Interoperability Frameworks for Learning Object Repositories

Abstract

Learning object repositories hold the digital resources that make on-line instruction possible. Whether held by individuals, learning communities, or purveyors of knowledge artifacts, the reusability and hence the potential market for e-learning objects depends on the extent to which the objects can be found, selected for appropriateness, and retrieved for use in a new instructional context. This presentation outlines the current efforts of eduSource Canada, a Canadian consortium building a national interoperability framework for both academic and industrial contexts. As eduSource strives to unite both peer-to-peer and web services models, the mechanisms for interoperability at the transactional and semantic levels are described in some detail. Key to the solutions proposed are the ECL or eduSource Communications Layer, an open protocol to enable search, gather and retrieval within the eduSource community and gateways which extend this functionality to other learning object repository networks. 1