IRISS
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Formerly called
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Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education (SIESWE) |
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| charity | |
| Founded | 2003 |
| Headquarters | Glasgow, Scotland |
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Number of locations
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1 |
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Area served
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Scotland |
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Key people
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Number of employees
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16 (2016) |
| Divisions | Evidence-informed practice, Knowledge Media, Innovation and improvement |
| Website | www |
Iriss is a Scottish charitable company, based in Glasgow, Scotland which acts to make improvements to how the social services workforce in Scotland makes use of knowledge and research.
In 2003, the Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education (SIESWE) was established as a sector-wide collaboration of the nine Scottish universities teaching social work with the objective of bringing about transformational change in the education and training of Scotland's future social workers
Stated goals were:
One of the first projects was the creation of the Learning Exchange, a digital repository, or library of bite sized chunks of learning or learning objects.
In 2007, SIESWE changed its name to Iriss which reflected an extension of the scope to include the social care workforce.
Iriss's work is based on three inter-related programmes:
Projects are organised under a number of themes.
The principles on which Iriss operates are set out in the strategy for 2012-15. In summary:
In 2005, the Learning Exchange was launched as the world's first interactive library of digital learning resources for social work education. This repository is catalogued in accordance with international metadata standards and Learning object metadata, allowing interoperability with other systems. In particular the intention was that multimedia learning objects could be downloaded as IMS packages and uploaded into virtual learning environments in higher education institutions.
Originally the Learning Exchange was built on IntraLibrary software and access restricted to students and staff of the higher educational institutions in Scotland engaged in teaching social work. Access was password protected using the Athens Eduserve authentication system. Subsequently the Learning Exchange was added to the NHS Education for Scotland (NES) portfolio of content accessible via Athens Eduserve. This made Learning Exchange available to the higher education sector and the entire social services workforce.
In practice much of the content of the Learning Exchange did not require password protection, partly because in 2008 Iriss adopted a policy of releasing its own content using Creative Commons licensing. Password protection was therefore removed and a simple search interface OpenSearch created which queried the database by SRU.
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Wikipedia