Implementing infrastructures for managing learning objects

Making learning objects available is critical to reuse learning resources. Making content transparently available and providing added value to different stakeholders is among the goals of the European Commission's eContentPlus programme. This article analyses standards and protocols relevant for making learning objects accessible in distributed data provider networks. Types of metadata associated with learning objects and methods for metadata generation are discussed. Experiences from European projects highlight problems in implementing infrastructures and mapping metadata types into common application profiles. The use of learning contents and its associated metadata in different scenarios is described and concluded with lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid. Introduction For nearly two decades, learning objects have been actively developed, published and disseminated. Research focused on standardising metadata, resulting in standards like Learning Object Metadata (LOM) and Dublin Core (DC) (Weibel et al, 1998). The Learning Technology Standards Committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers proposed the LOM standard to the public (IEEE LTSC, 2002). Repositories for learning object have been implemented for universities, disciplines or countries. Their increasing number and size complicated the search for relevant learning content for end-users. It became evident, that uniform access to distributed repositories is important. The European commission's eContentplus programme aims to make digital content in Europe accessible, usable and exploitable. Projects in domains like geography, education and digital libraries were funded. We discuss in this article pitfalls and lessons learned from several projects, looking at distributed content mangagement, content federation infrastructures, metadata classes and generation and practical aspects of distributed learning object repositories: PREPRINT Klemke, R., Ternier, S., Kalz, M. & Specht, M. (2010). Implementing infrastructures for managing learning objects. British Journal of Educational Technology • Metadata for Architectural