December 2004
Pan-Canadian project with global aspirations
Interconnecting repositories has advantages
No other country is better suited—or motivated—to lead the world in e-learning development than Canada. With its vast geography, dispersed population, excellent education and advanced broadband infrastructure, Canada is a natural test-bed for this burgeoning R&E frontier.
In a bold step toward exploiting this competitive advantage, CANARIE, the University of Waterloo and five other primary partners from across the country stepped up to the plate in 2002 with almost $10 million for the "eduSource Canada" project.
eduSource started out as a pan-Canadian project to create a test-bed of linked and interoperable learning resources across Canada. It turned into a valuable open source resource for any R&E institutions interested in building economies of scale and seeking out global markets with cost-effective e-learning modules. Learning objects, which can be any form of digital educational material, are the building blocks of e-learning modules and can be expensive to produce.
Once produced, they are usually stored and organized for easy retrieval on servers, or learning object repositories (LORs), of the educational institution where the objects were created.
Until eduSource, most LORs were like silos of learning resources across Canada. Not only was each educational institution deprived of access to valuable learning objects created by other institutions, there was also expensive duplication of efforts and material. Sharing them would go a long way to getting full value out of the investment while avoiding needless duplication, ultimately leading to substantial savings for education organizations across Canada.
Finding a way to link these LORs and make them interoperable was accomplished earlier this year. The real value of the project, however, is in getting the e-learning community to embrace the advantages of sharing.
To that end, eduSource also developed eRIB—the eduSource Repository in a Box—to help institutions and businesses create their own learning repositories quickly and easily. Furthermore, in addition to being fully bilingual and accessible to all Canadians, the software is free and open source, incorporating the best international standards and protocols in its development.
By encouraging the adoption of this software, the hope is to encourage the widest possible community of users who have built their repositories on the same standards and protocols, and are therefore able to share their content. Open source also levels the playing field, providing a foundation for small and medium sized operations to build on its software and compete with big companies, possibly jump-starting the e-learning industry in Canada.
eduSource’s executive director Douglas MacLeod hopes that the combination of affordable accessible learning object repository software and the idea of sharing through exchanges will lead to a critical mass of content in every subject that would be available in Canada and, perhaps, even globally.
“The Canadian education market for e-learning products is very small,” observes MacLeod. “If we don’t work within a global context, then e-learning developers really won’t be able to make money.”
MacLeod is serious about putting the pan-Canadian effort in a global context. Not only has he been relentlessly marketing the software and its philosophy of sharing across Canada, he has also been representing Canada on the international stage in organizations such as the Commonwealth of Learning.
In addition to the University of Waterloo, the eduSource project involved Simon Fraser University, Athabasca University; Netera Alliance, TéléEducation NB, and Télé-Université as primary partners, as well as eighteen other post-secondary institutions and private sector partners.
Learn more about eduSource at www.edusource.ca
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