1. Current directions in
educational repositories
Leo Højsholt-Poulsen
UNI•C
The Danish IT Centre for Education and Research
Denmark
Leo.Hojsholt-Poulsen@uni-c.dk

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6. EdReNe – Educational Repositories Network
Founding members
• UNI•C (Denmark) • IML - Umeå University Department of Interactive
Media and Learning (Sweden)
• EUN – European Schoolnet (Europe)
• EENET - European Expert's Network for Associated members
Education and Technology (Europe) • Utdanning.no (Norway)
• Menon Network (Europe) • Utdanningsdirektoratet (Norway)
• EDEN - European Distance and E-Learning
Network (Europe) • VETAMIX (Finland)
• FWU - Institut für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft • Lektion.se (Sweden)
und Unterricht (Germany) • Intrallect Ltd (UK)
• UPF - Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
• SLO - Netherland’s Institute for Curriculum
• TLF - Tiger Leap Foundation (Estonia) Development (The Netherlands)
• UNI-LJ-FMF, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, • CTIE - Centre suisse des technologies de
Uni. of Ljubljana (Slovenia) l'information dans l'enseignement (Switzerland)
• ITC - Centre of IT in Education (Lithuania) • APS IT-diensten (The Netherlands)
• Skolverket - The Swedish National Agency
for Education (Sweden) • TLU-CET - Talinn University (Estonia)
• ENIS Austria (Austria) • CTE - Centre de technologie de l'éducation
• NCTE –National Centre for Technology in (Luxembourg)
Education (Ireland)
• Ontwikkelcentrum (The Netherlands)
• Kennisnet – Sticting Kennisnet Ict op School
(The Netherlands) • LTScotland, Learning and Teaching Scotland (UK)
• Becta - British Educational Communications and • Encyclopaedia Britannica Education (UK)
Technology Agency (UK)
• CNDP - Centre National de Documentation • DGIDC –Ministry of Education (Portugal)
Pédagogique (France)
• ALLIANZ S.p.A. (Italy)
• Giunti Interactive Labs (Italy)
• Teachable.net (United Kingdom)
• BFU- Brancheforeningen for undervisningsmidler • Agenzia Nazionale per lo Sviluppo dell’Autonomia
(Denmark)
Scolastica (former INDIRE) (Italy)
• AIE - Associazione Italiana Editori (Italy)
• SMART Technologies (United Kingdom)
• EduLearn (Portugal) 6
• sDae - Sociedad Digital De Autores Y Esitores
(Spain)

7. EdReNe – a learning network
• develops practical guidelines and recommendations
on educational repositories
• will establish a lasting collegial network
of European repository nodes and stakeholders.
Main outputs:
• a comprehensive website (www.edrene.org) with
recommendations, documentation, templates, roadmaps and
documents describing issues, state-of-the-art offering solutions
• Existing repositories can cut some corners, and new repositories
may have a less costly and much less complicated path in life.
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9. A basic list of issues sets the agenda
• How do you establish a repository of learning resources
together with producers and users
• Everyday organisation and management of a repository
• Optimising number of titles and users
• Quality frameworks and criteria
• Networking repositories
• Functionalities and features of a repository
• Pedagogical metadata and links to curriculum
• Management of IPR screening and clearance
• Role of repositories in the new web environment
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10. EdReNe reports (two of them)
• State of the Art report on educational repositories
December 2008
– Looking for trends, evidence of success and impact (quantity and/or quality)
– Current status of European educational repositories
• Templates for agreements and guidelines
for repositories and content owners/providers …
January 2009
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12. SoA - “Huge variety of repositories across Europe”
• Catalogues of descriptions (metadata, links)
• Catalogues and Containers of content (metadata & data)
• Networks of repositories
• Digital resources - All types of resources
• Free content – Commercial content
• For everybody – Membership based (login)
• Validated/screened (quality assurance, rights management)
• Some facilitate feedback
• Target: schools, further/higher ed., homes
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13. SoA – obvious trends
• Public money in one way or the other
– Central or regional initiatives
– to encourage teachers’ uptake of innovative materials and learning styles
(traditional textbooks are still preferred by a majority of the teachers)
– But also examples of successful commercial or user driven repositories
• Digital resources
– web resource (a collection of web sites) somewhere in cyberspace
• Catalogues and containers of content (metadata & data)
• For everybody (no membership requested)
• Target: schools (further/higher ed. separately)
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14. Success indicators
– A successful repository is a platform that
many use to find learning resources of high quality.
– Use should be regular and frequent
– Quality not quantity
– Expected Usage pattern
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15. Unigue visitors weekly
30
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
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Materialeplatformen
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Date
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Marketing works
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2008-9
2007-8
Danish national repository use statistics
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16. SoA - some success stories
• Education Highway in Austria.
By far the biggest educational repository, offering
– 36 subject oriented portals
– over 800 thematic collections
– more than 80.000 titles
• Since February 1994 online
• Repository started with a database in 1996
• Subject oriented repositories since 1996/1997
First subject: Chemistry
• www.schule.at adapted to this concept in 2000
• Today still the most successful portals in Austria
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18. EduHi.at – Page views per month
10.000.000
9.000.000
8.000.000
7.000.000
6.000.000
5.000.000
4.000.000
3.000.000
2.000.000
1.000.000
0
2005 2006 2007 2008
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19. Eduhi.at – Why are we successful?
• “As our editors are teachers they know what their
colleagues need and try to provide this content and links
on the subject oriented platforms. The teachers like that
they can access relevant content and helpful links.”
• “Students like that they find relevant content for
presentations and reports, because the work of filtering
the content has already been done by teachers.”
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20. SoA - some success stories
Often user based repositories appear to impact better than traditional top-down approaches
• KlasCement in Belgium, an initiative of a non-profit
organization. Maintained by five teachers funded by the
government, and everything is submitted by teachers
• Lektion.se in Sweden, a private initiative founded by
teachers. It is the most popular service currently with more
than 190.000 users, and is a rapidly expanding base of
shared lesson plans
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21. No quality control
Community based
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22. Very successful
commercial
repository
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23. SoA – New developments
• Users meet the repository or a collection of repositories at their local school web
portal or in their own virtual learning environment
– e.g. Sweden (The Spider), The Netherlands (Edurep), Denmark (Materialeplatformen)
• Content is linked to the curriculum
– e.g. in France, Ireland, Denmark, Hungary, Iceland, Austria, Norway and the UK (the now closed
Curriculum Online service)
• Quality assurance and rights issues play a big role
– Summary of findings from the EdReNe Quality Assurance sessions
• Initiatives combine central repositories with school learning platforms
– e.g. England, Scotland, Spain, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Italy, Finland and Austrian regions
• The National Digital Resource Bank in England will provide a national repository to house
content created by schools and local authorities
• Cultural heritage (educational) repositories have emerged
– e.g. Denmark, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, The Netherlands and the UK
– Europeana – cultural collections of Europe
• Broadcasting companies have established popular services
by which schools can subscribe to TV and radio productions 23
– e.g. in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Ireland and the UK.

24. EDUREP value chain and communities
Model for Succes - 3 tier solution. Specialisation is the key
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