For schools, teachers and learners

The LRE is primarily designed to benefit schools wishing to find a critical mass of free, open educational resources (OER) from many different countries. At launch in late 2008, the LRE will provide:

• Over 40,000 learning resources and approximately 100,000 learning assets for both primary and secondary schools.


• Trusted content from Ministries of Education and leading educational publishers, developers and OER repositories.


• A critical mass of content with Creative Commons’ licenses that make it clear how all LRE learning resources and assets can be used or modified.


• Easy to use social tagging tools so that teachers can add their own tags to their favourite resources and share these with others.


• Access to content that has been rated and evaluated by teachers in different countries, as well as lesson plans linked to this content.

For content and tools’ providers

The LRE provides benefits to both large and small providers of educational content for schools as well as to organisations offering both open source and commercial learning platforms (see also Partnerships).
 
The LRE will provide you with:

• Access to a critical mass of open educational resources from a federation of digital content repositories, including those of 16 Ministries of Education.
• An opportunity to have your learning content exposed to schools all over Europe and globally.


• Regular feedback on how teachers in different countries are using your content, how they rate its effectiveness in different learning contexts and whether your resources really have the potential to ‘travel well’.


• Access to a LOM-based application profile for schools and a multilingual thesaurus plus tools for the automatic generation and translation of metadata.


• Enrichment of your existing metadata by teachers using the LRE social tagging tool.


• A first level of free advice and support, including attendance at workshops and access to LRE tools and open source turnkey solutions for learning resource repositories.


• Early access to the results of the MELT project; the LRE is one of the first large scale initiatives anywhere in the world to systematically evaluate how social tagging of resources by teachers can add value to traditional indexing approaches.


• Opportunities to help shape the future direction of the LRE service for schools and to participate in future projects taking forward this initiative.