David Massart

Towards a pan-European learning resource exchange infrastructure

The Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) is a new service that provides schools with access to educational content from many different origins. From a technical standpoint, it consists of an infrastructure that: - Federates systems that provide learning resources - e.g., learning resource repositories, authoring tools - and - Offers a seamless access to these resources by educational systems that enable their use - e.g., educational portals, virtual learning environments (VLEs). As the number of connected systems increased over time, this infrastructure had to evolve in order to improve the quality of its search service. This paper describes the current LRE infrastructure and explains the rationale behind its evolution.

Federation and brokerage of learning objects and their metadata

The CeLeBraTe (Context eLearning with Broadband Technologies) project is developing a system to support a European Learning Network (ELN) of virtual learning environments capable of exchanging digitally stored learning resources. The ELN is built around a Brokerage System that manages exchanges between its members. Unlike other virtual learning environment networks based on a client-server architecture, CeLeBraTe is based on a mixed approach where, although the brokerage system hosts a central metadata repository, each ELN member is also authorized to manage its own local metadata repository. Search requests are both handled centrally and propagated to local repositories.

The Simple Publishing Interface (SPI)

The Simple Publishing Interface (SPI) is a new publishing protocol, developed under the auspices of the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) workshop on learning technologies. This protocol aims to facilitate the communication between content producing tools and repositories that persistently manage learning resources and metadata. The SPI work focuses on two problems: (1) facilitating the metadata and resource publication process (publication in this context refers to the ability to ingest metadata and resources); and (2) enabling interoperability between various components in a federation of repositories. This article discusses the different contexts where a protocol for publishing resources is relevant. SPI contains an abstract domain model and presents several methods that a repository can support. An Atom Publishing Protocol binding is proposed that allows for implementing SPI with a concrete technology and enables interoperability between applications.

Taming the Metadata Beast: ILOX

We propose a framework for organizing multiple metadata specifications in a container that can be handled as a whole. This framework, named Information for Learning Object eXchange (ILOX), is developed as part of the IMS Learning Object Discovery & Exchange (LODE) specification that aims to facilitate the discovery and retrieval of learning objects stored across more than one collection. While thus far ILOX has been demonstrated to resolve a number of challenges specific to the e-learning domain, it is a generic framework that can be profiled to organize metadata about any type of digital content.

A Federated Authorization Service for Bridging Learning Object Distribution Models

In a large federation of commercial learning object repositories, customers might be confronted to different access control procedures put in place by different content providers to enforce their respective distribution models. This paper proposes a federated authorization service that provides a uniform access to learning objects protected by different authorization protocols. This service is based on a learning object broker that mediates different distribution models.