Abstract:

Photodentro LOR is the Greek National Learning Object Repository (LOR) for primary and secondary education. It hosts reusable learning objects, which are small, self-contained (semantically and functionally autonomous), reusable units of learning resources, tagged with educational metadata. It is open to everyone, students, teachers, parents, as well as anybody else interested (http://photodentro.edu.gr).
Photodentro LOR has been designed and developed in the context of the “Digital School” large scale program of the Greek Ministry of Education (2010-2015) and it constitutes a core part of the Ministry’s digital infrastructure for Open Educational Content for schools.

Photodentro LOR currently hosts more than 3.500 learning objects, organized in thematic or other collections. Most of them have been developed during the past three years by around 120 qualified teachers, in the context of enriching Greek textbooks with digital interactive resources (ebooks.edu.gr). A large part of them can be easily used in other countries and for different curricula. In an attempt to make the most of previous publicly funded projects, the next population phase of Photodentro LOR focuses on open learning objects that can be extracted from existing educational software and learning scenarios developed during the last decade.
Photodentro LOR supports free text search, faceted search, navigation through resources using visualization techniques, and filtering mechanisms allowing users to narrow search results. With faceted search users can explore the repository by applying multiple filters, such as learning resource type, thematic classification, educational context, age of students etc.

Photodentro LOR fully supports metadata annotation based on IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) specifications. The Photodentro LOR IEEE LOM Application Profile (AP) has been developed, used and evaluated. Ten (10) three-level thematic classification taxonomies that are relevant to the Greek curriculum for schools have been developed for classifying learning objects according to thematic areas (school disciplines), topics and concepts.

A form-based metadata authoring environment has been developed to support authorized users in the process of editing metadata according to the Photodentro LOR AP. Authorized user roles include: uploader, metadata author, metadata validator, and collection administrator. A specific work flow has been developed and followed to ensure metadata quality.
Photodentro LOR is based on DSpace, an open source platform for building digital repositories. The need to support the Photodentro LOR IEEE LOM AP and custom workflows has led to significant extensions and customization of DSpace. Photodentro LOR provides an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) target.

Photodentro LOR implements the Greek National Strategy for educational content, which –among others- promotes the use of open educational resources (OER) for schools. All learning resources are freely available to everyone under the Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

Photodentro LOR is part of the “Photodentro Federated Architecture for Educational Content for Schools” that includes a number of educational content repositories (for Learning Objects, Educational Video, and User Generated Content) and the Greek National Aggregator of Educational Content accumulating metadata from collections stored in repositories of other organizations.

Keywords:

Educational repository, learning objects, LOR, open educational resources, OER, educational metadata, national digital educational content strategy, DSpace.