Integrating Educational Repositories to

improve the reuse of Learning Objects

1. INTRODUCTION

The Web today offers a comprehensive

amount of Open Educational Resources (OER)

repositories.

However, studies report evidence regarding

the low adoption of OER Repositories in com-

parison with other search engines [2, 1].

This work presents a questionnaire that aims

to characterize the way students and teachers

consume educational resources.

2. GOALS

- Identify the profile of OER consumers.

- Characterize the use of OER repositories.

- Find ways to enhance the reuse of resources

from OER Repositories.

3. RESULTS

160 responses through an online form.

Figures 1, 2 and 3 show the answers to three

questions of the questionnaire.

Here are some more facts found in the an-

swers:

- 92% rated it as useful or very useful a spe-

cific environment to find educational re-

sources.

- 37% know two or fewer repositories, 43%

know 3 to 5 repositories.

Figure 1: Answers for the question: For what purpose do

you use educational resources;

Figure 2: Answers for the question: Where do you search

for OER

Figure 3: Answers for the question: What do you think

could be improved in the search for educational resources?

4. CONCLUSIONS

The results show low Reuse of OER: only

44% of consumers use OER Repositories and

20% know more than 5 repositories.

Consumers look for quality in resources, and

they can find it in OER Repositories. But

browsing through different repositories without

integration makes this a costly task.

The integration of educational resources from

different repositories is necessary to enable the

construction of mechanisms to facilitate their

search and increase their reuse.

REFERENCES

[1] - C. Dichev and D. Dicheva. Is it time to change the oer repositories role? In Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital Librar-ies, pages 31-34. ACM, 2012.

[2] - S. Dietze, S. Sanchez-Alonso, H. Ebner, H. Q. Yu, D. Giordano, I. Marenzi, and B. P. Nunes. Interlinking educational resources and the web of data: A survey of challenges and approaches. Pro-gram: electronic library and information systems, 47(1):60-91, 2013.