MURLLO - Management, Use and Re-purposing of Language Learning Objects

Event

Cherchez the 'Learning Object'

Funded by:

10am to 4pm, 9th November 2007
University of Southampton, Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (LATEU), Level 3, Building 25, Highfield Campus, Southampton, SO17 1BJ

eLanguages and the Learning Societies Lab at the University of Southampton held an L₂O community day, supported by the CLAReT project (funded by JISC) and MURLLO (funded by Eduserv).

We have been building tools over the last year for language teachers and learners to find and share resources. At events since February, you have helped us to design better tools by giving us feedback. You told us that you liked reusable LO's and assets, but:

Finding them was difficult
Adding your own LO's and assets was difficult and time consuming
You wanted to know how useful an LO might be before trying it
You found web 2 sites more interesting and appealing

This was an opportunity to see what we've done in response:

Visual tools for searching and navigation (like a shop window)
Web 2 look and feel
Ratings and reviews
Wiki like editing tools for the LO's and their metadata
Shopping trolley tool for collecting and downloading LO's

As well as previewing the new tools, we presented some exciting news about a new public repository website which will feature these tools and more.

The MURLLO project, funded and supported by the Eduserv Foundation, addresses some key issues that have been identified by the L₂O project as critical success factors for effectively managing, using and re-purposing re-usable learning objects (RLOs). These involve:

The need to add context-rich metadata to assist teachers and learners in resource discovery and material selection
The need for improving on and streamlining the processes involved in the selection, export and licensing of resources
The ease by which resources can be re-used or their ability to be re-purposed

MURLLO will initially look at different ways of collecting context-rich metadata; and test models for Intellectual Property Rights management of online resources, and for identifying suitable business models for licensing content. An analysis of the results will inform the development and testing of 'open source' tools.

These tools aim to enable users to easily add their own learning materials, along with metadata and IPR information to a digital repository. Innovative development by our programmers will allow users to use a Wiki-type tool for editing online learning material for their own purposes and then storing the revised content for others to view or use. The project also plans the creation of an 'online shopping trolley'-type tool to simplify the selection of learning activities from the repository, and the export of collections of such activities to a user's own computer.

What we've achieved so far

MURLLO has been working on a reference model for contextual metadata with a Community of Practice. This reference model is expected will inform the CLAReT project. The literature review that is the basis for the reference model is available via the project website.

Development of Wiki type Editor: we have conducted requirement study for the exact type of editor with which users can reuse and re-purpose learning objects to suit different pedagogical purposes. In order to find the applicable tool, we have compared the existing wiki and content management toolkits. After a thorough review of relevant tools, we concluded that it is the best solution to tailor-make a Wiki type editor to suit our needs as none of the available tools can fulfil our requirements completely. The wiki type editor now has been developed and is available for our community users to test. It allows users to upload an existing content package as a zip file. Once a learning object is loaded, users can open it from a WYSIWYG editor and make modifications using a selection of toolbars. It would be similar to editing Word documents. Therefore any users without HTML/XML knowledge are able to apply their changes easily.

Work in progress

The Wiki type editor is being tested and has been evaluated by users who attended an e-learning conference. We are investigating issues related to the application of customised context-rich metadata and how the resultant content packages can be stored in open and closed repositories. This will lead to the development of Tool A which will act as an interface to produce IMS compliant and interoperable content packages.