From education to e-learning: a union catalog service of learning resources

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is a new learning method that is receiving an increasing amount of attention in Taiwan. With the rapid growth in learning resources available over the Internet, it has become more difficult for teachers to find useful resources. Although several local service providers (25 counties) in Taiwan are organizing their existing resources, each provider only serves teachers in the local county. In this paper, we propose and implement a union catalog of learning resources, called the "Education to e-Learning" (EtoE) platform, to coordinate the resources of the 25 counties in Taiwan. Generally speaking, EtoE is an OAI-PMH service provider that can collect all the resources spread over the Internet. It can also provide resource browsing for learning skills, full-text/metadata search, personal resource management etc. We anticipate that EtoE will become an important medium between teachers and local service providers. With the EtoE platform, teachers will be able to utilize the resources of other counties, as well as their own, and we hope this will also encourage them to share and reuse learning resources. Furthermore, EtoE will help educators form knowledge sharing communities and establish CSCL in the future. The two main techniques used in the EtoE platform are: the IEEE LOM metadata standard, which is customized and localized to describe the learning resources; and OAI-PMH, which is used for metadata harvesting.