Project CALIBRATE – Calibrating eLearning in Schools

Abstract

One of the main issues that the European Union supports through the IST Programme is the exchange and collaborative use of learning resources. CALIBRATE (Calibrating eLearning in Schools) brings together eight European countries to carry out a multi-level project designed to support the collaborative use and exchange of learning resources in schools. Its main aim is to provide a brokerage system among national repositories of educational materials. This paper reports on the main goals of this project, which include developing an open-source technical architecture to support content exchange/collaboration between ministries of education and other owners of educational repositories, to develop a teaching toolbox that supports the collaborative use of learning resources, research and testing new approaches that can improve semantic interoperability related to the discovery and evaluation of learning resources. One relatively important issue developed through the project concerns the guidelines with which the metadata resources in the repositories should be equipped.We will report on two major guidelines the resources in CALIBRATE should follow. A number of practical examples of preliminary versions of tools will also be outlined.