The EdReNe Newsletter

took place in Sestri Levante, Italy, on the 17th – 18th September 2009

In the opening session Lilla Voss, former expert adviser to the Danish Ministry of Education on ICT in education, gave an overview of strategic national initiatives in relation to educational repositories, and shared her visions for the schools and repository tools of the future.

A number of publishers and universities presented their strategies, content and tools. There is a clear trend towards the use of commercially available repository platforms. And nearly all repositories also contain the digital learning resources. A number of universities follow the same approach. However, in most cases the repositories need to be tailored/ modified improved further to be integrated into the universities’ other systems, e.g. the repository part and the VLE part are integrated into one system for the staff and students. All higher education institutions manage their academic work in some sort of digital repository. Some stress the importance – for them and for colleagues – that the content (e.g. tools and courses) is open to the academic society.

Eugenijus Kurilovas, ITC, resumed the discussion of quality assurance by reporting about his research on evaluation criteria in the evaluation of Learning Object Repositories (LOR) and Learning Management Systems/Virtual Learning Systems (LMS/VLE).

Will Ellis and Andrew Kitchen presented Becta’s vision and first concrete steps of implementation on a new Resource Discovery System that is to pool a number of previous projects and components, and provide coordinated answers to many questions which previously have been dealt with in a more fragmented approach.

Standards strategies are important. A closer link between standards developers from universities and standardisation bodies, and publishers’ everyday needs must be given more attention. Becta has commissioned a project to work with content suppliers and VLE providers to define a specification for content packaging. They want to ensure that content developers use a consistent technical specification so that the content they produce can work in all VLEs.

In a group session members were asked to think of which standard has had the greatest impact on educational repository use so far, and describe why. They should also describe what they considered the most important barrier to remove within this area (and an approach for doing it!).

The workshop concluded the series relating to Repository strategies. The proceeding from the three workshops will serve as the primary source of input for the forthcoming thematic synthesis report on this issue.
http://edrene.org/workshops/repositories/ws3-3.html
http://edrene.org/workshops/repositories/ws3-2.html
http://edrene.org/workshops/repositories/ws3-1.html