Welcome to our third Talis Aspire newsletter.

This month we present updates on development activities from the team, and some interesting ideas from Talis Aspire customers.

Talis recently announced the award-winners of its Talis Incubator Fund for Open Education, and we include a podcast with Joseph Thibault in which he discusses his successful proposal for a Moodle course repository.

Sarah Bartlett,
Editor
sarah.bartlett@talis.com

Talis Aspire Product News

What are we working on?

The team is focused on enhancements to the publishing workflow in Talis Aspire. This is a major development which will introduce WordPress-like functionality to the resource list editing process, enabling users to maintain draft lists over time, among other capabilities. The release of this enhancement will be announced via the usual channels.

The Talis Aspire In Progress Board can be accessed by anyone who wishes to monitor current developments on Talis Aspire. It is updated weekly.

News from our customers

Updates from Talis Aspire early adopters

Two early adopters of Talis Aspire have been working hard on important areas of resource list management.

At the University of Sussex, ideas originating from lean manufacturing methodologies have been applied to make the acquisitions workflow in Talis Aspire more efficient.

Meanwhile Jo Tripplett at the University of Plymouth has been focusing on academic engagement by subject librarians. By speaking with academics and carrying out promotion work, significant numbers of academics in targeted faculties have adopted Talis Aspire.

Talis’ Ian Corns has been providing guidance to Talis Aspire customers on the area of academic engagement on the Talis Aspire blog.

Upcoming events

Talis Aspire Days

These free events give you the opportunity to discover how Talis Aspire encourages instructors to engage with students and resources, and integrates with other systems such as the VLE and authentication systems, to provide an engaging, modern and joined-up learning experience. Attendees can see Aspire in action and learn how institutions are rolling out and making the most of Talis Aspire.We are pleased to announce these forthcoming Talis Aspire Open Days:

• Talis offices, Birmingham – Thursday 13th May. Register here.
• London – Thursday 20th May. Register here.

“Into something rich and strange” – ALT-C at Nottingham, September

Come and visit our exhibition stand at this year’s ALT-C conference in Nottingham from 7-9 September 2010. Talis is proud to be a sponsor of this event.

Other Education news from Talis

Joseph Thibault talks with Talis

In this podcast, Joseph Thibault talks with Talis about his recent award from the Talis Incubator fund for Open Education. His successful bid focused on the inability of Moodle users to connect with each other and share content, and proposed the building of a Moodle course repository to resolve this problem. Joseph talks about the solution, which met with unanimous approval from the Review Board of the Talis Incubator fund, and his longer term vision for a repository that is interoperable with all learning management systems, not just Moodle.

From the blogosphere

• Sarah Bartlett on JISC and the supplier community
• Terry Anderson on options for hosting web 2.0 education
• Peter Murray-Rust on the CKAN – Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network
• Niall Sclater on HEFCE’s new strategy for e-learning
• Wired Campus reports on new section in YouTube aggregating all campus content
• George Siemens on open decentralised courses
• Pete Johnson on linked data and web search engines
• New York Times reimagines higher education with online courseware
  

Find out more

Our Talis Aspire product brochure details the benefits of our next generation resource list management system.

The Talis Aspire Roadmap shows approximate timings of planned developments and research themes. It covers a rolling 12 month period, and is updated on a quarterly basis.

Aspire ideas is our main customer communication channel. It’s an online community for customers only, through which all ideas raised by customers will be managed. You can search existing ideas and track their status or alternatively raise new ones. You can also make comments and vote on the ideas that you think are most important.