EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

In Norway there are many websites in the educational sector. Most of the governmental websites participate in SANU. SANU (Coordination Group for Websites in the Educational Sector) is managed by Utdanning.no, and the group is established to coordinate the initiatives (content, services etc.), stimulate sharing and re-use between educational websites and so forth.

A portal owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. National common gateway for easy access to everything you need to know about education. The website is mainly a metadata portal, where the key services offered are:

• A national centralised repository with Course descriptions of “all” education areas in Norway (course description metadata). CDM
• A national centralised repository of learning object metadata.
• A framework for learning content publishing (new!).

Repository of learning object metadata
Utdanning.no has a centralised repository of learning content harvested from minor collections. The repository consists mainly of metadata with links to external resources. (IMS LOM / NORLOM). The repository is aimed directly at both teachers and students. It contains approximately 6000 links to digital learning resources targeted to all ages from primary school to higher education.

 

Utdanning.no is all based on open source where the key software used is: Fedora.info repository software, drupal CMS, FEZ fedora GUI and more.

During the beginning of 2009 the portal Utdanning.no will be completely redesigned.

For more information:
http://utdanning.no/wiki/English_summary

English translation of the user interface:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Futdanning.no%2Flaering&hl=no&ie=UTF-8&sl=no&tl=en

The Norwegian Schoolnet has a link-repository, and it is an initiative from the Norwegian Directorate of Education and Training.

On of the important services provided by the Directorate is the new GREP initiative, which provides the national curriculum online as a common, controlled vocabulary. As the structure of the various subject curriculums is very similar, they can be stored in a well-defined data structure.

GREP is also used integrated in Skolenettet.no, also in its link repository. GREP will also be used for labelling and retrieval of educational resources.

http://skolenettet.no/Web/Templates/Pages/Topic.aspx?id=32487&epslanguage=NO&scope=8-10
Links (learning resources) for the subject “English” and the sub topic Communication for the age 8-10 (class level) has been chosen.

It is expected that GREP will be used by many external partners, e.g. NRK (Norway's major broadcasting institution) wish to include references to the curriculum when they tag their learning resources.

The learning environment developer It's learning and the publishers Cappelen, Det Norske Samlaget, Damm, Gyldendal og Aschehoug, and Grieg Music Education collaborate about the portal DigLib. Their goal is to build a sustainable solution for easy access to digital learning resources, and to streamline the distribution of digital learning resources for primary, secondary and higher education. The platform is open to all providers of learning resources and learning platforms.

One of the mail goals is to integrate the search and retrieval within VLE software’s.

So far the resources are free for schools.

The portal is based on the metadata database IntraLibrary from Intallect. IntraLibrary is based on international standards like SRU/SRW, OAI-PMH, NORLOM, Dublin Core, Scorm, IMS Content Packages etc.