Currently, there are no agreed profiles that address the needs of the learning domain, and no established practices for combining existing specifications into complete solutions.  Individual organizations are creating their own solutions, and an opportunity to establish broader interoperability is being missed.  There is also no way of measuring or testing the compatibility and conformance of specific solutions.

The new standard should benefit to most stakeholders in the field:

• Educators will have an easy way to discover learning content that addresses the needs of their students, making their jobs easier, and maximizing re-use and minimizing the cost of re-invention of materials.
• Students will have the benefit of access to the highest-quality learning resources available, making a significant impact on the quality of their learning experience and their learning outcomes.
• Content providers will be able to advertise their products by making them globally discoverable.
• System vendors will have a limited set of specifications to support to make their systems compliant with major federations of learning resources.
• Finally, federation builders will secure their investment by developing infrastructures based on standard specifications.

Since its creation in November 2006, European Schoolnet was co-chairing the Special Interest Group that wrote the LODE charter and will continue to co-chair the newly approved project group, a recognition of EUN’s expertise in the area of standards and interoperability of learning resources. Additionally participation in the LODE project group will be beneficial to EUN’s work in building the learning resource exchange for Europe (LRE).

IMS Global Learning Consortium (http://imsglobal.org/)