The document discusses educational resource repositories and the European Schoolnet's Learning Resource Exchange (LRE). It describes how the LRE originally aimed to create a federated search of repositories but faced challenges. However, it saw unexpected positive outcomes like the adoption of its application profile. The LRE public portal launched in 2008 and provided access to over 130,000 resources. Issues discussed include national vs. European approaches and ensuring quality and relevance of learning objects.

1. Current Directions in Educational
lre.eun.org
Repositories
Frans Van Assche
European Schoolnet

2. LRE Federation
• Ministries of education • Publishers
– Austria – FWU
– Czech Republic – Cambridge-Hitachi
– Estonia – Cambridge University Press
– Finland
Skolavefurinn
lre.eun.org
–
– Flanders (Belgium)
– France – Young Digital Planet
– Hungary – Dunlem e-Learning
– Iceland • Others
– Israel – The European Schoolnet
– Ireland
– ARIADNE Foundation
– Italy
– Lithuania – KULeuven
– Norway – OERcommons
– Poland – Contento
– Portugal – Promethean
– Region of Catalonia – Cité des Sciences
– Slovenia
– Open University (UK)
– Spain
– Sweden – Siveco
+ Interested to become Associate Partners

3. Experience with educational repositories
• Responsibilities
– 2000-2008 Managing EUN Learning Resource
Exchange (LRE)
• First federated search into heterogeneous network of LO
lre.eun.org
reporistories
• LRE Application profile V1-V3
• LRE portal launched in 2008
• Metadata & Repositories
– 1974 Semantic Interoperability, controlled
vocabularies and thesauri
– 1979 First paper on metadata repositories
– 1996 Web for Schools. Educational resource
repository

4. Experience with educational repositories
• Learning Technology Standards
– Main editor of
• Controlled Vocabularies for Learning Object
lre.eun.org
Metadata
• Harmonisation of vocabularies
– Coeditor
• Simple Query Interface
• Curriculum Exchange Format
– Past Vice-chair CEN/ISSS WSLT
– Past member of the board of directors of the
European IMS Network

5. What went wrong
• In 2001 believing that commercal publishers
were ready to engage in a federation of
repositories
lre.eun.org
• In 2008 School teachers rejected the
federated search
– Unstable result sets
– Unstable order
– Speed
– Is this a general rejection ?
• Many errors when end users apply Creative
Commons

6. Unexpected positive
• Adoption of the LRE application profile of the
LOM including the LRE thesaurus
lre.eun.org
• Willingness of the community to contribute
– Tags
– Translations of resources and metadata
– Improvements to metadata

7. LRE public portal
http://lreforschools.eun.org
• LRE public portal officially
launched Dec 2008
• Over 130,000
lre.eun.org
resources/assets in May
2009 from 25 providers
• Open free. Mostly
Creative Commons
• Being promoted initially to
60,000 eTwinning
schools

8. Features LRE portal
• Search by language, subject, age range
• Browse by subject
• Filter results by learning resource type, …
lre.eun.org
• Sort by popularity, rating
• Discover learning resources by tags
• Add to Favourites
• Provide Ratings, Annotations, Tags
• See other persons’ favourites
• Share favourites with other users

9. LRE portal Features
• Multilinguality
– 24 languages
– Multilinguality & social tagging
lre.eun.org
– Automatic translation of metadata
• Integrating LRE functionality in other EUN projects.
E.g. eTwinning through a widget
• About 20-25 users (mostly teachers) registering
every day

10. lre.eun.org

11. lre.eun.org

12. lre.eun.org

13. lre.eun.org

14. lre.eun.org

15. lre.eun.org

16. lre.eun.org

17. lre.eun.org

18. lre.eun.org

19. lre.eun.org

20. lre.eun.org

21. lre.eun.org

22. lre.eun.org

23. lre.eun.org

24. lre.eun.org

25. lre.eun.org

26. lre.eun.org

27. lre.eun.org

28. Introducing an international educational
resource repository
• National reflexes vs. European attitude
• Impatience
• Travel well - Learning object quality
lre.eun.org
• National curriculum
• Discipline/theme oriented social tag clouds
• Searching process
• Interest of teachers evolves
• Object vs. idea/tool
• Lesson plans
• Virtual vs. face-to-face contact
- Virtual international collaboration is still an issue
• License issue; CC extremely useful
28

29. Different Levels of Interoperability
lre.eun.org
Technical Semantic
Political

30. A typical usage scenario
Find the weakest link
Discovery
Search
Retract Soc. Recommend.
Agent based
Evaluate
Expose
Choose
lre.eun.org
Describe Resolution
Create Integrate Get
Reference
Adapt & Reuse or LO
Disaggregate
Aggregate
Modify the sequence
Modify the content
Integrate Use/Play
Local
Delete

31. lreforschools.eun.org (teachers)
lre.eun.org
lre.eun.org (repository owners)
info.melt-project.eu (see final report)