Repository strategies - first expert workshop (WS 3.1)

• Quality assurance strategies
  (editorial policies, technical quality assurance)
• Connecting and cooperating with existing repositories
• Educational repositories in a Google world
• Identifying successful policy actions
  (government support, public-private partnerships)

Similarly, members have expressed the wish that all workshops have a focus on a high level of participation and group sessions, in order to involve all participants as much as possible and underpin the networking aspect of the project.

There is not one strategy or policy that fits all European countries with respect to educational repositories, but members learn from sharing examples of successes. However, in a number of countries networks connect existing repositories that collaborate on providing one central platform, where the teachers and pupils may go and look for learning resources. Also at European level, EUN provides the LRE service that will enable users to find validated content from other countries.

The owners of national educational repositories consider quality assurance of a very high priority. Of course quality assurance in general is important, but it is also the very difference between finding a resource from a search in Google and from a search in a repository of ‘validated’ resources. When a user looks for resources in an educational repository, it must be easy to find the best, the metadata must be accurate and descriptive, and the user should know that the content is of solid educational quality. Some countries rely on the information provided by the (approved) educational publishers, and some have a team of teacher experts reviewing the entries from publishers and/or educationalists.

Trends clearly emerged, but the members did not extract any set of recommendations at this early stage of the project. They will continue to discuss these issues at the next expert workshops. At the next workshop there will be more focus on providing an overview of current approaches and identifying the decisive factors in obtaining a successful repository – and which of these can actually be planned and/or subsequently mplemented.

Presentations of new members

• Mike O’Byrne from the National Centre for Technology in Education (NCTE) in Ireland.
  Download presentation
• Jean-Luc Barras from Centre suisse des technologies de l'information dans l'enseignement (CTIE) in Switzerland.
  Download presentation

Theme presentations
In a number of plenum sessions experts presented concrete examples of “Connecting and cooperation with existing repositories” and “Identifying successful policy actions”.

In The Netherlands, the authorities have launched Edurep as the Middleman in the Dutch educational content chain, linking and facilitating interoperability between users and a number of rather different suppliers of educational resources.
Download presentation

The European Schoolnet, EUN, has, in collaboration with its national partners, developed the Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) service that will enable schools to find educational content from many different countries and providers. The LRE is based on experiences from previous projects like Calibrate and MELT.

Relevant links:
LRE
Download presentation of the LRE
Download Calibrate experiences

Lisa Petrides, from OER Commons/ISKME was invited as an external expert. She spoke about Open Educational Resources for Teaching and Learning, a network that aggregates thousands of lesson plans, exercises, and simulations from over hundred partners. Quite a number of initiatives use and share these collections of free resources.
Download presentation

Expert members presented the governmental service oriented strategy from Norway, and the digital content repository “La Central Digital” from Spain, which aims to be a global B2B marketplace mainly for audio/audiovisual content and to promote new business models for the legal sale of cultural contents in digital formats.

Relevant links:
Download presentation of Norway’s service oriented strategy
Download presentation of linking policies and business models

Quality Assurance sessions
The main focus of the group sessions during this workshop was on quality assurance strategies. In the three group sessions participants discussed:

• Real-life examples of educational resources – what should be included in educational repositories, and what should not. In this session participants made the important point of their group discussions available to all members by filling in a survey in the EdReNe Members Zone. The results of the survey was subsequently discussed in plenum, and made available to all members for further comments
• The two subsequent group sessions were in part based on the questionnaire developed in the Q4R project (www.q4r.org). This was used as a basis for initiating discussions among different repository stakeholders represented within the group of participants. In the second group session repository owners were asked to fill in a similar questionnaire this time reflecting the current practise of their repository. The complete survey is available to network members from the EdReNe Members Zone.

Summary of findings from the Quality Assurance sessions
The survey includes thirteen repositories from thirteen different countries, most run by or on behalf of national ministries of education. Their primary target is teachers and pupils of primary and secondary education, but some also aim at parents and the broader public. Their scope is the national environment, but nonetheless 71% include multilingual resources. Six of the 13 repositories are linked to other repositories in the national environment, and four have or will link to EUN’s portal (Calibrate/MELT/LRE), which aims at pan-European users.

The first educational repositories were launched more than ten years ago in 1993-1995, and the most recent in 2007. The overall goal of ministries have been to provide educational resources to the target group, and some governments drive to transform teaching and learning in schools by improving access to ICT and multimedia resources for all pupils. The focus is to create one central marketplace on the Internet, where users can go and search or browse for all available materials. About half of the repositories publish regular newsletters for its users and stakeholders, and 3/4 communicates events and news on the repository interface.

The number of titles registered in the repositories varies very much, from 500 to 100.000. 2/3 of repositories have records of all types of learning objects. However, nearly all concentrate on digital learning resources from text documents in pdf or html format, photos, video clips etc. to websites (links) and to more elaborate resources with support materials. As for the digital resources, the survey reveals no common trend of the size of the learning resources. The majority of repositories host both the descriptions (metadata) of the titles and the digital content of the title itself (data). A few serve purely as catalogues with only metadata and references/links to the actual resources stored at their original location.

In most countries the materials are being evaluated in various ways upon entry in the repositories. In fact, 79% accept only validated content. In many cases expert teachers are being paid to do this validation, and/or only content from approved publishers is considered eligible. In Austria all titles are checked – by a group of teachers hired by the repository owners - in quality, technical application and copyright issues as far as possible, but there is no standard evaluation procedure. Also in Ireland all the content provided has been evaluated by teachers, who are paid to provide the review and categories. In a few countries like e.g. Italy and Denmark the repository comprises any title registered by the producer, and it is up to the users, the teachers and pupils themselves, to choose a resource and evaluate its quality and appropriateness. However, nearly all have some kind of check of correctness of metadata.

More than 2/3 of the repositories apply intellectual property and editorial policies, and standards for interoperability. Half of them have formulated an accessibility policy. Some screen metadata and data for violation of intellectual property rights and apply e.g. Creative Commons for users’ rights. An editorial policy is often adhered to through workflow and checks. Regarding the accessibility policy, at least one repository has added in the LOM schema a field allowing specifying whether the learning objects are accessible or not to disabled people taking in account the W3C Accessibility guidelines.

Some variant/subset of the IEEE LOM metadata application profile, localised to national educational needs, has been applied by 79% of the repositories. But a few have ‘invented’ their own metadata profile. 71% of the repositories use some kind of metatagging tool for describing new titles. There appears to be no one common ‘European’ or ‘international’ tool applied, all have their own.

All repositories offer search by keyword or free text. In nearly all the users may search for resources by metadata and/or categories of metadata. In e.g. the Lithuanian and Danish repository the user may also browse for relevant materials through a hierarchical structure. 1/3 of the repositories also include a multilingual thesaurus, which ‘translates’ the national words and maps them onto a common application profile.

Quality assurance may be applied before and/or during the inclusion of a resource in the repository. About one half of the repositories, which do a quality check before inclusion, provide a checklist of quality criteria: a mix of pedagogical, ergonomical (interface presentation and navigation), cultural, accessibility and technical (e.g. interoperability) criteria.

Only 14% of the repositories request a membership of its users that look for materials, but the majority considers membership/registration in some form obligatory to contributors of content. Only one repository out of the thirteen currently has a built in Digital Rights Management system. 79% permit their contributors to apply a Creative Commons license.

A lot of work is being put into assuring that metadata is correct. There is not one common set or approach. 71% have experts verifying the metadata upon entry, and 50% provide a metadata reference guide for different types of content. 2/3 of those repositories that have a ‘technical quality control’, do an automatic link check.

Some repositories facilitate that users may add evaluations, comments or ratings in some form to the titles in their repositories, and some plan to provide these possibilities. However, as a matter of principles some repositories do not allow this type of feed-back. So far, none of the repositories have applied e.g. social bookmarking or tag clouds.

Download extract of Quality Assuance survey, by repository (Excel)

Extracts from the Quality Assurance survey
The following paragraphs present excerpts from the answers given by individual member repositories. The full survey results from both group sessions are available from the EdReNe Members Zone.

Please note that the surveys are primarily meant to initiate discussions and knowledge exchange between members of the network during workshops and should be interpreted with this in mind. Survey results can be used as eye-openers and for setting new important discussion items on upcoming workshop agendas but should not be interpreted as more than this.

Download Extracts from the Quality Assurance survey in PDF-format here!

Educational repositories in a Google world
The group session was introduced by a showcase of current Google technologies. This formed the basis of a more general discussion on how to integrate/create synergy with e.g. popular search engines and other popular web based services.

Download the introduction to the Google session.

As part of the group session participants were also asked to fill in a survey on current actual use/considerations concerning Google technology and their own repository.

The complete survey is available from the EdReNe Members Zone, and the following exemplifies some of the comments made by workshop participants during their discussions. Please note that the surveys are primarily meant to initiate discussions and knowledge exchange between members of the network during workshops and should be interpreted with this in mind. Survey results can be used as eye-openers and for setting new important discussion items on upcoming workshop agendas but should not be interpreted as more than this.

Download Extracts from the Google survey in PDF-format here!