Abstract:

The role of repositories, in recent years, has drastically changed. Until a few years ago, indeed, they mostly collected structured materials and, in particular, learning objects (L.O.); as a consequence, the issues about reusing developed from contents which adhered to given standards (SCORM). Nowadays the situation has changed, because, after the advent of web 2.0 , in repositories we find an increasing quantity of unstructured contents: applying rigid criteria of reusability to them – as we can do with L.O. adherent to given standards - is not possible any more. In a context in which, inside repositories, we find both L.O. adherent to given standards and others (coming from the Web) which do not conform to them, what are the issues related to quality? We will answer this question by analysing first of all the classical setting, the one which appeared before the advent of web 2.0 and its influx on repositories as far as e-learning is concerned. We will then consider how the management of quality was tightly connected to the definition and standards of learning objects (L.O.), because the necessity of imposing metadata derived just from this feature. After that, we will deal with the limits of this approach, the most important of which is about the spread of contents, as far as sharing and reusing are concerned.
We will finally see how the advent of technologies aimed at the production of contents (and based upon web 2.0 approach) has highlighted a new paradigm for the cooperative management of the contents themselves (the so-called “cooperative metatagging”), a paradigm which has had a deep impact on quality. It is a decentralized approach for the production of content that, apparently, is incompatible with the former one, and that implies a deep process of innovation for traditional repositories. This is due to the fact that, nowadays, contents of this type are increasingly included in e-learning systems.
The coexistence of alternative paradigms that drive the evolution of repositories, thus, imposes a revision of the quality criteria that we take into account, starting from users’ (students and teachers’) necessities rather than from the requirements typical of technologies and standards.

Keywords:

e-learning, content reusability, e-learning quality, web 2.0, e-learning 2.0.