The document provides information about the Learning Resource Exchange (LRE), a catalogue of open educational resources for K-12 education in Europe managed by European Schoolnet. The LRE aims to provide access to over 200,000 resources. It outlines the history and goals of the LRE, describes how it is governed, and discusses future plans to improve discovery of resources through linking them to curriculum standards in various European countries in a machine-readable way. This would allow teachers and students to more easily find resources that are relevant to their curricula.

1. European Schoolnet
Learning Resource Exchange
http://lreforschools.eun.org
David Massart <dmassart@acm.org>

2. Outline
• A presentation on the Learning Resource
Exchange (LRE)
– Outlining the project, indicating
– Current challenges and
– Future plans as well as
• Ideas on how the European Commission can
promote OERs in Europe

3. Learning Resource Exchange (LRE)
• Result of an effort started in 2002
• By European Schoolnet (EUN) and its supporting
European Ministries of Education (MoEs)
• With support of the European Commission
(CELEBRATE, CALIBRATE, MELT, ASPECT and
eQNet)
• Self-sustained since 2008
• Covers all aspects linked to access to OERs:
Interoperability and
standard, Legal, Quality, Infrastructure, Pedagogy,
Retrieval

4. LRE: Catalogue ofQualityOERs
for K-12 Educationin Europe

5. LRE Portal
http://lreforschools.eun.org/

11. The LRE is NOT “Yet-Another-Portal”

12. LRE Protocols

13. 50+ LRE Content Providers

14. 200,000+ OERs that

15. Trans-national Topics
(MUST BE PRESENT)
The resource addresses curriculum topics
that could be considered trans-national.
For example, teaching multiplication is
usually covered in every national
curriculum, but teaching the folklore of a
very specific region is not. It can also be
a resource well suited for use in multi-
disciplinary or cross-curricular contexts.
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/resour
ce-details?resourceId=280919
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/resour
ce-details?resourceId=400452
www.europeanschoolnet.org - www.eun.org 15

16. Knowledge of a specific language is not
needed
(MUST BE PRESENT)
The resource can be used without having to translate
accompanying
texts and/or the resource may be available in at least 3
European
languages.
For example, a resource might be a video where
the narrative can be turned off, or it employs
icons, images, animations, maps, etc. making its
contents understandable for everyone.
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/resource-
details?resourceId=400117
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/resource-
details?resourceId=264342
www.europeanschoolnet.org - www.eun.org 16

17. Stored as a file type that is usable
with generally available software*
The resource can be used in any
environment (online and off-line) and
runs on multiple platforms (also
hand-held, IWB).
For example this can be an
animation that plays in a web
browser without the need for
additional software.
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/gues
t/resource-
details?resourceId=264832
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/gues
t/resource-
details?resourceId=250809
www.europeanschoolnet.org - www.eun.org 17

18. Methodological support for teachers
is not needed
Subject teachers can easily
recognize how this resource meets
their curriculum requirements or how
this resource could be used in a
teaching scenario without further
instructions. This criteria should not
be used to assess the usability
(technical qualities) of a resource.
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/gues
t/resource-
details?resourceId=399084
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/gues
t/resource-
details?resourceId=401108
www.europeanschoolnet.org - www.eun.org 18

19. Intuitive and easy to use
The resource is intuitive to use in the
sense that it has a user-friendly
interface and is easy to navigate for
both teachers and students without
having to read or translate complex
operating instructions.
Example are resources with simple
button commands to create maps for
use on computers, printouts or
interactive white boards.
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/res
ource-details?resourceId=261871
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/res
ource-details?resourceId=280960
www.europeanschoolnet.org - www.eun.org 19

20. Interactivity with or without feedback in a digital
environment
This kind of resource invites or requires a significant
degree of user input or engagement, other than just
reading something on a page in an online or offline
environment.
The interactivity can be simple or complex. Simple
forms can be feedback on correct or incorrect
answers in a drill/practice scenario. Complex forms
can be lab activities that produce different results
depending on user actions or hints to help complete
tasks successfully in an online environment. An
interactive resource that does not provide feedback
but still requires user input would be a geometric 3D
shape that can be moved and turned.
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/resou
rce-details?resourceId=248375
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/resou
rce-details?resourceId=264849
www.europeanschoolnet.org - www.eun.org 20

21. Clear license status (MUST BE PRESENT)
The user can easily find information about the
license/rights (sometimes called Terms of
Use, Copyright or Permissions) for this
resource.
These statements explain if users or educators are
allowed to make copies, or remix or redistribute
a resource, or use images from the site in a
blog without contacting the photographer, or if
they can put this resource in a VLE like
Moodle, etc.
This license/rights information should be
understandable for a typical user.
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/resource-
details?resourceId=265528
http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/resource-
details?resourceId=399091
www.europeanschoolnet.org - www.eun.org 21

22. LRE Subcommittee
• LRE governing body
• Meets twice a year
• Founding members and Associate members have
one vote each and elect a Chair
• Technical Advisory Board – chaired by EUN
• Decisions on operation of LRE and annual workplan
decided by Founding and Associate members
• Changes to statutes of LRE Governing Committee
and LRE membership rules require majority
decision by Founding members (MoE)

23. Types of LRE Members
• LRE Founding members – EUN MoEs
• LRE Associate members
– Territorial, regional, municipal authorities
– Commercial and public sector content providers
– Tools’ providers
• LRE Subscription members (limited to 1 year)
– Smaller organizations exploring LRE added value

24. LRE Subcommittee Members
• Belgium (NL) • The Netherlands (chair)
• Czech Rep. • Norway
• Finland • Portugal
• Italy • Sweden
• Lithuania • Switzerland
Currently discussing with SMEs, MoEs, Projects

25. Beyond Metadata: Social Data

26. LRE Social Data Manager

27. What’s next?

28. Location of LRE Portal Visitors (2012)

29. Beyond Metadata: Artifact Data

30. LRE Proxy (under development)
• This proxy is very similar to URL
shorteners such as goo.gl or tinyurl.com
• LRE “short” URLs are used in the LRE
metadata to replace resource locations
• Each time users consult the LRE catalog to
accessOERs, they contact the LRE Proxy
that captures data before redirecting the
users to the actual resources

31. OER Analytics
• Associated with metadata, interaction data enables
– Improved curation, searching, ranking, and recommending
of OERs
– Better data on which OERs are most likely to be used and
where
• Valuable source of analytics of OERs’ audience
preferences
• Helps to identify quality resources by crowdsourcing
• Makes it possible to measure
– Impacts of marketing campaigns for the uptake of OERs
– Shifts in educational policies on OERsglobally
• D. Massart and E. Shulman. Interaction Data Exchange.
D-Lib Magazine, May/June 2013. (forthcoming)

32. Beyond Metadata

33. SENnet
http://sennet.eun.org

34. Curriculum-Based Discovery
How do LRE teachers can do to find OERs
that address a given curriculum item?

35. What we need
• A European bank of curriculum in machine addressable
form that:
– Are based on the extensible ASN framework used in the US and
Australia supporting interoperability and tailoring to each
nation’s needs
– Are accurate digital representations of curriculum documents
and their component statements (semantic units);
– Are consistent in form; and
– Are modelled in RDF and amenable to the emerging Semantic
Web and Linked Data principles.
• Design an extensible framework to support evolving uses
• Provide open access
• Support curriculum that is language independent

36. Rationale
• Thanks to EU funding during the last 10
years, Europe has been ‘competing’ on very
favourable terms with the USA in terms of
access to learning resources (LRE, national
portals)
• However, without a major initiative at
European level on the ‘curriculum mapping’ of
digital learning resources, there is now a real
danger that we will fall seriously behind

37. Rationale (cont.)
• Europe does not have an initiative comparable
to ASN even though a number of European
Ministries of Education at the forefront of
content repository development increasingly
recognize that curriculum-based discovery is
key to ensuring that the majority of teachers
begin to exploit digital learning resources and
justify the existing investment in eLearning
content portals

38. Rationale (cont.)
• Coordinating national efforts (interoperability)
• National initiatives
– Denmark
– France
– Sweden
– The Netherlands
–…

39. Process
• MoEs create machine-readable descriptions of their
national curriculum
• Machine-readable curriculum documents and statements
are stored as open data in a European bank that supports:
– Efficient integration of data from disparate resource providers
– Resource sharing and linking related resources
• Content providers relate their learning resources to the
curriculum learning outcomes provided by the MoEs
• As learning resources get tagged using different
curriculum, it will be possible infer cross-maps between
these curriculums

40. Immediate Benefits
• Greatly enhanced discovery of relevant OERs
(and other resources)
• An instrument for defining across Europe:
– Instruction (i.e., what is taught in the classroom)
– Assessment (i.e., what skills are tested) and
– Relating assessments to instruction.

41. This instrument enables
• Content providers to align their learning
resources with the different European curricula
• Ministries of Education to better manage
curricula
• Teachers and learners to perform curriculum-
based search for learning resources (something
that is simply impossible to do via Google)
• Policy makers to better monitor and compare
curriculum and curriculum-related activities.

42. Long-Term Benefits
The cross linking of the curricula of nations and their relationships to
resources will enable:
• Better alignment of learning resources and strategies to student
assessment based on national learning objectives
• Development of data-driven decision making mechanisms based on
learning objectives (both expected and achieved)
• Personalization of student learning to meet particular needs through
customized maps or trajectories through learning outcomes
• Student mobility through e-portfolios representing student achievement
aligned to learning outcome expectations and the international cross-
mapping of those expectations
• Sharing/leveraging of eLearning content developed throughout the world
based on semantically related learning outcomes
• Intensive data-driven research into the nature of learning processes as
they relate to goals expressed in curricula

44. For Further Information
WEB:
http://lreforschools.eun.org
EMAIL:
lre-contact@eun.org