The Spider: Connecting learning object repositories - strategies technologies and issues

The rapid growth of digital learning resources (sometimes referred to as Learning Objects) has brought forward a number of issues concerning availability, distribution and use. Issues that are a mix of interplaited technological and pedagogical considerations. Some of those issues, mainly related to repositories and the distribution of digital learning resources, are described and examined in this article. A particular focus is put on how resources can be described and indexed using metadata, and on how access to digital learning resources can be improved and facilitated through federation and/or harvesting of metadata in order to tie several repositories together to provide a service that offers one single entry point for access. The study also examined how this single point of entry can be moved closer to the user (i.e. to the environment where digital learning resources are intended to be used) through simple federation of the service, enabling access to the network of repositories from any virtual learning environment. The study is carried out through experiments connected to a real-life case. The study concludes in several suggestions for how access to digital learning resources can be enhanced, as well as in the identifications of a couple of new issues that need to be addressed by future research.