Re-Mar: Repository of Marine Learning Objects

Current literature shows the lack of learning object repositories exclusively related to environmental education and that there is no predominant software. This paper presents Re-Mar, a marine learning object repository based on open source software. Re-Mar is a part of an effort to promote ocean literacy through educational content for students and teachers. The repository is supported by computational technologies to catalog and organize learning objects to retrieve and reuse. Our prototype shows that is possible to store, catalog, retrieve, and link learning objects to support environmental education and coping with learning objects lifecycle. This is the first step to future aggregation of linked data, ontologies, and artificial intelligence aspects.

Open Educational Resources Repositories

Open educational practices (OEP) are being enriched with many repositories to support teaching and learning activities in the modern era. Hence, the study aims to understand the trends of such repositories at global level by making analysis of 782 repositories categorized under learning object repositories (LOR) in directory of open access repositories (OpenDoar) with a focus on identifying open educational resources repositories (OERR) specifically possessing ‘open educational resources' for reuse, modification, and adaption. The authors looked into LOR under different facets like global distribution, operational status, interface language, etc. A total of 78 OERR identified from the LOR focus mainly on open teaching learning materials when their availability was ascertained by visiting each repository and browsing randomly through “collections and communities,” “content types,” “license statements,” etc. The results reveal that these hail predominantly from North America and Europe with different distribution patterns, while little visibility is evident among other geographical locations.

Exploring the Common Structures and Sequences of Real-World Online Learning Modules

Online learning “modules” are generally defined as units of learning, often in reference to the amount of time that learners spend to consume the materials, acquire the learning, and test out of that sequence. No widely accepted or formal definition of such modules exist. How modules instantiate depends on many factors, not least of which is technology (authoring tools, learning management systems, and others). Given the wide availability of “modules” on open-source sharing sites, digital learning object repositories and referatories, proprietary learning management system (LMS) instances, massive open online course (MOOC) sites, cloud-based survey suites, websites, wikis, commercial proprietary online training sites, taking a bottom-up coding approach from real-world examples (both open-source and proprietary) is a healthy place to start exploring some common structures of real-world online learning modules. This chapter defines a pared-down approach to mapping online learning modules on some relevant dimensions.