Webcast: Publishing in a World of Repositories and Standards: Making Money from Reusable Learning Objects

The Ed Tech Industry has gotten the message loud and clear: our end users want to reuse and remix content flexibly and creatively. But how can we deliver content in the ways schools want to purchase it and still make money? It seems the answer lies in how we leverage repositories, open standards, and useful metadata.

During this interactive discussion, the following key questions were answered by stakeholders from the Department of Ed, the vendor community, and the nonprofit sector:

• Standards are designed to reduce friction. How are standards going to improve our business and usability for our customers?
• If you're trying to get the resources just right for students what capabilities do you need in the licensing, content, and tools that allow you to manipulate the content?
• What constitutes 'the curriculum' and what are 'learning resources' For example, in the online world is there such a thing as scope and sequence?
• What are the opportunities and challenges for companies delivering content, repositories to store the content, platforms to deliver the content and tools to manipulate the content?

Traditionally, metadata definitions about learning content have focused on the objective elements of the content and they've resided in one controlled setting. How can the subjective elements, such as ratings based on usage, be reliably included into federated learning object repository metadata so teachers and students can benefit from the wisdom of their peers? And even more so, how can the subjective metadata be designed to scale in a distributed environment? This presentation addresses the potential power of the crowd within the future of education. Tune in to be part of the discussion.

Moderator:

• Gail Lewis, Senior Product Manager, Capstone Digital

Panelists:

• Avron Barr, Director of Communication, LETSI
• Sue Evans, CEO, SoftChalk
• Steve Midgley, Deputy Director for Education Technology, US Dept of Education