The HumBox website was created by the HumBox project. This project was part of a wider Open Educational Resources initiative funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the HEA, to showcase UK Higher Education by encouraging teachers within HE institutions to publish excellent teaching and learning resources openly on the web.

The HumBox project focused on the Humanities and was a collaboration between four Humanities HEA Subject Centres (LLAS, English, History and Philosophical and Religious Studies), and at least twelve different institutions across the country. It ran from April 2009 to April 2010.

Ongoing HumBox research

The HumBox team are tracking some of the resources that have been put into the site and are using surveys, focus groups, web stats and other means to do this. We have produced three tracking reports (2010 - 2011) for the JISC about our findings. Read all three reports here:

• Report One (Sept 2010)
• Report Two (Dec 2010)
• Report Three (May 2011)

We have also been involved in the HumBox Impact project (JISC-funded) which is exploring user opinions of HumBox and introducing technical improvements to the site based on user feedback. An initial impact analysis was conducted and included conclusions from a user survey. Read the analysis below:

• HumBox Impact Analysis

Open University SCORE Fellowship Project

Research on review and endorsement of Open Educational Resources (OERs) is being conducted using HumBox resources as part of an Open University SCORE Fellowship Project. The aims of this project, led by Antonio Martinez-Arboleda at the University of Leeds, are to explore and develop a feasible model for employer engagement in OERs and to add extra value to existing and future OERs, hence reinforcing our existing Communities of Practice and encouraging high-quality open content publication and re-use.

In particular, the project will look at ways of facilitating the review and endorsement of OERs by graduate-recruiting employers in the HumBox, where a vast range of Arts and Humanities OERs of all levels of granularity have been uploaded and shared by an increasing number of practitioners. In connection with this project, Antonio is interested in proposing a more dynamic, case-based and multilateral approach to employability in the area of Arts in UK HE. In this respect, the review and endorsement of OERs by employers can play a crucial role in this transformation.

If you are interested in having some of your resources reviewed or endorsed by employers or simply finding out more about this project, please contact Antonio Martinez-Arboleda at sllama@leeds.ac.uk

Watch this video about the project.

More about the HumBox project:

The HumBox project aimed to publish a bank of good quality humanities resources online for free download and sharing, and in doing so, to create a community of Humanities specialists who were willing to share their teaching materials and collaborate with others to peer review and enhance existing resources.

Our aims were:

1. to discover, review and revise digital resources from a range of Humanities disciplines and to share them as open content;
2. to provide a trusted and sustainable community repository;
3. to create an expanding national community of peers committed to sharing and reviewing online resources from a range of subject areas in their own disciplinary contexts, which have a global reach;
4. to embed the culture of shared, open educational resources across the Humianities community fostering an increased awareness of and commintment to sharing Humanities resources;
5. to meet the need for a light touch process of peer review and quality enhancement in the delivery of shared learning resources;
6. to provide solutions to practical obstracles inhibiting the sharing or resources across the Humanities. In particular attention will be focused on metadata, licensing, copyright and intellectual property rights;
7. to create a robust model to sustain the further development of HumBox in the future.

Read the final report here:

• HumBox project final report

Project Contact

If you wish to know more about the HumBox project, or you wish to join the project and become part of the HumBox community, please contact the project team at: humbox@soton.ac.uk.

This site is powered by EPrints 3, free software developed by the University of Southampton.
The design, layout and styling of the HumBox was created by Seb Skuse, Patrick McSweeney and Marcus Ramsden from the University of Southampton. These materials are all available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.

HumBox supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://humbox.edshare.ac.uk/cgi/oai2