Initial LRE partners include partners in the CALIBRATE and MELT projects. These include 16 of Ministries of Education in Europe: Austria, Belgium (Flemish community), Region of Catalonia (Spain), Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden. Other partners such as the ARIADNE Foundation and commercial providers such as Cambridge-Hitachi (UK) and Skolavefurinn (IS) are also involved.

The LRE service is also offered to other organisations anywhere in the world that provide digital content to schools: Ministries of Education, regional educational authorities, commercial publishers, learning platform providers, broadcasters, cultural heritage institutions, science centres and others.

The easiest way to participate in the LRE is to become an Associate Partner. Technically, there are a number of ways in which Associate Partners can join the LRE and make their content more widely available to schools. 

If you are still considering whether to join the LRE, take a look at the following key benefits:

Key benefits for LRE Associate Partners

• The opportunity to have your learning resources exposed to schools all over Europe and globally. Your resources can be found through different portals including those from connected Ministries of Education, the LRE portal itself and the ARIADNE & GLOBE network.
  
• Access to a critical mass of open educational resources for schools with Creative Commons’ licenses that can be freely used for educational purposes.
  
• A first level of free advice and support, including attendance at workshops and access to tools, that will show you:
  
• how to connect your own portal or virtual learning environment to the LRE federation, allowing access at your own site to all resources from these repositories.
  
• how to make your metadata available for harvesting.
  
• how to make your resources visible via the LRE by using an easy ‘mass upload’ facility.
  
• how to implement the LRE LOM-based application profile for schools in Europe that provides access to elaborated multilingual vocabularies including a multilingual thesaurus of 1200 terms.
  
• how to automatically translate LOM metadata, automatically generate metadata from given learning resources and how to organize the metadata tagging workflow.
  
• Regular feedback on your learning resources in terms of popularity, annotations and ratings by teachers.
  
• Enrichment of your existing metadata by teachers using a LRE social tagging tool.
  
• Access to open source turnkey solutions for learning resource repositories including advice on how to install and manage these.
  
• Opportunities to help shape the future direction of the LRE for schools and to participate in future projects taking forward this initiative.
  

Help and Support
EUN staff are available to help LRE Associate Partners and we will be running regular awareness seminars and technology workshops where you can learn how to expose your metadata and learning resources so that they can be more easily be found by schools.