ASPECT and LRE workshop at EMINENT 2010

The "ASPECT and LRE: applying standards to support learning content interoperability and exchange" workshop took place at the EMINENT conference on 8 November in Copenhagen. The workshop was dedicated for the developments of the ASPECT project and European Schoolnet's different initiatives for Learning Resource Exchange (LRE).

The first speaker, Lars Ingesman from Uni-C, explained the process which the ASPECT project has gone through when investigating learning technology standards.

In the second presentation, Dr. Àgueda Gras-Velázguez from European Schoolnet talked about the ASPECT tests carried out among teachers from four countries (Lithuania, Belgium, Romania and Portugal). This phase of the project was about taking the content packaging to real context. Since the teachers taking part in the project are already teachers with higher ICT skills and motivation than teachers on average, it was supposed that if these teachers would not understand and get interested about content packaging, no teacher would.

In the third presentation Diny Golder spoke about an initiative called Achievement Standards Network (ASN) which is about creating an open access multi-national bank of curriculum in machine addressable form. ANS has for over 15 years worked in favour of interoperability and portability of educational resources.

The project manager for ASPECT, David Massart, presented the Learning Object Discovery & Exchange (LODE) specification which aims to facilitate the discovery and retrieval of learning objects stored across more than one collection. More concretely it is a "glue" specification that profiles existing general-purpose protocols to take into account requirements specific to the educational domain, rather than creating new protocols.

Jim Ayre, European Schoolnet, presented an initiative of LRE Subcommittee, promoted by the EUN. In general LRE means that the MoE and schools can easily access resources that "travel well", that is they can be used in different countries and educational contexts. The participating organisations can also participate in knowledge building community and research projects among other things. Already 10 MoE have committed to the subcommittee that will intensify this work and contribute to the future development of the LRE.

The presentations are available in the EMINENT blog