EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

EdReNe members:
utdanning.no (”The national common gateway that provides easy access to everything you need to know about education at one address”)
Utdanningsdirektoratet (The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training).

In Norway there are many websites in the educationalsector. Utdanning.no is the project manager for SANU, a coordination group established to coordinate the initiatives (content, services etc.), stimulate sharing and re-use between educational websites and so forth.

Utdanning.no also includes a repository with learning resources. This repository is built upon the Fedora technology and contains metadata only. After redesign the service is getting more popular.

The new “GREP” initiative will provide the national curriculum online as a common, controlled vocabulary. As the structure of the different subject curriculums is very similar, they can be stored in a well-defined data structure.

GREP is also used integrated in skolenettet.no (the Norwegian schoolnet, a service from Utdanningsdirektoratet) and its link repository. GREP will also be used for labeling and retrieval of educational resources.

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 streamline the distribution of digital learning resources for primay, secondary and higher education. The platform is open to all providers of learning resources and learning platforms.

So far the resources are free for schools.