Organizing open educational resources for teaching and learning: A review of existing learning object repositories

Jennifer S Belen, Primo G Garcia, Luisa Gelisan and Tomas Cabagay, Jr.
University of the Philippines Open University
Los Baños, the Philippines

With e-learning becoming a widely used approach in teaching and learning, e-teachers have been searching for accessible learning materials for use in their courses. While the Internet provides a wide array of resources that can be utilized, teachers prefer: resources that have been reviewed or at least recommended by peers, are openly accessible to allow remixing of resources, and are searchable according to their instructional requirements (Recker, 2004; Cervone 2012). As a response, several institutions have created digital repositories for the collection, maintenance, and dissemination of open educational resources, specifically learning objects. Learning object repositories are basically ‘digital collections in which the learning objects are deposited and organized in a database, either by the content creator or some third party (Heery & Anderson, 2005, as cited by Palavitsinis, 2012). Examples of LORs include DOOR (Digital Open Object Repository), Ariadne, Rhaptos, Connexion, MIT Open Courseware, and Merlot.

As an open learning institution that employs e-learning as an instructional approach and a supporter of the OER movement, the UP Open University is planning to establish a LOR that supports the needs of its faculty staff as well as the wider academic community. As part of the planning for the establishment of such a LOR, a review of the existing models of LOR is needed on both practical and theoretical grounds. Such a review can guide the institution in designing an appropriate LOR, as well as contribute to a deeper understanding of the pedagogical, technical and institutional issues surrounding LORs. This paper attempts to contribute to this end by reviewing from extant literature the different LORs on the basis of institutional structure, metadata, cataloguing, end-user modifiability, the information system, and copyright.