The meeting provided an excellent opportunity to have an overview of experts’ views on the interoperability of learning resource repositories.

Discussion focused, among others, on issues of authentication/privacy and verification of portable and potentially distributed learner information, the need to bring together emerging formal descriptions of context (course offering etc) with products and achievements, the integration of learner information in non-educational systems; the motivation of developers and producers, personalization and accessibility, and specifications for collaborative learning.

Also under discussion was proliferation of standards, specifications and proprietary formats, the poor practice in the use of vocabularies and ontologies, and the lack of support of diversity.

Specific recommendations and solutions to these issues were offered. The participants discussed also the broad categories of what learner information to record. These include competency, demographic information, learner preferences, accessibility information, performance and achievements, plans, goals, reflections, activities and the relationships between these items.

The outcome of the expert group meeting will become available in the forthcoming report on interoperability. This report is expected in the summer of 2006 and will cover interoperability issues in different areas including accessibility, assessment, the learning process, learning content, institutional information, learning environments, learner information and learning resource repository interoperability.