Results and deliverables

ASPECT aimed at taking steps to address the potentially damaging ‘disconnect’ between standards bodies and experts on the one hand and educational policy makers, ICT advisers and practitioners on the other. It has ensured that best practice with regard to the implementation of standards and specifications for learning technologies (SSLT) are no longer derived primarily via technical experts. 


ASPECT has actively worked with leading European experts, professionals and policy makers in Ministries of Education who can make a real impact on SSLT take-up. From the perspective of Ministries of Education taking part in project, a key result was that teachers’ views as well as those of technical experts are considered during the pre-standardisation process.



In addition, the ASPECT partners have continued to be active contributors to all international standardisation bodies and consortia active in e-learning (CEN/ISSS, IEEE, ISO, IMS, ADL). The project has also:

1. Helped to create SPI (ftp://ftp.cen.eu/CEN/Sectors/TCandWorkshops/Workshops/CWA16097.pdf), a new CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) to publish metadata in a repository and has initiated two others one on Social Data for learning objects (https://sites.google.com/site/censocialdata/home) and the other on registry of learning object repositories (https://sites.google.com/site/registriyinterop/home)(subject to approval by CEN/ISSS WSLT).  It has also helped to produce  the IMS LODE specification (http://imsglobal.org/lode/)(subject to approval by the IMS Global Learning Consortium) and two ENs (SQI and SPI), which will be developed within two recently approved New Work Items created in TC353.

2. Made proposals and recommendations concerning how a number of standards can be combined in order to ensure more transparent forms of interoperability between learning content repositories and the wide variety of learning platforms in schools.

3. Enabled stakeholders to better understand the merits of a range of different standards and specifications and how these can be applied to both professionally generated content and the growing volume of user-generated content from teachers and pupils.

4. Provides a new set of support services that facilitate the interoperability of learning content. Implemented within an LRE Service Centre. These started to become available in September 2009 and are being sustained beyond the end of the project. The LRE Service Center includes:


• Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) for schools portal
• Learning Technology Standards Observatory LTSO
• Application Profile Registry
• Vocabulary Bank for Education VBE
• LRE Collection Registry
• ARIADNE Collection Registry
• ARIADNE Validation Service (Metadata compliance testing)
• Transformer Service, transforming metadata and vocabularies into another format
• LRE Automatic Translation Service for Learning Object Metadata
• Recommendations, Best Practices and access to known interoperability issues

5. Consolidates and further extends work that has already commenced related to the building of a pan-European Learning Resource Exchange service for schools.

ASPECT is producing the following public deliverables: