Building E-learning Content Repositories to Support Content Reusability

• Main Author: Jacek Marciniak
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kassel University Press 2014-05-01
• Series: International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET)
• Subjects: e-learning digital libraries, content reusability, UCTS, tools for e-learning
• Online Access: http://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jet/article/view/3456

The paper presents the method and tools to build repositories of digitalized didactic materials to support their reusability. The method consists of a set of recommendations for the structuring of didactic materials and of a way to assign unambiguous didactic interpretation to sections of materials by means of UCTS. UCTS (i.e. Universal Curricular Taxonomy System) is a taxonomic system designed to situate learning content in the didactic process. Using this system to mark parts of materials ensures that users will access materials that are cohesive and relevant without the risk of downloading from the repository incomplete chunks of content. Such guarantee is indispensable in massive repositories, which are created and used by numerous users, and which contain non-uniform content. An important component of the presented method is dedicated software Content Repository Tool, which was designed to store and process didactic content with the ability to reuse it in different educational contexts. This software enables creation of single- or multi-topic repositories with the possibility to create distributed repositories.