MELT stands for Metadata Ecology for Learning and Teaching. Metadata is data about learning resources describing the content, its intended users, etc. Metadata, in general, facilitate the retrieval of learning resources in a learning resources portal or repository, just like library cards help people to find the right books in a library. The idea in MELT is to work on creating more semantically rich metadata that teachers and learners would find more useful, and that would help them to better find and re-use relevant resources.

MELT project partners in the kick-off meeting

For this purpose the project allows users to add "tags", for example personal keywords, to the resources they find on the portal. With tags users can easily find the interesting learning resources later again and also share resources among groups of users. This approach is commonly called ‘folksonomies’.
The MELT project will have a large-scale school validation on this and other complimentary metadata creation formats, and will particularly explore the synergy between this new approach for enrichment of metadata as a complimentary approach by expert indexers.

Kicking the project off

In the two day kick-off meeting project partners were thoroughly introduced into the project tasks, future planning of the work, as well as about the administrative tasks. The new Executive Director of European Schoolnet (project leader), Marc Durando, welcomed the project partners from different European countries. He reminded them of the long tradition that some of the partners in the project have working with learning resources, their discovery and reuse in the European Educational scene.

Following, professor Erik Duval from KULeuven, the other major technological partner in MELT, talked about the technology of open learning with the title of "I still haven't found what I'm looking for".

The meeting continued with the introduction to key technologies from federating repositories to IPR approaches such as creative commons. Each work package got a chance to plan the first part of the work and discuss common synergies and challenges for the upcoming two years.

About MELT and Learning Resources Exchange (LRE)

From a EUN perspective, MELT has been specifically designed to complement and build on work being carried out in the CELEBRATE and CALIBRATE projects, as well as the EUN’s FIRE initiative, which have developed a technical architecture for linking repositories that enables a transparent form of federated searching.

Content repositories in MELT will become part of a federation using this architecture and the project will be a key component in the EUN’s plans to launch a pan-European Learning Resource Exchange (LRE). The co-ordinated LRE strategy is developed by EUN in a number of projects addressing the demand from schools, Ministries of Education and other bodies for a system that will allow teachers and pupils across Europe to more easily locate, use and reuse both ‘open content’ and learning resources from commercial suppliers.

In addition the integration of the LRE technologies with the technologies used in the ARIADNE federation will allow creating the largest heterogeneous federation for learning resources.

More information about Learning Resource Exchange at: http://lre.eun.org