This report attempts to give a short overview of each of the presentations in the order that they were presented at the conference. Please note that most summaries do not contain links, but these can be found in the seminar presentations.

An overview of activities of EUN related to LRE (Ulf Lundin, EUN)

Ulf Lundin, the Executive Director of European Schoolnet (EUN), opened the meeting and reminded participants that, despite all the new projects that will be presented during this meeting, the most important acronym they should keep in mind is LRE. LRE stands for Learning Resource Exchange, the framework within which European Schoolnet will accommodate all of its work related to sharing and using digital learning resources.

Opening Speech (Maruja Gutiérrez Díaz, European Commission, DG Education and Culture, Head of Unit Multimedia)

Maruja Gutiérrez Díaz shared with the audience her enthusiasm for education and libraries, stating that currently she is pleased to see more and more teachers that are sharing educational content in their everyday practices. She emphasised that solving the interoperability between different platforms would be important for the portability and transferability of resources.

Ms Gutiérrez Díaz noted that the ICT-industry is facing a brighter outlook and e-learning needs to seize the moment. She said that she would particularly be interested in seeing the creation of new business models around content development.

Jim Ayre, who helps develop and co-ordinate EUN projects dealing with digital resources, gave an overview of the last five years of EUN content-related projects that collectively have provided the platform for the launch of the new LRE. In 2001, the EUN CELEBRATE project: demonstrated the interoperability of learning resources using a breakthrough ‘Brokerage System’ architecture; developed and made available 1,400 LOs and 2,400 assets that were tested in 319 schools in six countries; and evaluated how ‘learning objects’ could support new forms of pedagogy. Ministries of Education (MoEs) who participated in the project indicated that they wanted to develop a critical mass of LOs, and to find new mechanisms that would enable them to both localise and share LOs. Commercial partners in the project also expressed interest in using the CELEBRATE system in order to promote and actually sell learning resources directly to Ministries and schools.

However, while CELEBRATE had successfully demonstrated a technical solution for a LRE by the end of 2004, further work was still required in order to make it easier for content owners to connect to a federation of repositories. There was also the need to implement a licensing mechanism for open content using the emerging Creative Commons scheme. And commercial vendors were still in the process of trying to develop viable business models for online educational content. Jim Ayre emphasised at the end of his presentation that, as a result of additional work carried out by the EUN since 2004, a sustainable model for a new LRE was now a real possibility.

LIFE project (Frans van Assche, EUN)

Frans Van Assche’s first presentation focused on the LIFE project, the Learning Interoperability Framework for Europe. His analysis of three different types of interoperability - technical, semantic and political - underlined that interoperability is a transversal issue that applies to schools, universities, vocational training, publishing and the IT industry. Currently, the LIFE-project is focused on the following areas of work: assessment, learning activity and content, enterprise, learner information, metadata and Learning Object Repositories, and accessibility.

The LIFE- project has adapted the CETIS-model of the lifecycle of technical specifications. The stages in the model start from the needs that R&D tries to solve, and then moves to Learning Technology specifications that are implemented in different systems. At the next stage, content creation and exchange services use those systems, and eventually multiple-source systems apply them. The new needs emerge when more systems deploy specifications, thereby closing the loop of the lifecycle. There are different tasks that are related to each stage such as creating prototypes, testing them in "plug-fests", establishing good practices and raising awareness and general use.

The LIFE project has organised a number events that follow the CETIS model including "codebashes" or "plug-fests" for developers for early testing of interoperability between applications, expert groups and field work in connecting repositories. An upcoming LIFE-fest will be organised in June in Paris and a book, "Roadmap to Interoperability", will be published. The final LIFE-conference will take place in October 2006.

CELEBRATE LRE architecture (Frans van Assche, EUN)

In a second presentation, Frans Van Assche outlined the key components of the LRE architecture. The framework concentrates on discovery and resolution issues, the latter dealing with a resource's identifier and handle, which can also be used to address issues related to Digital Rights Management.

Mr Van Assche emphasised that the LRE is a service, that allows different metadata approaches, alternative distribution models for different participants, and where there has been a major reduction since 2004 in terms of the effort required by repositories to join the LRE federation.

CALIBRATE project (Jim Ayre, EUN)


Jim Ayre continued on to explain how a recently launched EUN-led project named CALIBRATE will carry out work to support the formation of a LRE. CALIBRATE, which builds on the outcomes of CELEBRATE, ITCOLE, Valnet and ETB, has 17 partners (including 11 from new member states) out of which eight are MoEs. As well as further developing the CELEBRATE technical architecture and making it easier for repositories to connect to a federation, CALIBRATE will develop an open source learning toolbox for schools that supports the collaborative use of learning resources.

Work is also being carried out related to semantic interoperability. The project is currently examining national curricula in the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria and the Flemish Community of Belgium with a view to seeing if learning resources can be mapped to curriculum elements. This 30-month project will run until March 2008, although the first operational version of the CALIBRATE portal for schools will be launched as early as September 2006.

Current and future development of LRE (David Massart, EUN)

David Massart introduced the LRE architecture and explained some of the services. The LRE is seen as a federation of public and private sector content repositories (including those hosted by learning platforms vendors), based on a ‘brokerage system’ architecture called LIMBS. In this federation each partner remains in control of their resources and management. The services are in the following areas: connection and trust (you can be assured about the identity of senders), discovery (federated search, trusted harvesting, and possibly agent searching in the future to provide an enhanced search capability).

David Massart highlighted that organisations connecting to the LRE no longer need to adopt the total LRE solution but now only need to implement those protocols that they require. This means that connection is now a matter of 3-5 days’ work rather than 3 months’, work as was the case in the earlier CELEBRATE demonstration project. This session also explained and demonstrated the workflow for connecting to the LRE-network by using FIRE (Federation of Internet Resources for Education) – the recommended way of joining the LRE. Assisted by Fredrik Paulsson from the Swedish National Agency for School Improvement, David Massart demonstrated just how easy it is for a content provider to upload a learning resource to a repository and for that resource to become immediately available to all users searching other repositories connected to the system.

Currently the envisaged federation will include learning resource repositories from the EUN, Sweden, Israel, RESPEL (French Community of Belgium), nine repositories from the CALIBRATE project, and content from LORNET (Canada). Discussions are also taking place with CNDP (France), the Norwegian Ministry of Education, the Flemish Community of Belgium and several commercial content providers.

For those seeking to know more about connecting to the LRE, it was announced that a 2-day developer workshop is being planned in Ljubljana in June and that the EUN can provide other forms of support to new LRE repositories. Support can also be provided to organisations that do not have a repository but who wish to make their resources available via the EUN repository that is already connected to the network. At the end of this session, Sylvia Hartinger showed an early version of the CALIBRATE portal for schools which will serve as the model for a LRE portal for teachers and pupils that will come online later in 2006.

LRE in Austria (Robert Kristoefl, BM:BMK)

Robert Kristöfl from BMBWK, the Austrian Ministry of Education, presented the work that is being carried out by the Ministry related to the use of digital educational content . The work on the content framework and its components started four years ago with a school where 80 notebooks were available for use. The Ministry assumed responsibility for content exchange between schools and work has continued on building an Austrian metadata specification based on LOM and has involved work with external partners such as publishers and regional partners.

Currently, the Ministry is connecting three Austrian repositories to the LRE federation in the context of the CALIBRATE project and is particularly keen to explore issues related to cross-border content provision and use of DRM. Robert Kristöfl also emphasised that identity management is an important issue within the nine Austrian communities, each of which have their own user authentication system for their portals. He also provided information on some models for commercial partners' connections where a pre-pay model is used.


Semantic interoperability (Frans van Assche, EUN)

Frans Van Assche explained that semantic interoperability can be understood as the ability of two or more systems to ensure that its users can understand each other. As for learning resources exchange, the problems can be both on the metadata level and on the resource level itself. Moreover, errors can both be on the communicating and receiving site. As an example, he gave a librarian who adds a metadata description for a LO and a teacher who is making the search, but does not understand the concepts used in the metadata. At the LO level it could be about the end-user who does not understand the message within a LO. The semantic interoperability problems occur because: users can't find relevant resources, user finds irrelevant resources, users misunderstand the metadata or evaluate the LO wrongly.

In order to help improve semantic interoperability, Frans Van Assche suggested use of controlled multilingual vocabularies, because one can be more precise about the terms. He gave an example of the LRE thesaurus that is now available in 14 languages. Furthermore, the concepts adapted by a community that uses a common application profile can be useful such as that developed in the CELEBRATE project. This application profile has now been updated for use by the LRE.

Moreover, semantic interoperability problems occur when dealing with European-wide learning resources that contain information regarding national curriculum descriptions. This type of information is hard to translate; even if the same topic-area existed in another country's curriculum, it is not clear whether schools deal with it at the same age level, or what prerequisite information is required in order to successfully use the resource, etc. Curriculum mapping between national and regional curricula does not only need to take account of different ways or describing subjects; increasingly competency-based information is included in curricula. The CALIBRATE project attempts to deal with mapping terms in national curriculum schemes. This constitutes a major research challenge but it is an important issue that we need to start to address.


John Bell on IMS Global and European IMS new initiatives

Briefly before lunch, John Bell introduced two new IMS Global/European IMS initiatives, one being targeted for executive representatives from education and training providers, learning product and service organisations, and governmental organizations. More information is available at: http://www.imsglobal.org/esc/

MELT - a new 'metadata ecology' (Jim Ayre, EUN)

Jim Ayre provided an introduction to a newly approved FP6 project called MELT, which stands for Metadata Ecology for Learning and Teaching. The project, which will probably start in September 2006, takes forward some of the lessons from the CELEBRATE-project regarding metadata creation and indexing. Conventionally metadata is created by experienced indexers such as librarians and subject matter teachers, who know the content of the material well. Indexing is done before the resource is submitted to a repository or actually used by teachers (this can be thought of as a priori metadata).

However, such an approach is both time-consuming and expensive, particularly when one is dealing with large quantities of learning resources (the project will include 140,000 learning resources/assets!). MELT will look into other ways to capture metadata, venturing into the area of folksonomies, also known as ‘social tagging’ and will explore how volume metadata creation can be assisted by the use of an automatic metadata generation framework. A key goal in the project is to see how (a posteriori) metadata can be created cost-effectively that reflects how learning resources have actually been used by teachers and learners.


MELT - research agenda (Frans van Assche, EUN)

Frans Van Assche provided more detail on the research agenda for the MELT project which focuses on the enrichment of learning resources with semantically well defined metadata . Apart from looking into folksonomies, MELT the project will also explore the contribution that can be made by the automatic extraction of metadata from the learning resource and its context. This work will be led by professor Erik Duval at the Catholic University of Leuven. Furthermore, studies will be conducted into how more useful metadata could be drawn from observation of the behaviour of users; how to leverage metadata that we already know exists; studying user patterns and trying to predict what type of metadata is needed. In the last case, for example, if one knows that a user always uses a particular Creative Commons license, the system could automatically propose that in the future by pre-filling the field. This type of pattern observing could also be used to present different personal templates for uploading material to the repository.


Challenges of developing and marketing learning resources (Guy Lane, Cambridge Hitachi)

Guy Lane from Cambridge-Hitachi highlighted some of the serious challenges facing a commercial publisher trying to address a European market. Cambridge-Hitachi, part of Cambridge University Press, is the oldest publisher in the world has had to adapt its businesses to meet the fast-moving changes brought about by the impact of ICT in the classroom. Not only do publishers have to adapt to new technical standards, new platforms and new risks related to IP protection in a digital world, but market factors such as building brand awareness in an increasingly crowded marketplace is also a significant challenge. At a European level, the question must also be repeatedly asked as to whether ‘localisation’ makes it impossible to make a positive return on investment, a question that is made yet more urgent given clearly the increasing volume of ‘open content that is becoming available to schools.

As other speakers highlighted during the day, the challenge for the LRE will be to find new ways in which both open/commercial or public /private sector content can ‘co-exist’ with the federation of LRE repositories.


Creative Commons (Podromos Tsiavos, London School of Economics / Creative Commons England and Wales)

Prodromos Tsiavos presented the Creative Commons licensing scheme which he identified as an attempt to find balance between copyright extremism and copyright anarchy.

He also provided a number of examples on how new business models are created around content that is released under Creative-Commons licence. For example, the best-selling book "The World is Flat" was published as a book and also on-line in a wiki. The fact that the on-line version was available to everyone on the web did not hamper the sales of the hard copy edition.

To find, implement and exploit new types of business models it is important to re-think Intellectual Property Rights and especially the "Flows of rights", which is the movement between rights and value. It is crucial to distinguish between the rights themselves, what is the carrier of these rights, and finally the services generated around them. In the example of "The World is Flat", the paper version of the book is the material carrier that one pays for. If all these three (rights/carrier/services) are thought of as separate entities, one has more possibilities to figure out how to create business opportunities and new types of business models to extract value from services.


LRE approach to identity management and DRM (Jean-Noel Colin, Sun Microsystems)

In his presentation on identity management and DRM, Jean-Noel Colin from Sun Microsystems explained the processes of identity management and authentication. He particularly highlighted how the LRE can accommodate fully anonymous, semi-anonymous and fully authenticated licensing models, the last of which offers complete end-to end authenticated exchange. Providing various levels of granularity for DRM is key to the LRE approach. Initially LRE ‘open content’ will be offered under Creative Commons licenses which require no enforcement of the CC license and avoid the need for usage tracking based on an end-user identity. If commercial suppliers wish to exploit the LRE. however, it will probably be essential to include a fine grained digital rights and authentication process and complete usage tracking. The need for this sort of flexibility has been recognised from the beginning and the LRE will be able, therefore, to accommodate a variety of content distribution and business models.

As one might expect, ongoing work in this area by Sun and the EUN is carefully monitoring major standards initiatives including SAML, LibertyAlliance, Shibboleth and OASIS WS-*.


Sustainability models for Open Educational Resources (Jan Hylen, OECD)

Jan Hylen from the OECD's Directorate for Education, that hosts the CERI research lab, spoke about the current Open Educational Resources initiative (OER). This project aims to analyse and map the scope of OER initiatives in OECD countries. By Open Educational Resources, OECD means "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching and learning." Four main issues are being explored: how to develop sustainable cost/benefit models; what are the key IPR issues; identifying the incentives and barriers to produce, use and deliver open educational material; and how to improve access and usefulness.

Some early results are available from this 18-month study. For example, two approaches to OER sustainability have been identified: an “institutional” approach, where a repository is built and supported by a university or other institution; and a “community approach”, where a community of interested people work on a voluntary basis. The question currently being considered is whether these represent ideal approaches that exist at either end of a continuum or whether they represent diametrically opposed and incompatible approaches.

Different revenue models deriving from these approaches is also being analysed by the OECD. For example, in the ‘conversion model’, a learning content repository might give something away for free and then convert the consumer to a paying customer while other revenue models depend on voluntary support and donations, the payment of membership fees or the provision of value-added services such as sales of paper copies, training and user support. More information about the initiative can be found at www.oecd.org/edu/oer

Building a European LRE (Jim Ayre, EUN)

In his concluding remarks, Jim Ayre highlighted that the day inevitably constituted something of an “tasting menu" providing a very quick overview of everything that that the EUN has been doing over the last 4-5 years in the area of digital content. He hoped, however, that delegates were able to see that the EUN was involved in more than just an interesting series of projects. CELEBRATE, eCOLOURS, LIFE, FIRE CALIBRATE and the new MELT project have all been consciously designed as part of a strategic vision for a new Learning Resource Exchange that is directly supported by the Ministries of Education participating in the EUN. As a result of these projects, Jim Ayre suggested that many of the key components were now in place (a technical architecture, critical mass of content and new approaches to semantic interoperability) to allow the EUN to start offering the LRE as a service to schools later in 2006.

Jim Ayre also echoed the call of Maruja Gutiérrez Díaz at the start of the meeting for the creation of new business models involving both public and private sector partners. In particular, he suggested that discussions pitting ‘open content’ against commercial content were misguided and unhelpful. While one needed to recognise that the dynamics of the digital content market are changing, a sustainable LRE and a strong European content industry would only come about through the co-existence of different types of content from a wide spectrum of key players. He concluded the meeting by extending an invitation to all those present (Ministries, commercial publishers, broadcasters and cultural heritage organisations) to become new partners in the LRE initiative.

Closing remark (Ulf Lundin, EUN)

Ulf Lundin, the Executive director of EUN closed the day with the remark that services are now at the centre and that projects such as these presented here today are EUN's way to make them possible.

More information about LRE is available at:
http://lre.eun.org