Search results

In order to sustain the development and utilization of learning content under the limited financial and human resources, the sharing and reuse of open educational resources (OERs) have been promoted in various school levels and disciplines. In many countries, central organization(s) collect both learning content and its metadata, and provide them to learners and teachers with distinctive value‐added services from their portals. Collaborations among the national portals have also emerged beyond borders.Global Learning Object Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) is an international consortium of the hub organizations, which manage a federated repository and/or a meta‐referatory in each country and region. GLOBE was established in September 2004 by five founding members, and now twelve organizations in the world participate in. By adopting IEEE LOM version 1.0 for the metadata standards, SQI for the query language, and OAI‐PMH for harvesting, GLOBE realized a global search and delivery infrastructure for lifelong learning (LLL). At present, while the repositories all over the world store huge number of learning content and metadata, the variance of the quality becomes much bigger. In addition, because the effectiveness of learning content is relative and dependent on contextual factors, both optimizations specialized in learner characteristics and localizations to each language/culture are indispensable. The users need some supports on the quality and pedagogical guidance when they find their right content. GLOBE, based on multilingualism, multiculturalism and pluralism, collaborates to build up standardized services on the quality assurance of the content utilizing the “Educational” items of LOM. In AAOU framework also, the organizations can promote “openness”, and share the quality learning content and educational information by using a standardized content search and delivery infrastructure.

With the development of social network services (SNS) on the Internet, the world has gained access to vast amounts of information resources, allowing people to carefully research and select what they need and want to share with others. The main idea behind open educational resources (OER) is providing freely accessible and openly licensed documents, which fits well with the online learning system using SNS. However, the gap between higher education and social network media in relation to shared activities and OER use remains a challenge. The main reason for this is that teachers lack knowledge of mutual assistance and the skills to use OER. Teachers are dissatisfied with having to use others' resources, which indicates that the problem lies in teachers' psychological conflicts and technical capabilities. Our learning platform, Creative Higher Education with Learning Objects (CHiLO), is based on e-textbooks and aims to develop a flexible learning environment. The CHiLO e-textbooks were developed with a completely new design that considered large-scale online courses, such as open online courses. The core component of CHiLO is the CHiLO Book, which is created in EPUB3 format and has media-rich contents, including graphics, animations, audios and embedded videos. Our set of experimental outcomes shows that CHiLO, which includes not only Web services but also e-textbooks, is easy for teachers to handle.

ISHM invites papers for the above Conference, to be held on 29–31 May 1991 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Papers should cover areas such as: design, manufacturing, packaging and interconnection, materials and processing, applications, reliability, components, new technologies, marketing and economics, optoelectronics. Summaries should be in English, length 200–300 words. The deadline for receipt of summaries is 30 September 1990. (For full details, see announcement on pp. 54–55.)

Triggered by the advancement of information and communications technology, open access repositories (a variant of digital libraries) is one of the important changes impacting library services. In the context of openness to a wider community to access free resources, Wawasan Open University Library initiated a research project to build open access repositories on open educational resources. Open educational resources (OER) is an area of a multifaceted open movement in education. The purpose of this paper is to show how two web portal repositories on OER materials were developed adopting a Japanese open source software, called WEKO.

The design approach is based on a pull to push strategy whereby metadata of scholarly open access materials kept within the institution and network communities’ digital databases were harvested using the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting method into another open knowledge platform for discovery by other users.

Positive results emanating from the university open access repositories development showed how it strengthen the role of the librarian as manager of institutional assets and successfully making the content freely available from this open knowledge platform for reuse in learning and teaching.

Developing further programmes to encourage, influence faculty members and prospective stakeholders to use and contribute content to the valuable repositories is indeed a challenging task.

This paper provides insight for academic libraries on how open access repositories development and metadata analysis can enhance new professional challenges for information professionals in the field of data management, data quality and intricacies of supporting data repositories and build new open models of collaboration across institutions and libraries. This paper also describes future collaboration work with institutions in sharing their open access resources.