SWAPBox

SWAPBox is a repository that brings together open educational resources from the disciplines of Social Policy and Social Work as well as related, interdisciplinary subject areas (eg social sciences, sociology, health). OERs are learning and teaching materials that can be freely used and repurposed . for example, to include in your own lectures or to set students tasks or exercises. As a registered user, you can also upload your own resources to the repository collection quickly and easily.

Rather than being just a great place to find useful materials, SWAPBox also offers users the opportunity to participate in a diverse online community of individuals engaged in teaching at different levels, students and practitioners.

The original SWAPBox project (2010-2011) was funded by JISC and managed by the Subject Centre for Social Policy and Social Work (SWAP) at the University of Southampton in collaboration with six project partners: SCIE, IRISS, CEIMH, CHST, ECS and Southampton University Library. Since then, the SWAPBox repository has continued to be hosted by the University of Southampton. Since the beginning of 2013, the repository is being managed by the LLAS team, who also manage the LanguageBox (www.languagebox.ac.uk) and HumBox (www.humbox.ac.uk) repositories.

The repository is free for anyone to use. Creating an account for yourself or your institution is straightforward, and offers you instant access to a range of fantastic features to share your resources, raise your teaching profile, meet and network with individuals sharing your teaching and research interests, seek and provide peer reviews, and build yourself a catalogue of high quality resources.

The Software

The SWAPBox is an installation of the Learning Box, an attempt to reinvent learning object repositories for the Web 2.0 world. Our philosophy is to make software that is useful to users, simple to use, and which helps to build a community of teachers and learners. The Learning Box differs from more traditional repositories in that it is a living space rather than a dusty archive!

The Faroes project has developed the Learning Box as part of the EdShare initiative. EdShare tools are based on e-prints, a tried and trusted repository infrastructure developed at the University of Southampton. E- prints is installed at over 250 institutions worldwide for managing research materials, and EdShare is extending this scope into learning and teaching.

The SWAPBox Team

Helen Carmichael, Project Director, SWAP, University of Southampton
Jules Newman, Project Manager, SWAP, University of Southampton
Martina Johnson, Project Officer, SWAP, University of Southampton
Jackie Rafferty, Project Partner, SWAP and Centre for Human Service Technology (CHST), University of Southampton
Tarsem Singh Cooner, Project Partner, Centre for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Mental Health (CEIMH), University of Birmingham
Gavin Nettleton, Project Partner, Social Care Institute of Excellence (SCIE)
Colin Paton, Project Partner, Social Care Institute of Excellence (SCIE)
Ian Watson, Project Partner, Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services (IRISS)
Hugh Davis, Project Adviser, School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton
Yvonne Howard, Project Adviser, School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton
Patrick McSweeney, Technical Support Officer, School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton
Matt R. Taylor, Technical Support Officer, School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton
Mark Brown, Project Adviser, University of Southampton Library
Debra Morris, Project Adviser, University of Southampton Library
John O.Hagan, IPR Officer, University of Southampton Library

Contact Information

Any correspondence concerning this specific repository should be sent to swapbox@soton.ac.uk.

This site is powered by EPrints 3, free software developed by the University of Southampton.