the construction of the repository associated with the Corpus & Repository of Writing, a web-based archive of pedagogical materials from first year-writing courses at multiple institutions. We discuss the decisions we made regarding material and metadata collection, data processing, classification of materials, and interface design, and share insights from testing with administrators, teachers, and mentors keen on developing sustainable, equitable approaches to mentoring. By drawing from the methods of corpus linguistics and technical communication, and guiding our development processes with user-centered design, we offer a model for repository building that can shape mentoring, teaching, and research within and across diverse writing programs.
- Published
- 2023