LRE - Learning Resource Exchange for Schools

This strategic seminar will provide a platform where Ministries of Education, publishers and ICT vendors can discuss the future of educational publishing and digital content for schools. The seminar builds on work carried out in the European Commission funded ASPECT project that has been developing best practices related to the adoption of learning technology standards and specifications.

One of the teachers' workshops in the eTwinning Professional Development Workshop on 13 November 2010 in Helsinki was about the use of digital resources by teachers. The eQNet partners ran this workshop and asked "Can digital learning resources be used across borders?".

An article written by Phil Barker and Lorna M. Campbell provides an overview of specifications and standards for metadata relating to learning materials.

The ASPECT Best Practice Network invites metadata specialists and developers working with educational content providers to a one-day plugfest on 18 January 2011 in Brussels. The objective of this plugfest "Building Interoperability Across Metadata Application Profiles" is to bring together technical teams to explore issues and techniques related to the conversion of one application profile to another.

A series of webinars has been provided by the ASPECT Best Practice Network to promote the adoption of learning technology standards by publishers, content/tools' developers and educational institutions. A total of seven webinars were organised from May to December 2010. The recorded webinar sessions can be watched at the ASPECT website.

SE@M 2010, the 4th International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials was held on 27-28 September 2010 in Barcelona in coordination with EC-TEL 2010. The presentations are now available at the ASPECT website.

The Norwegian "Senter for IKT i utdanningen" has published "Quality criteria for digital learning resources". The document specifies guidelines for the evaluation of the quality of digital learning resources (DLR). The purpose of these criteria is to help ensure that digital learning resources used in Norwegian primary and lower secondary education are of sufficient quality.

In May 2010, the ASPECT Summer School gathered 40 teachers from across Europe to learn about content packaging and integration of resources into learning platforms. We interviewed several teachers to know what they think about content standards, digital learning resources and using these in their day-to-day teaching. Find out here what they said!

What makes some educational resources more useful for different cultural and linguistic contexts? This is a difficult question to answer but, in a number of its projects, European Schoolnet has found that some resources in its Learning Resource Exchange have the potential to “travel well” and can be used cross-border in different educational contexts. Now we are trying to define “travel well” quality criteria so that Ministries of Education and other LRE content partners can more easily identify those resources that can be easily shared and reused by teachers and learners across Europe.