Over the past few years European Ministries of Education (MoEs) have started to store these resources in repositories and to describe them with metadata. The creation of learning resources constitutes a big investment and hence sharing them across Europe increases the availability to teachers and pupils at a much reduced cost. Therefore, MoEs are taking part in a European-wide initiative to share knowledge resources.

The EUN Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) aims at making the collections of the MoEs discoverable, unlocking a wealth of material for teachers and pupils.  The LRE uses a federated approach which provides a good balance between trust and autonomy; it is decentralized enough to allow MoEs to manage their collections autonomously, and secure enough to ensure the trust necessary when dealing with content for sensitive groups like pupils.

Another advantage of the solution is its simplicity by using the Simple Query Interface (SQI) specification co-developed by the EUN as part of a contract by CEN/ISSS WSLT, the European Standardisation body for learning technologies. It takes usually about one week to connect a new repository to the federation.  This time can be reduced to one day when the repository supports the Java Database Connection (JDBC). 

Using the latter solution, the Israeli repository was connected to the federation in December 2005 and the Swedish one was connected in January 2006.  In both cases, a one-day developer workshop was organised. The morning session consisted of a technical introduction whereas the afternoon was dedicated to lab exercises allowing developers to concretely work with the software tools developed by EUN to connect repositories.  After the workshop, a second day was used to actually connect the repositories to the LRE federation.

This work is part of the LIFE (Learning Interoperability Framework for Europe) project which provides principles and practice for enhancing the interoperability in different areas including learning object repositories, assessment, accessibility, learner information, learning design, and school administration. The LIFE project organises on 13-14 June2006, a major interoperability workshop in Paris where participants will be able to learn more on these interoperability issues and test it out in practice. Within the framework of the CALIBRATE project six more ministries of education will in 2006 connect their learning resource repositories to the learning resource exchange.

http://life.eun.org