Tidskrift för lärarutbildning och forskning

The Spider: Connecting learning object repositories – strategies, technologies and issues

 - av Fredrik Paulsson, Umeå universitet

Abstract:

The rapid growth of digital learning resources (sometimes referred to as Learning Objects) has brought forward a number of issues concerning availability, distribution and use. Issues that are a mix of interplaited technological and pedagogical considerations. Some of those issues, mainly related to repositories and the distribution of digital learning resources, are described and examined in this article. A particular focus is put on how resources can be described and indexed using metadata, and on how access to digital learning resources can be improved and facilitated through federation and/or harvesting of metadata in order to tie several repositories together to provide a service that offers one single entry point for access. The study also examined how this single point of entry can be moved closer to the user (i.e. to the environment where digital learning resources are intended to be used) through simple federation of the service, enabling access to the network of repositories from any virtual learning environment. The study is carried out through experiments connected to a real-life case. The study concludes in several suggestions for how access to digital learning resources can be enhanced, as well as in the identifications of a couple of new issues that need to be addressed by future research.

The amount of digital learning resources are increasing rapidly and a huge amount of commercial as well as open educational resources (OER) are now available. However, this rapid growth of digital learning resources also means that it becomes harder and harder to get an overview and to search and find suitable digital learning resources. At the best, digital learning resources (or metadata describing hem) are stored in a repository. While repositories can be a good approach to indexing and cataloging digital learning resources, they also introduces a couple of new problems that need to be addressed: – Descriptions of digital learning resources need to be made according to a common standard and/or Application Profile (Heery & Patel, 2003) in order to be useful in a broader context.
– Repositories tend to become isolated islands that are often not indexed by general search engines like Google. This also means that users need to perform there searches in several different places in order to cover several repositories. To do this they need to be aware of where to find the different repositories.
– Repositories tend to be separated from the rest of the virtual learning environment (VLE) instead of becoming a transparently integrated part of the VLE. This is mainly a problem that is related to how VLEs are designed and implemented, discussed in (Paulson, 2008), but that, never the less, needs to be solved.

The Spider3 project was set out to address the problems described above from a general perspective. Hence, the methodologies applied by the Spider should be applicable in other, similar cases, as well as being applicable to repositories for digital learning resource in general.

The remainder of this paper will describe how the above problems were addressed and how the solutions were designed and implemented in order to develop a broker service for learning resource repositories: the Spider.

The first part of the paper briefly describes the objectives, intentions and deliverables of the Spider project. The second part of the paper reviews some previous and related research, as well as similar projects. The third part of the paper describes how the problems described above were addressed and how the resulting solutions were designed and implemented. Finally, the paper ends with a brief discussion of the research presented in the paper and some suggestions for future research directions to solve some of the new and unsolved issues that were encontered during the project.