EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

MDX (Learning Materials Online) is a cooperative repository that contains digital materials and resources resulting from teaching activities carried out in member universities. The purpose of MDX is to make the participant institutions’ teaching production more visible and widespread, thus contributing to educational innovation, on the one hand, and free access to knowledge, on the other.

What are the aims of MDX?

• To facilitate the management of teaching materials and objects produced by the universities by arranging them and integrating them within a common server.
• To offer the academic staff of the participating universities a resource server that allows the materials produced to be filed and subsequently retrieved.
• To provide users with permanent, simple and fast access to the teaching production of member organisations.
• To add value to the materials collected through elements such as the permanent address, standardised citations or consultation data.
• To establish and apply preservation mechanisms in order to ensure the durability of the materials.
• To encourage the publishing and editing of teaching materials in electronic formats.

The MDX repository works with the free software DSpace, a program created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the company Hewlett-Packard.

MDX uses the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) interoperability protocol, which increases the documents’ visibility since it is offered jointly with other international repositories.

MDX is a project of the participant universities, Consortium of Academic Libraries of Catalonia (CBUC) and the Supercomputation Centre of Catalonia (CESCA), that counts with the support of the Commission for Universities and Research of the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Spain is divided up into autonomous regions, which have full competences in education. There is no Spanish central repository yet, but a connection among those who have it.

The central government has launched the initiative “plan avanca”. It deals with health, administration and education. The programme for education developed by plan avanca is called Internet en el Aula. One objective is to help teachers use technology in the classroom. The main project in the programme is the platform Agrega.

Agrega is under development at the moment but launched version 1.0 was launched in July 2008. It is still under development with new search functions, Web 2.0 functions (content evaluation, comments, etc.), a proxy cache to connect more efficiently to the federated sites and an off-line version to enable content creators to package and catalogue LO. Evaluation of the platform and its practical usage continues during development. The general objectives are:

• To promote, unify and set a standard reference.
• To generate a repository of digital educational objects.
• To create a technological environment for the contents.

Agrega will be a platform of digital educational objects. The target group is schools for the age group 6-18 years. Only public schools can access agrega (private schools cannot use the content). The platform will be multilingual (5 languages in Spain, plus English).

The main aim is to provide a repository of digital educational objects. 2000 different educational objects are being produced according to standards.

Producing and sharing
The platform should be flexible enough to allow teachers to produce their own content based on (parts of) the content in the repository, and it should be possible to share the result. That is, all teachers must be able to produce content, but not necessarily to publish for all teachers in Spain (only authorised users can publish). All content will go through quality assurance. All new shared content in the repository must follow the same standards as the original content.

Metadata
Teachers will do the basic tagging. A trained editor (tagging actor) will do the advanced tagging. It is too difficult for the ordinary teacher.

The Agrega platform includes 18 federated nodes, one per autonomous community plus another one located at the CNICE / Ministerio de Educación in Spain. The nodes can have different types of content, including content which can only be used locally by registered users. All nodes are built on the same technology.

Characteristics of the repository and the content (detailed diagrams of the modules can be found in the presentation by Manuela Lara on edrene.org):

• Each node has its own repository with contents packaged according to the standard SCORM 2004, SCORM 1.2, SCORM “Moodle” and IMS-CP.
• The tagging information is stored following the standard LOM v.1.0 in Spanish (LOM-ES).
• Generated content licensed as Creative Commons - Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike Spain.
• Open Source tools and technological developments licensed as GPL-GNU.
• All content searches are done with a federated system based on the specification “Simple Query Interface” (SQI).
• There is also an Interoperability Interface - IMS-DRI, OAI-PMH (to support sharing with e.g. the European Repositories).

Status after developing less than a year: First versions of the tools are being tested at the moment. That is the searching, packaging and tagging tools.

EAPC shares the Catalan LOM application profile with the Department of Education, which will connect with the rest of the Spanish regions in 2008. Although not yet operational, it has begun cataloguin learning resources contained in its large amount of elearning courses.

At present, examples of active repositories can be seen at

EDU365 portal, http://www.edu365.cat
The Catalan educational portal for children, mostly primary and secondary level, called edu365.cat with a selection of digital learning resources in Catalan. The portal also holds the JClic repository with more than 1200 objects and the community supporting it.

The Merlí project which aims to:

• define a basic LOM Application Profile for the Catalan educational system, including a structured vocabulary mapping the official curriculum
• start the process of cataloguing the Catalan on-line learning objects with LOM metadata
• connect the LOM repository with equivalent Spanish and European networks
• make the retrieval of learning objects easier
• build an on-line resource organizer allowing teachers to annotate, organize and use digital content easily
• enrich the LOM metadata with comments, ratings and keywords (tags) written by teachers.

The first phase of development is now finished with more than 3.000 digital objects already catalogued and testing beginning at schools in February 2008. The next step will be to invite Catalan publishers and teachers to add records.

The connection to federated networks (LRE and Agrega) is still in development.