EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

• CELEBRATE was a large-scale IST demonstration project, ending in Nov. 2004, that addressed all parts of the educational content value chain and involved 23 participants including Ministries of Education, universities, leading educational publishers, content developers, VLE vendors and technology suppliers from 11 countries. The project particularly demonstrated the viability of an open source, ‘brokerage system’ architecture and federated search capability. The lessons learned in CELEBRATE can be found in the project deliverables at:
  http://celebrate.eun.org/eun.org2/eun/en/index_celebrate.cfm
• CALIBRATE was also an IST project ending in March 2008, that particularly involved partners from new member states http://calibrate.eun.org. The project connected repositories from Ministries of Education in Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia and provided a test bed of 40 schools with access to both this network of repositories and a new web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources http://lemill.net. Research was also carried out in CALIBRATE related to semantic interoperability. As well as further developing the LOM-based Application Profile developed in the CELEBRATE project, CALIBRATE carried out research into the curriculum mapping of learning resources from four countries (Austria, Belgium/Flanders, Czech Republic, Poland) involving the development of both Topic and Action-verb vocabularies and the development of a curriculum mapping tool.
• MELT is an eContentplus ‘content enrichment project’ officially scheduled to end in December 2008 but may be extended to finish ending in March 2009, http://info.melt-project.eu. The aim is to enrich approximately 40,000 learning resources and 100,000 learning assets (from a network of linked repositories) with semantically well-defined metadata. In the first phase of the project, experienced indexers enriched MELT content with new metadata using a LOM-based Application Profile. Content has also been enriched using automatic metadata generation approaches. In a second phase, teachers in up to 40 schools are using MELT social tagging tools to further enrich content with additional tags. An evaluation will then be carried out of these various content enrichment approaches. The MELT portal will be re-branded as the Learning Resource Exchange service for schools when a public version of the LRE is launched in December 2008. If they choose to connect to the LRE architecture, ministries of education and LRE Associate Partners can enable their teachers and users to access LRE content from within their own national/local repository or learning environment. This is, in fact, a key part of the LRE strategy that has been developed with ministries of education participating in EUN projects (see below).

• ASPECT is an eContentplus 30-month Best Practice Network (BPN) ending in December 2010, http://aspect-project.org. It involves 22 partners from 15 countries, including 9 Ministries of Education (MoE), four commercial content developers and leading technology providers. For the first time, experts from all international standardisation bodies and consortia active in e-learning (CEN/ISSS, IEEE, ISO, IMS, ADL) are working together in order to improve the adoption of learning technology standards and specifications. Technology providers and standards’ experts in the project will work with ASPECT content providers to develop best practice approaches to implementing standards for both educational content discovery and use. Content providers will then apply these best practice approaches to a critical mass of resources in an expanded version of the LRE. Later in the project, these resources will be validated with up to 40 schools in four countries in order to determine how the implementation of standards and specifications in the project leads to greater usability of LRE content.
  
  Based on this practical implementation of standards, which will be independently evaluated, ASPECT partners will feed the project’s experience into pre-standardisation activities and run an extensive set of dissemination actions that include international workshops, plugfests, regional events and an award. The aim is to involve a wider group of organisations in ASPECT BPN activities and to develop a unique co-operation framework for all stakeholders who will also benefit from a set of new support services that include: a LOR registry; Vocabulary Bank for Education; Application Profile registry; automatic translation service for LOM and content packaging formats; compliance testing; transformer services; and access to known interoperability issues.
• The Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) for schools includes a re-branded version of the MELT portal. However, it is not a centralised portal but a framework that supports interoperability of content repositories. http://lre.eun.org. The LRE will be launched as a public service for schools in December 2008, building on the results of the CELEBRATE, CALIBRATE and MELT projects. Initially it will contain a critical mass of open educational resources/assets with Creative Commons’ licenses from approximately 20 repositories in the LRE federation (including those of 16 Ministries of Education). LRE resources include content for both primary and secondary school pupils and cover all curriculum subjects. As part of the LRE initiative, EUN is also working with both public and private sector Associate Partners that wish to make resources available to schools. Associate Partners are provided with a first level of free advice and support including attendance at workshops and access to tools that show them how to: connect a portal or VLE to the LRE federation; implement the LRE application profile and use multilingual vocabularies; automatically translate LOM metadata, automatically generate metadata from given learning resources and organise metadata tagging workflows; make their metadata available for harvesting; build, install and manage open source turnkey solutions for building learning resources repositories.

• the development of an open source brokerage system architecture that is being taken up and applied by ministries of education at national level;
• a LOM-Based application profile and multilingual thesaurus that has influenced developments, not only in many European countries, but also globally;
• recognition that, “the most important Europe-wide (and potential global) player in e-learning content may become the European Schoolnet (EUN) through their European Learning Resource Exchange which is currently under development.”
  Open Educational Resources and Practices: OLCOS Roadmap 2012, OLCOS, March 2007.

• Recognition of the importance of supporting multiple strategies, such as federated search (SQI, SRU/SRW), harvesting (OAI-PMH), publishing (SPI), mass upload, syndication (RSS/ATOM) and automatic metadata generation to collect metadata whatever their formats: LOM, DC, or others.
• Use of “standard metadata” as exchange formats rather than as a working format.
• Growing importance of metadata automatic validation and enrichment.
• Building new communities of practice via social tagging of resources – moving beyond content discovery to linking groups of like-minded teachers and learners to content found in repositories.
• Contributing to (including taking a lead role in some instances) the development of open learning-related standards and specifications:
  • CEN/ISSS LTWS (e.g., Simple Publishing Interface, Simple Query Interface, Vocabulary Exchange)
  • IMS Global Consortium (e.g., Learning Object Discovery and Exchange)
  • IEEE LTSC (e.g., Learning Object Metadata, Recommended Practice for Digital Rights Expression Languages (DRELs) Suitable for eLearning Technologies)
  • OASIS (e.g., Search Web Service)

The LOGOS 3-year project has a budget of € 3,732,400, partly funded by the EU. It counts 15 partners including partners with repositories. Antenna Hungaria is the Hungarian broadcasting agency and has taken the role of the project co-ordinator.

The LOGOS project members develop an environment for effective exploitation of available material in digital archives in order to reduce the production costs and give added value to existing digitised knowledge.

The Platform consists of layered repositories supporting the gradual creation of learning experiences starting from existing content residing at multimedia archives. An Authoring Studio of tools provides the delivery of learning experiences integrating web-based, mobile and digital TV technologies. The delivery is handled by special (Moodle-based) Learning Management System and publishing services taking into account the characteristics of the different media and the learner’s individual profile. The most promising objective of the LOGOS Learning Platform is the provision of its personalised learning services in a ubiquitous way, enabling the learners to access their courses from different devices and different personal situations.

For users, it is a set of tools helping to create digital content which will then be played on the different devices. The LOGOS platform offers a personalisation framework model, an overall learning services model introducing the user roles of the Learning Platform and how they interact in the system to facilitate personalised experience, and detailed process definitions and role descriptions for the Course provider, Learner and Teacher users.

Course providers are able to introduce further collaborative and supporting elements and activities into the course to emphasize an organizational and pedagogical approach in the background of the contents. The teacher/trainer/professor can store the learning design and build e-content for educational purposes. The learner’s profile is stored with basic data. When the learner enrols he/she refines the profile, with his/her needs, how she/he learns, etc. The learners are able to access and actively take part in the learning services created by the course providers and teachers from different devices, including PCs, mobile phones and Interactive TV. The systems enables thus to support a high number of learning designs and to adapt to the needs of the learners. The detailed learning model (not final yet) can be found in the presentation.

At the moment the LOGOS framework is being evaluated. A user evaluation will take place in October/November including needs for further enhancements.

OLCOS, the Open eLearning Content Observatory Services is a recently finished project, which was co-funded under the European Union’s eLearning Programme. The project consortium built an online information and observation centre for promoting the concept, production and usage of open educational resources, in particular, open digital educational content (ODEC) in Europe.

Presently the benefits and characteristics of open source software in education is apparent and widely acknowledged, this is not the case with respect to the concept of digital open content that may particularly benefit flexible and open learning models (e.g. collaborative knowledge and skills building) in schools, higher educational institutions and vocational training.

Results of the project include:

• the ODEC Roadmap 2012 which explores the possible pathways towards a higher level of production, sharing and usage of Open Digital Educational Content (ODEC). The Roadmap will provide an orientation as well as recommendations on possible measures and actions to support decision making at the level of educational policy and institutions (first project year);
• a set of online tutorials that provide information and guidance on how to practically work with ODEC. These tutorials are freely accessible on the web in several languages;
• several awareness raising workshops in the European eLearning community designed to foster the take-up of the concept of ODEC, and how to develop the required infrastructures, legally sound practices, educational policies and organisational strategies (second project year).

The ELEONET (www.eleonet.org) (European Learning Objects Network) project aims to create a European catalogue of Learning Objects (LOs) metadata accessible by schools, teachers, and students for immediate retrieval and re-use of educational content. Digital educational resources available through the ELEONET catalogue will be persistently identified using the DOI, the international standard for managing any Intellectual Property in a digital environment.

The ELEONET portal is implemented together with partners and addresses markets in the UK, Italy, Germany and Spain.

Many interesting functionalities, e.g. a unique access point to search in different LO-repository, an editor to add metadata and submit learning objects including SCORM validation etc.

The DOI/LOM application profile – the unique and stable identifier - is essential. Especially when referencing the same object from different portal (i.e. borrow, buy, demo …). The multiple resolution service now is in the testing phase. The DOI string is used to bring the user to the relevant resource (LOs/publisher’s web page/local repository).