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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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