INTEROPERABILITY GUIDELINES FOR DIGITAL LIBRARY
OF EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES AND SERVICES
Kurilovas Eugenijus
Centre of IT of Education, Ministry of Education and Science, Head of International
Training Department.Suvalku str. 1, LT-03106 Vilnius, Lithuania
Kubilinskienė Svetlana
Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Akademijos, str. 4, LT-08663 Vilnius, Lithuania
Tel. [phone]
Keywords: Learning objects, metadata, repositories, interoperability, standards.
Abstract: The main scientific and technologic problems investigated in this article deal with creation of flexible e-
Learning content and services system (Digital library of educational resources and services - DLE)
providing learning customisation possibilities for its users. The aim of the work is to examine existing and
emerging international interoperability standards and specifications, and to provide recommendations how
to improve e-Learning standards’ application profiles and their adoption and application in e-Learning
practices as well as to help to combine existing standards and specifications into complete solutions that
address the needs of the school sector in terms of Learning Objects (LOs) discovery, exchange and reuse.
The main recommendations (for curricula mapping and for LOM Application Profiles (APs)) are presented
in the article. Lithuanian DLE for general education based on flexible approach is presented in more detail.
1 INTRODUCTION
The main scientific and technologic problems
investigated in this work deal with creation of
flexible e-Learning content and services system
(Digital library of educational resources and services
- DLE) providing learning customisation
possibilities for its users. The authors consider DLEs
to be the aggregates of LO repositories, and services,
organized as complex information systems, and LO
to be ‘any digital resource that can be reused to
support learning’ (Wiley, 2000).
The aim of the work is to examine international
interoperability standards and specifications, and
provide recommendations how to improve e-
Learning standards’ APs and their adoption and
application in e-Learning practices as well as to
combine existing standards and specifications into
complete solutions that address the needs of the
school sector in terms of LOs discovery, exchange
and reuse.
The tasks according to this aim are:
(1) to formulate and analyse the key principles of
creation and development of flexible DLE: ultimate
reusability and interoperability of LOs (Learning
Assets (LAs) and Units of Learning (UoLs)) and
Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) adaptation
capabilities;
(2) after investigation the main interoperability
standards and specifications for DLE, to provide
recommendations how to improve e-Learning
standards and specifications, namely;
(2.1) to analyse, validate and provide
recommendations for European Learning Resource
Exchange (LRE) service for schools;
(2.2) to analyse and provide recommendations
for curriculum mapping and integration with LOs
metadata on European and Lithuanian level;
(2.3) to provide recommendations for
improvement of existing IEEE Learning Object
Metadata (LOM) standard’s application profiles
(APs);
(2.4) to provide recommendations for flexible
DLE components’ and their interoperability;
(3) to partly create the practical example of
implementation of flexible DLE – DLE for
Lithuanian general and vocational education, and to
prepare recommendations for its development.
468
Eugenijus K. and Svetlana K. (2008).
INTEROPERABILITY GUIDELINES FOR DIGITAL LIBRARY OF EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES AND SERVICES.
In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 468-471
DOI: 10.5220/0001527304680471
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

2 DLE CONCEPT
The presented approach for DLE is based on the
proposition that it should consist mainly on
‘ultimately reusable’ LOs and their metadata
repositories as well as appropriate services to create,
modify and manage LOs, e.g. adaptable VLEs.
The need for reusability of LOs has at least three
elements: (1) interoperability: LO is interoperable
and can be used in different platforms; (2) flexibility
in terms of pedagogic situations: LO can fit into a
variety of pedagogic situations; (3) modifiability to
suit a particular teacher’s or student’s needs: LO can
be made more appropriate to a pedagogic situation
by modifying it to suit a particular teacher’s or
student’s needs (McCormick et. al., 2004).
The authors’ approach is that ultimate reusability
of LOs should be ensured by their partition to two
main separate parts (LAs and UoLs) which should
work independently and should have clear different
functions: (1) LAs are considered not to be directly
interconnected with particular pedagogical activities
/ designs, and therefore it should be possible to reuse
the same LAs to implement different learning
designs; (2) UoLs are conversely considered to be
LOs containing learning activities / designs reusable
for different subjects and different LOs / LAs.
DLE components’ scheme based on this
approach is presented in Fig. 1.
Figure 1: The scheme of flexible DLE.
3 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR
DLE INTEROPERABILITY
Conclusions of the analysis of existing standards and
specifications performed by the authors are:
(1) the majority of standards and specifications
are not adopted and do not conform with educational
practice; (2) there exists a problem of complex
solutions for application of standards and
specifications in education; (3) standards and
specifications often do not cooperate.
3.1 European Learning Resource
Exchange for Schools
European LOs implementation in education policy is
based on LRE. This is a federated network of 20
learning content repositories that has been developed
by European Schoolnet (EUN) and its supporting
Ministries of Education (incl. Lithuania) together
with other partners that include the ARIADNE
Foundation.
The main principles of LRE are: (1) LOs are
described using LOM standard for expressing
metadata about LOs; (2) federated search engine to
search for LOs is implemented. The LRE is a service
that provides the means to unlock the educational
content hidden in digital repositories across Europe
and share it among all partners of the LRE and their
users. LRE system is implemented by connecting
national LO repositories of various countries to the
federation system - an infrastructure for discovering
and exchanging LOs, where each partner remains in
control of LOs and their metadata.
Core services provided by the LRE system are:
(1) LOs discovery; (2) LOs exchange (including
Digital Rights Management (DRM)); (3) LOs
semantic interoperability. The quality of the former
two services depends on implementation of the latter
service - semantic interoperability of the LOs
(Jevsikova, Kurilovas, 2006).
The newest EUN initiative in the field is
ASPECT project proposal to European Commission.
ASPECT is Best Practice Network for educational
content that involves 23 partners from 16 countries,
including 10 Ministries of Education (incl.
Lithuania), four commercial content developers and
leading technology providers. For the first time,
experts from all international standardisation bodies
and consortia active in e-learning (CEN / ISSS,
IEEE, ISO, IMS, ADL) will work together in order
to improve the adoption of learning technology
standards and specifications.
Most stakeholders will benefit from agreed profiles
and established practices as projects like ASPECT
help combine existing specifications into complete
solutions that address the needs of the school sector
in terms of LOs discovery, exchange and reuse
(ASPECT, 2007).
LRE validation in Lithuania has shown that the
teachers prefer LOs from national repositories which
INTEROPERABILITY GUIDELINES FOR DIGITAL LIBRARY OF EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES AND SERVICES
469

have the potential to ‘travel well’ and can be used in
different national contexts. These reusable LOs
preferred by the teachers are mainly ‘small’
decontextualised LAs.
There are two main conditions for LOs
reusability elsewhere: (1) LOs have to fit different
countries’ national curricula; (2) different countries’
LOM application profiles have to be oriented
towards quick and convenient search of reusable
LOs. Approaches concerning application profiles
and curricula mapping (incl. controlled
vocabularies) are the main while creating any
metadata guidelines or strategies. Therefore the
recommendations to curricula mapping and LOM
AP are the main in the author’s DLE interoperability
guidelines.
3.2 Curriculum Mapping
(CALIBRATE) project’s approach makes
interoperability possible by making use of two
smaller controlled vocabularies instead of a very
large one on competencies which would be more
volatile. The approach builds on proven
technologies, i.e. thesauri, and well-known
vocabularies for the action verb expressions and
allows for relaxing the search criteria building upon
the hierarchical structure of the two vocabularies
(Van Assche, 2007).
Figure 2: Lithuanian example of mathematics curriculum
mapping and connection with LOM AP.
3.3 Proposals to LOM AP
The authors’ research and Lithuanian teachers-
experts survey performed during CALIBRATE
project’s summer school in Slovenia in August 2007
have shown that it would be purposeful to improve
the existing LRE AP v3.0 to provide more quick and
convenient search possibilities for those searching
ultimately reusable e-content components by the
means of changing (advancing) the status of several
LRE AP elements (see Fig. 3).
This principle could be the basic one for
preparation of Lithuanian LOM AP.
Figure 3: Proposals to Lithuanian LOM AP.
4 DLE FOR LITHUANIAN
EDUCATION
4.1 Contemporary Practice
Several important developments in the field were
carried out in the Centre of IT of Education under
Lithuanian Ministry of Education in 2006:
(1) EUN LOM AP 2.0 was localised;
(2) separate LOM repository based on MySQL
database management system, PHP software
package and Java technology was created together
with user-friendly interface to aggregate all LOs
metadata into LOM repository;
(3) metadata for more than 1200 Lithuanian LOs
were created in conformity with LOM AP, and
aggregated into LOM repository by specially trained
indexers;
(4) all approved distance learning courses were
disaggregated to smaller courses (and even LAs
level) and introduced as SCORM 2004 packages to
reuse in different VLEs;
(5) LOM repository was connected to European
LRE system via Simple Query Interface technology
and Brokerage system.
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4.2 Recommendations to Development
of Lithuanian DLE
Recommended developments for flexible DLE for
Lithuanian education are yellow coloured in Fig. 4.
Figure 4: Recommendations for development of DLE for
Lithuanian education.
The recommendations are:
(1) horizontal implementation of W3C
accessibility standards for all components of DLE;
(2) for repositories: (2.1) implementation of
repositories interoperability based on ability to
integrate with other repositories (OAI-PMH
compliance), and ease of integration with systems
such as VLEs; (2.2) creation of fully LD-compliant
environment to reuse UoLs and implementation of
Learning Activity (UoLs) repository; (2.3)
implementation of IMS Common Cartridge and
Learning Design specifications;
(3) recommendations for metadata tools: (3.1)
implementation of Topic-Goal-(Learning) Activities
(TGA) ontology-based curriculum mapping in main
subjects to search for LOs in the repositories and
VLEs; (3.2) implementation of main controlled
vocabularies (e.g., Topic and Competency
taxonomies); (3.3) implementation of social tagging
and bookmarking tools to enrich LO metadata with
the learning practice experience; (3.4)
implementation of LOs digital right management
(DRM) system based on localised and approved
Creative Commons licences;
(4) recommendations for services and tools to
create and reuse LOs: (4.1) implementation of IMS
LD-compliant tools (e.g. RELOAD, LAMS v.2.0.3
together with Moodle v.1.8, MOT+ etc.) to create
and reuse UoLs; (4.2) to localise and implement
IMS CC and IMS LD compliant VLEs; (4.3) to
implement teachers’ and students’ e-Portfolio
systems based on IMS LIP or IEEE LTSC PAPI.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The key principles of creation flexible DLE are
ultimate reusability of LOs and VLEs adaptation
capabilities.
The majority of standards and specifications are
not adopted and do not conform with educational
practice, there exists a problem of complex solutions
for application of standards and specifications in
education, and standards and specifications often do
not cooperate.
Approaches concerning application profiles and
curricula mapping are the main while creating any
metadata guidelines or strategies.
REFERENCES
ASPECT (Adopting Standards and Specifications for
Educational Content). eContentplus project proposal,
part B. EUN, October 2007.
CALIBRATE (Calibrating e-Learning in Schools) project
web site. Available: http://calibrate.eun.org
Jevsikova, T., Kurilovas, E. (2006). European Learning
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McCormick, R., Scrimshaw, P., Li, N. & Clifford, C.
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http://celebrate.eun.org/eun.org2/eun/Include_to_conte
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