Building on the CALIBRATE and MELT projects

The LRE builds on work carried out in the large-scale, CALIBRATE and MELT projects that together have received a total of €6.2 million from European Commission funding programmes.

• CALIBRATE is a project supported by the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. It brings together eight Ministries of Education, particularly those from new member states in order to help them develop and link learning content repositories, investigate new approaches involving the curriculum mapping of resources and test a new open source web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources.
  
• MELT is a project supported by the European Commission's eContentplus Programme. It brings together 18 public and private sector content partners, including 12 Ministries of Education, the ARIADNE Foundation and commercial publishers such as Cambridge-Hitachi and Skolavefurinn. The project’s aim is to provide a scalable and cost-effective solution for European content providers faced with the challenge of creating more and better metadata.

LRE open content

The LRE includes most of the content contributed by partners in the CALIBRATE and MELT projects as well as material from LRE Associate Partners. LRE content also comes in all different sizes, shapes and languages. It includes both larger or more complex learning resources (including what some people call ‘learning objects’) as well as smaller learning assets (which might just be an individual photo, a short piece of text or an small audio file). Teachers are also encouraged to submit lessons plans related to LRE content and, later on, will be able to upload resources they have developed themselves.

The LRE has resources on virtually every curriculum subject and includes those directly produced by or for MoEs and other public bodies, as well as resources developed by teachers themselves. Some private sector organisations are also contributing content that can be freely used in schools. All LRE content can currently be thought of as ‘open educational resources’ or educational materials that are offered freely and openly for anyone to use and in some cases they can also be adapted and redistributed.

Addressing copyright issues

Teachers and pupils frequently find content on the web and are not sure if they can use it in their lessons, make copies of it or modify it and give it to someone else. The description of each item in the LRE includes clear information on what can be done with it.

For example, the vast majority of LRE content is made available under Creative Commons’ licenses. This internationally recognised licensing scheme is growing in popularity and provides a small number of easily understood license types that defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright – all rights reserved – and the public domain – no rights reserved.

The LRE and commercial content

Initially, the LRE is responding to the wish of Ministries of Education to make ‘open content’ more widely available to schools. Increasingly at national and regional levels, digital educational resources are being offered freely and openly for educators, pupils and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching and learning. As a first stage, the LRE is being designed to make it easier for Ministries to share these resources and make them more widely available across national borders.

However, the LRE system can also be adapted to support a range of standards-compliant rights’ management schemes and can accommodate a wide variety of content distribution and business models. If required, for example, the LRE can also support fully authenticated licensing models involving end-to-end authenticated exchanges and complete tracking of end user actions.

Based on extensive work related to both identity management and digital rights management, the EUN is also currently talking to organisations that have expressed an interest in developing a version of the LRE portal that will allow them to promote and sell learning resources directly to Ministries and schools.