SPARK: SPARK for Faculty and Staff

SPARK will give you:

• Visibility (High Google and other search engine rankings)
• Preservation (Your work is permanently archived)
• Stability (Persistent links--Your work stays in one place)
• Monthly Download Counts (You'll know how many people are looking at your work)

Get Started:

1. Send your Vita, citations, email links, documents or presentations to janesmith@parkland.edu
2. Answer some questions about your work via phone or email, whichever is easier for you
3. Sign an agreement to allow us to post your work in SPARK.  Remember - you keep your copyright.

The faculty and staff of Parkland College produce high quality scholarly and creative work in a variety of formats - papers, presentations, artwork, and multimedia. SPARK provides a secure repository for your work and makes it openly accessible to your colleagues, students, and the public around the world. You retain copyright, and, for published works, we can seek permissions on your behalf. Each work in SPARK includes a copyright statement, like Creative Commons, and clearly identifies use permissions and restrictions.

All student works included in SPARK are vetted by faculty before being uploaded. Student work collections create a useful resource for students whose work has been accepted into the repository. It also produces a visible picture of success that other students can reference and emulate.

We invite you to submit examples of excellent student work and innovative course projects and will work with you to create course or project pages  (like Kinesiology 288) that you and your students can use. The student works in SPARK, like A with Honors Projects, are some of the most downloaded material in the repository. By encouraging students to include their work in SPARK, we demonstrate to the world the high value we place on student scholarship and creativity here at Parkland!

Expand your classroom by publishing your open educational resources. Whether it's original textbooks, MOOCs, instructional videos or lectures, syllabi, or other course materials, we can aid you in publishing your high quality instructional resources and discovering new resources that you can use. All teaching materials are automatically collected in TeachingCommons, a portal to teaching resources published in Digital Commons.

Jane Smith - Repository Manager 

janesmith@parkland.edu

(217) 351-2410

We know that scholarship at Parkland College comes in many shapes and sizes. SPARK supports many file formats, including Word, PDF,TIFF, JPEG, WAV, PowerPoint (PPT), and streaming video.

It also supports non-Western foreign language content. If you have something you would like to include, we can find a way to make it accessible.

Frequently Asked Questions