Connecting Learning Object Repositories: Strategies, Technologies and Issues

The rapid growth of digital learning resources has brought forward a number of issues concerning availability, distribution and use. Altogether, the issues are a mix of interplaited technological and pedagogical considerations. Some of those issues, mainly related to repositories and the distribution of digital learning resources, are examined and described in this article. A particular focus is put on how resources can be described and indexed using metadata, and on how access to digital learning resources can be improved and facilitated through federation and/or harvesting of metadata in order to tie several repositories together to provide a service that offers one single access point. The study also examined how this single point of access can be moved closer to the user (i.e. to the environment where digital learning resources are used) through simple federation of the service, enabling access to the network of repositories from any virtual learning environment. The study was carried out by experiments connected to a real-life case. The study concludes in several suggestions for how access to digital learning resources can be enhanced, as well as in the identifications of a couple of new issues that need to be addressed by future research.