PROWE (Personal Repositories Online Wiki Environment) was one of seven eLearning projects funded under the UK Higher Education Joint Information Systems Committee's Digital Repositories Programme (03/05). The Open University Library led the project and worked in partnership with The University of Leicester's Beyond Distance Research Alliance.

PROWE was a research project that addressed the challenge of supporting part-time distance education tutors' continuing professional development (CPD) needs, including collaboration and resource sharing, through the provision of informal and personal repositories created using wiki and wiki-type environments. Wiki and blogs were used to engage the tutors within the context of two large distance education providers, The Open University (OU) and The University of Leicester (UoL).

The main outputs were: Two demonstrator communities of practice based on open source tools (Elgg/PMwiki at the OUand Zwiki sited within Plone at the UoL); the PROWE Ecology and Repository Management Toolkit. 

Project start and end dates: 01 June 2005 to 31 July 2007

Page owner: info@prowe.ac.uk URL: http://www.prowe.ac.uk/