INTEROPERABILITY FRAMEWORKS FOR LEARNING OBJECT REPOSITORIES GRIFF RICHARDS BCIT Technology Centre. E-mail: griff@sfu.ca MAREK HATALA Simon Fraser University, 10153 King George Highway, Surrey, BC CANADA V3T 2W1. E-mail: mhatala@sfu.ca Learning object repositories hold the digital resources that make on-line instruction possible. Whether held by individuals, learning communities, or purveyors of knowledge artifacts, the reusability and hence the potential market for e-learning objects depends on the extent to which the objects can be found, selected for appropriateness, and retrieved for use in a new instructional context. This presentation outlines the current efforts of eduSource Canada, a Canadian consortium building a national interoperability framework for both academic and industrial contexts. As eduSource strives to unite both peer-to-peer and web services models, the mechanisms for interoperability at the transactional and semantic levels are described in some detail. Key to the solutions proposed are the ECL or eduSource Communications Layer, an open protocol to enable search, gather and retrieval within the eduSource community and gateways which extend this functionality to other learning object repository networks. 1 Introduction As learning objects become more common in the development and deployment of e-learning curricula, there will be increasing impetus to ensure that the learning objects developed for one instructional context can actually be re-used in another. Similarly, there will be increased desire for learning object repositories (LOR), the storehouses of learning objects, to interoperate so that objects stored in one LOR can be discovered, previewed, and transferred to another LOR. Whether this exchange is free or commercial those wishing to exchange objects need to have a clear method of making their collections known and accessible while safeguarding the usage rights and integrity of the objects themselves. This paper discusses the evolution of our LOR work culminating in the outcomes of the eduSource Canada project in implementing systems for the standards-based storage and exchange of learning objects. After providing an overview of interoperability issues and mechanisms, this paper outlines the approach we took to interoperability in POOL, and in the eduSource Communications Layer (ECL). Three possible approaches by which learning object repositories connect to a global network for exchange are explained. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of current work to integrate this framework with the MIT Open Knowledge Initiative and PennState’s LionShare. References are provided to more technical discussions and documentation. 2 Background to Learning Object Repositories Learning objects may be generally regarded to be the digital files that store the content or prescribe the activities for e-learning [5]. There are many variants of the definition [9,14], depending on the size (or granularity) of the objects which may vary from a single image or text block to a complete course, the degree to which the objects fit intrinsically into a reusability scheme, and the intended purpose for the object (either instructional by nature, or re-purposed for instructional ends.) While in conventional computer-assisted instruction, the content and activities might be inseparably hard-coded, in a web-based learning objects environment these elements are generally kept as discrete files that can be inserted or transmitted as required by an instructional plan. Learning object repositories (LORs) are essentially storage and retrieval systems for learning objects. Given the difficulty of searching non-textual images or applets, learning objects are often catalogued or “meta-tagged” with information about their content, audience and format. Those searching for an appropriate learning object can therefore search a repository’s metadata to see if a suitable object is present.