Making standards work for you!

Creating good, pedagogically sound and effective learning resources incurs substantial costs, so avoiding duplication of development efforts is important. The community working in the field of learning technologies has been and is still dedicating a lot of energy to the creation of better and more reusable learning resources. Some of these efforts in the sphere of reusability have matured enough to lead to the creation of standards such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata, the IMS Content Package, or the IMS Common Cartridge. Nowadays, the number of reusable educational resources available online, for free or by subscription, is huge but most of these resources are “hidden” in repositories and cannot be easily found, hampering their potential use and reuse.

Over the past few years, researchers and practitioners have started to address these issues. Several initiatives worldwide (such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange, ARIADNE, and GLOBE) are developing solutions for federating e-learning systems and unlocking the educational content hidden in repositories. Started last year, the work of the IMS Group on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange aims at supporting these initiatives by developing a set of specifications that facilitate the discovery and retrieval of distributed learning resources. 

The main goal of the international workshop on search and exchange of e-learning materials is to bring together the communities of researchers, publishers and practitioners working in the field of learning resources, to share the latest advances in the state of the art of research and practices for discovering and exchanging learning content and foster further collaboration.

The workshop is a unique opportunity to explore theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches to learning resources discovery and exchange. A special focus will be put on the latest outcomes of the ASPECT project (http://aspect-project.org).