EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

EdReNe members in Denmark:
UNI•C – the Danish IT centre for education and research
BFU – Brancheforeningen for Undervisningsmidler

infoguide.dk was initiated by the Danish Ministry of Education back in 1997. It is an educational link repository with the 10,000 best web resources for Danish schools (K12). The web resources are described with Dublin Core metadata. Users can suggest new links to be included in the repository. A hired staff of appr. 45 subject specialists register all links in the relevant categories. The goal is not to include everything, but to have the best web-based resources and in this way help the teachers to manage the vast amount of information on the Internet.

Content in the repository can be accessed through SOAP web services and in this way be presented in e.g. Learning Management Systems.
At the moment it is not clear to us whether the end-users prefer to have these links combined with the learning resources in materialeplatform.dk.

materialeplatform.dk, initiated by the Danish Ministry of Education and implemented together with the Danish publishers. The Materialeplatform opened on-line in April 2006. Status: 20,000 Danish learning resources, app. 14,000 of these came from a repository maintained by the Danish publishers. The repository contains both digital and analogue resources (that is books, chemistry sets, exhibitions, etc.). The publishers or teachers who created the learning resource must also register the metadata. Metadata cannot be provided by a third party (unless it is specified in an agreement with the content owners).

 

emuseum.dk, initiated by the Danish Ministry of Education and The Danish Ministry of Culture, opened on-line in October 2006. At the moment the repository includes 625 learning resources on cultural heritage, visual arts, design, film etc.

All the learning resources can also be found by searching materialeplatform.dk. E-museum is a specific user interface (with add-on functionality) to the same repository.

dr.dk/skole and dr.dk/gymnasium are the Danish initiatives corresponding to the Dutch Teleblik. With these services the Danish schools (K12) can access TV and radio productions from DR – the Danish public service TV channel.

Some experiences during the last three years are:

• Cooperation is essential for a successful project. Involve all the stakeholders if possible, including the relevant ministries.
• Defining a learning resource is difficult if not impossible. However, it is necessary to have guidelines and criteria for excluding a learning resource submitted by publishers or teachers. Current definition based on “real life”: “Any resource which is primarily used for educational purposes in the present form”.
• Rights issues: Everybody, who registers a new title, must agree to an online declaration. Furthermore, UNI•C has implemented a screening procedure for all teacher produced material. Demands for a procedure were raised both by the publishers and the teachers. Both parties wanted to avoid lawsuits.
• Based on IEEE Lom, a Danish DanLom metadata application profile is used.
• Based on the resources in the repository it can be concluded that teachers and publishers (and museums) need some kind of guidance to guarantee the relevant metadata and content in the repository.