swiss (inter-)national learning object repository · 2.demand for a national learning object...

2007 © SWITCH

Swiss (Inter-)National

Learning Object Repository

Dr. Martin Sutter, Head of [email protected]

TERENA “Collaboration on Storage Services” Workshop

Amsterdam, 29th June 2007

2007 © SWITCH 2TERENA “Collaboration on Storage Services” WS: Swiss LOR

Background

Swiss Virtual Campus SVC

• Addressing Swiss institutions of higher education (IHE)

• Impulse program 2000 - 2003

– establish and promote expertise in e-learning technologies

• Consolidation program 2004 - 2007

– establish e-learning centers @ each IHE

– maintenance of products

SWITCH - The Swiss Education & Research Network

• Foundation established in 1987

• Financed by the Swiss IHE and subsidies

• Four business fields:network, security, net services, domain registration


Four Important Findings (2006)

The Swiss institutions of higher education defined a national

e-learning platform, based on open source software, as follows:

1. No immediate and need for a nationally hosted learningmanagement system (LMS)

2. Demand for a national learning object repository (LOR)with interfaces to

– open source LMSs: Moodle, OLAT, others upon demand

– commercial LMSs: Blackboard/WebCT Vista

3. Integration of the platform into existing services

– authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI)

– audio/video conferencing, groupware tools, etc.

4. Support of the e-learning community

– national competence center and e-learning hub


Current Situation

Digital learning content production is increasing

• Distribution of content is unsatisfactory

– LMS: institutional - local - private

– CMS, website: institutional - local - private

! generally not public, not retrievable, not persistent

• Sharing of content

– classical way: «Google»

– Web 2.0 approaches

! “Community” projects

! Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, delicious, ...

– repositories

! Merlot, Ariadne, CAREO, LORnet, EdNA, ...


Goals and Motivation

• Reuse e-learning content

• Enhance collaboration (intra- and interinstitutional)

• Make teaching activities visible to peers and to the public

• Attract students

• Long-term archiving and distribution of content with stable URL(content lifecyle)

• Make teaching activities citable and referenceable

• Single point of entry for all kinds of e-learning contents,independently from distribution platform


Four Important Findings (2006)

The Swiss institutions of higher education defined a national

e-learning platform, based on open source software, as follows:

1. No immediate and need for a nationally hosted learningmanagement system (LMS)

2. Demand for a national learning object repository (LOR)with interfaces to

– open source LMSs: Moodle, OLAT, others upon demand

– commercial LMSs: Blackboard/WebCT Vista

3. Integration of the platform into existing services

– authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI)

– audio/video conferencing, groupware tools, etc.

4. Support of the e-learning community

– national competence center and e-learning hub


Scenarios and Benefits of a LOR

• Personal content management:Lecturers can use their content in different LMS (i.e. as visiting lecturer) andlower migration cost in case of changes

• Corporate content management:Projects or working groups can share common resources and deploy themin different LMS’s

• Distributed working groupscan collaborate and build contents for common courses

• Institutions with one ore more LMScan manage their content independently from the LMS presently used

• Inter-institutional curriculacan use a common content platform with the LMS provided by theinstitutions

• National and international synergies:The exchange of learning material is being supported


LOR Criteria

• Ease of use– publish: one-click export to repository

– retrieve: full-text search or metadata search

– reuse: try it online, download standardized package

• Metadata– simple but adaptable metadata model

– reuse existing metadata

• Quality assurance– quality of metadata

– quality of content

• Access rights– authors control access to their contents

– control levels: individual (private), group, institution, world (public)

– integrated into AAI / Shibboleth


LOR Criteria

• Federated architecture:

– possibility to run institutional repository that is part of a federation

• User interface

– adaptable: simple interface with few functions, complex interface foradvanced users

– support for multiple languages: en, fr, de, it

• Extensible architecture

– flexibility to integrate special applications, e.g. manage e-tests, manage x-ray images

./.


Architecture: Federation

• hierarchical organization

• autonomous decisionabout structure andorganization

UniZH

Math-Nat Philosoph. Vet'medizin Medizin Wirtschaftsw. Rechtswiss. Theologie

FHO

Tech / IT / Bau

Gesundheitsw.

Planung / Wirtsch.

Soziale Arbeit

St. Gallen

Rappersw.

Buchs

Chur

EPFL

Arch / Civil Eng. Chem / Math / Phys Engineering Inform. / Communic. Life Science Humanities Tech. Management


Architecture: Federation

• SWITCH

– manages federation

– manages organization root (global structure)

• Institutions

– organize internal structure

! consistent with federation

! consistent with their organizational structure

– access rights (write access)

• Repository system

– complies with federation organization

! uses catalogs / dictionaries

– supports federation interface

! metadata harvesting

! federated search

UniBas

UniZH

Math-Nat Philosoph. Vet'medizin Medizin Wirtschaftsw. Rechtswiss. Theologie

EPFL

Arch / Civil Eng. Chem / Math / Phys Engineering Inform. / Communic. Life Science Humanities Tech. Management

FHZ

FHO Tech / IT / Bau Gesundheitsw. Planung / Wirtsch. Soziale Arbeit


Metadata Model

• Simple Model

– common schema within federation

– plan: simple schema withpossibility for extensions

• Extensible Model

! only possible to extend schema!

Mandatory

• ID

• Title

• Language

• Contributor

• Location

• Copyrights

+ Domain?

+ Institution?

Optional Tags

• Description

• Keywords

• Creation Date

• Issue Date

• Format

• Instructional Method

• Learning Resource Type

• Context

• access rights

Bsp: Forum neue

Medien in der Lehre

! Uni Basel

! Economy

! Introduction I

! Introduction II

! Psychology

! Life Science

! Uni Bern

! Uni Geneva

! Video

! Economy

! Psychology

! Life Science

! PDF

! JPEG

+ ECTS

+ MPEG7

+ Dublin Core


Metadata Model Mapping

...

......

contextsignatureaccess rights

semantic densitypublishercontext

interactivity typeaudiencelearning res type

roledatecreation date

coveragecoverageinstructional meth.

descriptiondescriptiondescription

keywordssubject/keywordskeywords

formattypeformat

rightsrightsCopyrightCopyright

Location(~ID)LocationLocation

creatorcreatorContributorContributor

languagelanguageLanguageLanguage

titletitleTitleTitle

IDIDIDID

IMS MetadataDublin CoreExtendedMandatory Basic


Common Way to Put Contents into LOR

local LMS

LOR

download

download

upload

search, browse

edit metadata

manage access rights

edit create

manage

upload


Direct Way to Put Contents into LOR

local LMS

LOR

publishdownload

deploy

import

download

upload

search, browse

edit metadata

manage access rights

edit create

manage

upload


by Institution:

! Uni Basel

! Economy! Introduction I

! Introduction II

! Psychology

! Life Science

! Uni Bern

! Uni Geneva

by Domain:

! Economy! Introduction I

! Introduction II

! Ethics

! Psychology

! Life Science

by Format:

! Flash

! Economy! Cash flow

! Return on Investemnt

! supply chain mgmt.

! Psychology

! Life Science

! PDF

! JPEG

Searching

• Browse by multiple views

• Browse by language, date, author, …

• Indexable by public search engines


Cutomizable Interface

• Simple / advanced

• Adapted to content type

• Adapted to corporate identity

• To enforce workflows

• Web-Services interface forcustom front ends

Repository Engine

Uni A Uni B Videoportal

Web Services

API


Integration in Known Environments


Integration: Big Picture

LMS

focus content(Vista, Sakai, Ilias, …)

LMS

focus collaboration(Moodle, OLAT, Claroline, …)

Conferencing

synchronous(Breeze, …)

Groupware

asynchronous(BSCW, …)

Repository(Subversion, …)

Testing(Q'Mark, …)

Audio-

conferencing(Skype, VoIP, …)

Common Authentication with AAI

Desktop:

locally

installed

authoringand

mana-

gement

Tools

initiate

session

import course,

module, media files

backup or share

courses, modules,

media filescontent

storage

initiate

session

initiate

session

content

storageexchange

scores

direct ex-

change of content or

user profiles

edit or

package content(D'weaver, Reload,

PLAY, Flash,…)

sync with agenda(Outlook, Palm, …)

edit content(IMS QTI, Respondus,

…)

tool categories interfaces

Legend:

related tools

more tools: video

streaming, content

conversion, …

ePortfolio

issue

certificate


andere Diensteandere Dienste

The Even Bigger Picture

Moodle

OLAT

Vista®

publications

otherother LMS

streams / podcast

AAI integration

VO workspaces

learn

ing o

bje

cts

oth

er

obje

cts

e-conferencing,calendaring, etc.

e-learning services services for virtual organizations

workflow

andere Diensteandere Dienste

LMS hosting, com-munity support, etc.

federateduniversalrepository

workflow

central/federatedinfrastructures

OAI-PMH compliant

metadata harvesting

CMS / search engine


Ease of Use: Publish and Preview

• Publish: one-click export to repositoryDemo: Publish OLAT Course to LOR

• Reuse: try it online, download standardized packageDemo: Browse for Course in LOR and Preview


Other Topics • Persistent identifiers

• Quality control

• Institutional integration

– support from university management / institutional strategy

– support peer reviews

– honor teaching

– generate reports

– teacher/teaching rewarding system

! for those who share

! for those who re-use

– support social tagging

– e-Learning award


Persistent Identifiers

Uniform Resource Name (URN)

• Syntax: Namespace Identifier:Namespace specific string

• NSS: "ISBN", "MPEG", "SWIFT", "ISO",...

• Examples:

– urn:isbn:0451450523

– urn:ietf:rfc:2648

URN

Handle

DOI

URI

swiss (inter-)national learning object repository · 2.demand for a national learning object...

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