Final report from the ADL Global Learning Repositories Summit

http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/
FinalSummitReport.pdf

Following up on earlier posts about their wiki and draft list of repositories, the final report by Colin Holden on the recent ‘Global Repositories Summit’ has been released.

The report ultimately contains as many (more) questions than answers, but reflects what was evidently lots of quality interchange amongst the participants, and could be taken as an effective state of the learning object union. I found it hard not to come away with a sense that a lot of learning object/repository projects feel like solutions in search of a problem, or at least a solution that’s not sure which, out of many, problems they want to address. One of the best pieces of advice contained in the report was “Those at the Learning Repository Summit recommended that administrators of developing learning repository projects … know the communities that they are serving” and, I would add, the specific problem(s) they want to solve. While this may seem obvious, if you reach a point where you start to have functional software but are still having to persuade users into using it, you have to wonder a bit. – SWL