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ISSN 1479-523XMiniproject perspective: Resource discoveryDr David A Davies, University of Birmingham School of MedicineThe Resource Discovery and Collaborative Development LTSN-01 mini-project seeks to investigate emerging interoperability standards and to take a pragmatic view of resource discovery with a target audience of teachers and students with a requirement to develop CAL material. The continuing success of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), and in the field of medicine BIOME (1) in particular, demonstrates the importance of resource discovery as an activity to support learning and teaching. New technologies and tools to embed the RDN service into virtual learning environments (VLEs) will result in greater emphasis placed upon resource discovery and the collaborative nature of resource development. An area of resource discovery yet to be fully exploited involves reusable learning objects (RLOs), the building blocks of electronic learning materials. The definitions of RLOs are almost as diverse as the objects themselves but for the purposes of this article RLOs are defined as the smallest components of computer-assisted learning (CAL) packages, single pictures, multiple choice questions (MCQs), digital video clips and so on. Institutions are investing in developing catalogues of their own RLOs to support their teaching programmes but cost and quality are becoming real issues. Increasingly institutions are looking to share the burden of developing such catalogues and therefore share RLOs. A new challenge to resource discovery is linking diverse and disparate RLO catalogues so that a teacher or student can find just the image or just the MCQ they want. It is unlikely that institutions will ever use the same content management or database systems but emerging standards (2) may provide a solution to the vexed question of interoperability. Common data exchange formats will ensure that RLOs from one VLE can be incorporated into other VLEs. The 'Resource Discovery and Collaborative Development' LTSN-01 mini-project seeks to investigate emerging interoperability standards and to take a pragmatic view of resource discovery with a target audience of teachers or students with a requirement to develop CAL material. The project is using the RDF Site Summary (3) (RSS) XML metadata description and syndication format to exchange RLOs between partner institutions. The first public deliverable is an MCQ search portal (4) that searches MCQ RLO catalogues held at five institutions, Birmingham, Newcastle, Nottingham, Dundee and MCQs.com. An advantage of using RSS is that there are many tools (e.g. RSSxpress Lite (5)) in existence for working with data in this format so RLO resource discovery data can be quickly and easily incorporated into VLEs. The next steps for this project include extending the early success with MCQs to encompass images and other RLOs. There will naturally be issues of intellectual property rights along the way but the main goal of the mini-project is to explore and demonstrate the principle that resource discovery of RLOs can work and can be incorporated into institutional VLEs. Integration of such an RLO resource discovery system with the RDN as a higher-level resource discovery service is also being explored and issues of controlled vocabularies and metadata schemas are being debated. Anyone interested in finding out more about this project is encouraged to contact the author. Further InformationDr David A. Davies, Medical Education Unit, School of Medicine, The University of Birmingham d.a.davies@bham.ac.uk Links
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