Demonstrations

The norwegian ministry of education and research is currently establishing an education portal as part of the national learning net for the education sector. One major goal of this initiative is to enable better reuse and sharing of learning objects on the internet. The portal is developed by BEKK, a Norwegian consultancy.

The demonstration will show:

• An efficient and user friendly search interface optimised for learning resources
• Using the LOM standard to facilitate data integration
• Using loose coupling and XML to enable integration

The LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard; IEEE 1484.12.1 (http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/) standard was approved December 10, 2002 and defines a meta-model to categorize and describe learning objects. Although well received, and internationally recognized, adoption is still in its early stages, which again required the project to define the actual use of the standard in collaboration with local standardization bodies.

The following technologies and products developed the portal and search interface:

• A portal framework; IBM Websphere Portal Server for the search user interface
• A search engine; Verity, to index the meta-data for learning objects
• XML and XML Schema for data interchange and validation

The demo will run on a standard web-browser; although designed to support all browsers; it is optimzed for a javascript enabled browser. The data interchange and internal processes can be displayed by a terminal emulator with SSH support, such as putty.