Distributed Repositories for Educational Content

As education providers increasingly integrate digital learning media into their education processes, the need for the systematic management of learning materials and learning arrangements becomes clearer. Digital repositories, often called Learning Object Repositories (LOR), promise to provide an answer to this challenge. This article is composed of two parts. In this part, we derive technological and pedagogical requirements for LORs from a concretization of information quality criteria for e-learning technology. We review the evolution of learning object repositories and discuss their core features in the context of pedagogical requirements, information quality demands, and e-learning technology standards. We conclude with an outlook in Part 2, which presents concrete technical solutions, in particular networked repository architectures.

Distributed Repositories for Educational Content

In Part 1 of this article we discussed the need for information quality and the systematic management of learning materials and learning arrangements. Digital repositories, often called Learning Object Repositories (LOR), were introduced as a promising answer to this challenge. We also derived technological and pedagogical requirements for LORs from a concretization of information quality criteria for e-learning technology. This second part presents technical solutions that particularly address the demands of open education movements, which aspire to a global reuse and sharing culture. From this viewpoint, we develop core requirements for scalable network architectures for educational content management. We then present edu-sharing, an advanced example of a network of homogeneous repositories for learning resources, and discuss related technology. We conclude with an outlook in terms of emerging developments towards open and networked system architectures in e-learning.

Research commentary: Information systems and conceptual modeling - A research agenda

Within the information systems field, the task of conceptual modeling involves building a representation of selected phenomena in some domain. High-quality conceptual-modeling work is important because it facilitates early detection and correction of system development errors. It also plays an increasingly important role in activities like business process reengineering and documentation of best-practice data and process models in enterprise resource planning systems. Yet little research has been undertaken on many aspects of conceptual modeling. In this paper, we propose a framework to motivate research that addresses the following fundamental question: How can we model the world to better facilitate our developing, implementing, using, and maintaining more valuable information systems? The framework comprises four elements: conceptual-modeling grammars, conceptual-modeling methods, conceptual-modeling scripts, and conceptual-modeling contexts. We provide examples of the types of research that have already been undertaken on each element and illustrate research opportunities that exist.