Executive Summary 

This report considers developments in international e learning repository initiatives and 

commercial systems that support these. The report was produced by the JORUM team in 

mid late 2005. This is a rapidly changing area and some of this work may already be out of 

date, or have been superseded. 

Section 1 provides an introduction to the report. The report is then divided into two main 

areas; e learning repository initiatives and existing commercial repository solutions. 

Key findings from a study of e learning repository initiatives in Section 2 highlighted eight 

current trends which can be found in Section 2.4. In summary: 

1.  The majority of repositories are on line metadata catalogues of web based resources 

and do not host actual learning objects. 

2.  Federated searching is beginning to emerge between large scale repositories. 

3.  Adoption of the Creative Commons licence is evident mainly within USA and 

Canadian based repositories. 

4.  Repositories are beginning to enforce some format of quality assurance of content. 

5.  An increasing number of repositories are based on Open Source Software solutions. 

6.  Support is growing for a de centralised peer to peer architecture. 

7.  Repositories are beginning to deliver community support features such as developers 

toolkits, forums, training, best practice guides and publications. 

8.  Large scale repositories have adopted contribution incentive schemes to increase the 

number of resources being submitted. 

Reflections of the impact of these trends on JORUM, and recommendations arising from this, 

are detailed in sections 2.5 and 2.6. 

Section 3 of the report focuses on existing commercial solutions relevant to the application of 

e learning repositories. It is important to note that the review of repository systems was 

carried out through desk research; evaluating products was not within the scope of this report. 

Key areas of interest, to JORUM, are highlighted in the following list (see Section 3.5).  

1.  HarvestRoad Hive Explorer has been integrated with the open source RELOAD tool 

and with the open source VLE, Moodle. 

2.  HarvestRoad Hive Explorer's approach to federated repository solutions. 

3.  The BCcampus initiative, which is probably closest in their requirements to JORUM, 

have implemented The Learning Edge repository system. The Learning Edge also 

has an authoring tool, BCAT which allows users to author content to integrate directly 

with the Blackboard VLE. 

4.  Learning content produced with the Learn eXact suite may be delivered by using 

traditional formats (DVD, CD Rom and the Web) or also possibly on wireless, palmtop 

and wearable mobile devices.  

5.  The utilization of DSpace by Luminas in their Open Source repository solution. 

6.  The intuitive interface design of KaiNao's K>Collector. 

7.  Sentient LearnBase and LearnBuild integration using user familiar authoring tools 

8.  KaiNao Ltd authoring tool integration with MS Word. 

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