About ASPECT

ASPECT is a 30-month Best Practice Network supported by the European Commission's eContentplus Programme that involves 22 partners from 15 countries, including 9 Ministries of Education (MoE), four commercial content developers and leading technology providers. For the first time, experts from all international standardisation bodies and consortia active in e-learning (CEN/ISSS, IEEE, ISO, IMS, ADL) will work together in order to improve the adoption of learning technology standards and specifications.

Project outcomes (April 2011)

• Final public report (PDF)
• Recommendations, Best Practices and known interoperability issues
• LRE Service Centre
• Final presentation

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Initially, 14 content providers add additional content (both professionally produced and user-generated by teachers/pupils) to a critical mass of educational resources in an existing Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) for schools. This is a federated network of 20 learning content repositories that has been developed by European Schoolnet and its supporting MoEs together with other partners that include the ARIADNE Foundation.

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Technology providers and standards’ experts in the project work with ASPECT content providers to develop best practice approaches to implementing standards for both educational content discovery and use. Content providers apply these best practice approaches to a critical mass of resources in the expanded LRE. These resources are then validated with up to 40 schools in four countries in order to determine how the implementation of standards and specifications in the project leads to greater usability of LRE content. Based on this practical implementation of standards, which will be independently evaluated, ASPECT partners will feed the project’s experience into pre-standardisation activities and run an extensive set of dissemination actions that include international workshops, plugfests, regional events and an award. The aim is to involve a wider group of organisations in ASPECT BPN activities and to develop a unique co-operation framework for all stakeholders who will also benefit from a set of new support services that include: a LOR registry; Vocabulary Bank for Education; Application Profile registry; automatic translation service for LOM and content packaging formats; compliance testing; transformer services; and access to known interoperability issues.

As a result of its work, the ASPECT project will have a strategic impact on pre-standardisation activities and the ability of partners to submit and support proposals to European and international standardisation bodies. Together with the CALIBRATE and MELT projects, ASPECT will also help European Schoolnet and its supporting 28 MoE and partners to implement its strategic development plan for the LRE and provide standards’ based, high quality learning resources both to schools in Europe and globally.

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