Digital Learning Objects Repositories Care and Feeding

1
Digital Learning Objects Repositories - Care and
Feeding

• Moderator Bruce Landon
• Panel Diane Chubb, Tim Tirrell, Cory Stokes,
  Scott Leslie

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LOR Partner Project Plan

• The Partners 4 to 8 institutions
• Initial telephone interviews for background
• Scheduled teleconferences
• Meeting in Denver with Guest Expert
• Sharing Research Findings among Partners
• More teleconferences
• Presentation at WCET conference
• (you are here now)
• Invitation to LOR Project for 2005 (handout)

3
LOR Partner Project

• 2004 Project Partners
• University System of Georgia
• Utah Education Network
• Virginia Community College System
• Virginia Tech
• 2004 Contributing Guest Experts
• Flora McMartin from MERLOT
• Mike Mattson from CAREO
• Ed Walker of IMS Global (at Denver Meeting)
• Kevin Harrigan from CLOE

4
Learning Object Repository Project Panel Partners

• Diane Chubb, University System of Georgia
• Cory Stokes, Utah Education Network
• Tim Tirrell, Virginia Community College System
• Scott Leslie, Edutools LOR Researcher

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Diane M. Chubb

• Advanced Learning Technologies
• University System of Georgia

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• The University System of Georgia

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Learning Object Repository

• Explore the use of a course
• management system
• (WebCT Vista) as a
• repository to store and
• distribute digital instructional
• resources created by the
• USG.

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What can be found in SMARTech?

• Technical Reports
• Project Reports
• Newsletters
• Annual Reports
• Working Papers
• Fact Sheets and Reference Guides

• Pre-/Post-Prints
• White Papers
• Conference Papers
• Simulations
• Web Pages
• Data Sets

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Whats Next?Georgia Knowledge Repository

• A distributed network for the capture of the
• intellectual currency of the University System of
  
• Georgia
• Each institution captures their own content and
  metadata with their own policies in their own way
• The metadata collected by each institution is
  harvested to create a larger statewide
  repository

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Tim Tirrell

• Director of E-Learning Services Programs
• Virginia Community College System

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All this Content and No Place to Put It

• Selecting a Learning Object Repository

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• A System of Colleges (23) and campuses (39)
• College operational autonomy encouraged
• Each college individually named
• One governing board and CEO for system
• Scope -
• System Office, 23 Colleges, 40 Campuses
• 10,000 Faculty and staff
• 235,000 credit students
• 100,000 non credit students
• 93,000 FTEs credit students (unduplicated)
• Scale - The full range
• Smallest college 1,100 students (470 FTE)
• Largest college 70,000 students (20,000 FTE)
• 51, 000 Distance Learning Students

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Virginias Community Colleges
Voice, Data, Video, and Education In the
classroom On the desktop --Statewide access --
One low fee
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Learning Object Repository Project Goals

• Content
• Tagging, Storage, Retrieval
• Emphasis on chunking content
• Library
• MERLOT
• Federal Funding Initiative

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VCCS Priorities

• Property Rights management
• Acquired material
• Library Compatibility
• Interaction
• Training
• Meta tagging
• Common look and feel
• Content
• Variety of content from variety of sources
• CMS compatibility

LOR
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More VCCS Priorities

• Portal/Single Sign-on
• Scalability
• Student authoring
• Timeline within one year
• Who can access

LOR
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Direction

• Still evaluating
• On Deck Digitools
• Library compatibility
• Content management
• Rights management
• Video??

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How are we doing?
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Cory Stokes

• Online Learning Systems Administrator
• Utah Education NetworkDigital Media Service
• cstokes_at_uen.org

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Utah Education NetworkDigital Media Service
Cory Stokes Online Learning Systems
Administrator cstokes_at_uen.org

• Statewide learning object repository for
• K-12 Higher Education

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What the User Wants

• Focused Instructional segments
• (3-4 minutes)
• Get guides, activities and related materials
• Fast, simple search use
• Create a personal collection
• A way to recommend resources to colleagues

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eMedia for Teachers

• Search using academic metadata
• Browse by Utah Core Curriculum Areas
• Download all media associated with a learning
  object

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What is a Media Learning Object?
Media organized into focused instructional
segments that can be re-used in a number of
different courses.
Lesson Plans Study Guides Web Sites Interactive
Activities
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TeleScope as a LOR

• Collection control
• Video Manager allows curriculum experts to review
  and define instructional segments
• Container Fields associate other assets to the
  video to create a learning object
• Notes allow educators to leave comments and
  critiques

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Current Service
40,000 Educators 400,000 students 40 school
districts 10 universities and colleges UIMC
video collection Local PBS video collection 1-2
Higher Ed LOR collections
UEN TeleScope Core
200 K-12 Video titles to ingest each year
Virage w/ 7 encoders 3 - WMP 3 - MPEG4 1 - MPEG2
Video Manager Connection
DVD StudioPro station to create DVD masters
provided to the State Office of Education for
duplication
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Scott Leslie

• Edutools LOR Researcher

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Outline of Research Findings

• Background on LOR field in general
• Some caveats and context of the research
• High level summaries of the 6 products we
  reviewed
• Questions/Discussion

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Background
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LORs are immature technology

• LORs still struggling to define precisely the
  problem that is trying to be solved with them?
• Is it discovery and sharing of resources?
• Is it the management of content development?
• Is it the facilitation of content re-use?
• Is it the creation of communities of
  practitioners?
• Is it the archiving of learning materials?
• Is it the ingestion and re-composition of complex
  multimedia objects?
• All of the above?

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LOR Market an Immature Market

• The market for learning object repository
  technology is very immature and has some
  fundamental risks involved
• unclear how large a market there will ever be for
  repository technology vendors are trying to
  amortize their RD efforts across too few
  customers and too short a period leading to hefty
  licensing prices considering the actual
  technology involved
• if the problem is expanded to include the LCMS
  field, it becomes a broader and deeper market,
  but as corporate e-learning were the early
  targets for many of the LCMS their pricing needs
  to get in line with higher ed expectations and
  abilities to pay

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Early Days for Open Source LORs

• Very few examples (outside of library world) of
  open source repository software that has been
  widely taken up by community of implementers
• Many initial projects were developed
  institutionally on soft money and havent been
  transitioned that well to being inclusive open
  source projects

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LOs, LORS and Existing Challenges

• LOs and LORs initiatives exist against the
  general background of the explosion in networked
  based technologies and the related issues of
  intellectual property
• There are still no widespread acceptable
  solutions to the Digital Rights Management
  question, only a large number of interim,
  provisional attempts to stave off the problem.

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Fear not!

• Like I said, its early days. In fact this
  project and this group fits very well with the
  definition of early adopters Respectable
  people, opinion leaders, who try out new ideas,
  but in a careful way.

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Our Review Process
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General Observations

• overall, we found support lacking for the
  following features across all of the products
• Syndication and Notification
• Community Evaluation features (e.g. evaluation
  system, wish lists and context of usage
  illustrators)
• Time-based Media support
• Content Aggregation and Packaging tool

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General Observations

• we found that the defining characteristics of
  these systems, in terms of widespread feature
  support, were
• Support for searching and browsing of records
• Metatagging tools, and standards-based schema
  support
• Support for federation and harvesting

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Product Summaries
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6 Products

• HarvestRoad Hive
• Intrallect Intralibrary
• North Plains Telescope Enterprise
• DSpace
• Concord Masterfile
• Ex Libris DigiTool

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HarvestRoad Hive

• A learning content management system
• Strengths
• Content management support
• Workflow, roles
• Strong integration with existing enterprise
  Course Management Systems
• Weaknesses
• Interface
• Lacks both aggregation tools and ability to cope
  with aggregate objects
• As an LCMS, has more than just repository features

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Intrallect Intralibrary

• A classic learning object repository
• Strengths
• Strong support for learning object standards
• Awareness of practices and standards from the
  library world, including support for Thesauri
• Interface very straightforward and intuitive for
  what it does
• Weaknesses
• Lacks workflow support
• Lacks aggregation tool (but can handle aggregate
  objects)
• Licensing model based on number of contributors
  to database and is geared to a model of only very
  few contributors

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North Plains Telescope Enterprise

• A Digital Asset Management system
• Strengths
• Strong capabilities to handle audio and video,
  including abilities to ingest, segment and
  caption video, and transform existing media
  formats into other formats
• Strong content management support and unlimited
  step and role workflow
• Ability to search for other assets based on their
  visual similarity to existing asset
• Weaknesses
• Lacking off the shelf support for Content
  Packages, either their ingestion or their
  production
• Because of the quite different domain and
  business model from which this software
  originates, it lacks any real support for the
  idea of federation of repositories
• License model may prove prohibitive to any but
  the largest educational organizations

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DSpace

• Primarily an institutional repository system
• Strengths
• DSpace system and associated applications are
  freely available as open-source software, the
  DSpace Federation and user groups form a core
  of active support communities
• Commitment to open standards and open access
  through protocols such as Dublin Core and OAI-PMH
• Emphasis on archival and digital preservation
  features
• Weaknesses
• Lacks community and evaluation functions
• Lacks content management functionality
• Lacks digital rights management controls

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Concord Masterfile

• Described as an Education Institution Content
  Management System
• Strengths
• Content created for courses can be entered
  automatically into resource collections with
  relatively minimal metadata entry
• Content management system can add features to the
  authoring and delivery of online courses, such as
  versioning, media handling and low-bandwidth
  options.
• Tightly integrated with Blackboard, and
  integration work with WebCT Vista 2.1 is ongoing.
• Weaknesses
• Modular system architecture likely means that
  multiple add-on modules would be needed.
• Many features (metadata schemas, federated
  search) require vendor customization.
• Lacks features designed to support learner
  interaction with resources, such as community
  tools or personal collections.

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Ex Libris DigiTool

• A digital content management system
• Strengths
• Broad support for formats, standards and
  protocols for media, metadata and data
  interchange.
• Effectively designed interfaces, in particular
  for metadata entry and resource browsing.
• Flexible options for structuring and presenting
  resources.
• Strong complement of digital rights management
  and access control features.
• Weaknesses
• Lacks content authoring support
• Lacks community and evaluation, syndication and
  notification features

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Conclusion

• Clearly there are many ways to address the need
  for learning object repositories
• The one that is right for you will depend in part
  on
• how you define your problem
• who you have working on the problem
• what systems and vendors you already have in place

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LOR Partner Project Plan

• The Partners 4 to 8 institutions
• Initial telephone interviews for background
• Scheduled teleconferences
• Meeting in Denver with Guest Expert
• Sharing Research Findings among Partners
• More teleconferences
• Presentation at WCET conference
• (you are here now and thanks for your attention)
• Invitation to LOR Project for 2005 (La Babia at
  215)
• At the end of the hall past the
  Registration/email room